Contesting Election Results in Court Isn’t the End of Democracy. Quite the Opposite
Is a disputed presidential election the end of democracy as we know it?
That’s what many pundits and members of the legacy media are claiming as President Donald Trump has challenged election results in a number of states—both legally and rhetorically.
It seems that much of the media hivemind now insists that voter fraud never happens, that it’s equally impossible for an election to be stolen or tainted in any way, and that going a few weeks with two rival candidates both declaring victory (including one they really don’t like) means we are witnessing the end of America as a free country.
It’s amazing that this is the case after countless Democrats, including Hillary Clinton, insisted that Trump colluded with Russians to steal the 2016 election, a story that most major media outlets ran with for years without providing any hard evidence.
It’s also amusing to see so many in the media praising former Georgia state Rep. Stacey Abrams for her work to flip the Peach State into the Democrat column in 2020.
Abrams lost the 2018 Georgia gubernatorial election to Gov. Brian Kemp, a Republican, in a race Kemp won by almost 55,000 votes.
Abrams insists that voter suppression is the only reason Republicans came out ahead and never conceded defeat. Yet she has received, literally, glowing profiles in The Washington Post and countless other media outlets.
Whatever the results of Trump’s legal challenges, the situation hardly portends a slip into dictatorship.
Truth be told, these sorts of electoral disputes aren’t even uncommon in our history.
Americans have been blessed with a marvelous political system that has stood the test of time. And it has been tested. Not every election has been entirely free and fair, and they certainly haven’t all gone smoothly.
As my colleague, Fred Lucas, the author of “Tainted by Suspicion: The Secret Deals and Electoral Chaos of Disputed Presidential Elections,” wrote for The Daily Signal, there have been at least five highly contested presidential elections.
The 1876 election between Democrat Samuel Tilden and Republican Rutherford B. Hayes was perhaps the most dramatic example.
Much like 2020, turnout for the election was incredibly high, a U.S. record of 82% of eligible voters. But there was widespread, often violent, suppression of black voters—who then were largely Republicans—in the South, and ballot stuffing was common throughout the country.
Tilden’s supporters literally called for blood if their candidate was not installed in the White House.
Neither candidate conceded defeat until just before Inauguration Day, which at the time was in early March. So, the country spent over four months without knowing who the president would be.
The mess was only “resolved” by a last-minute, so-called corrupt bargain between Democrats and Republicans that handed Hayes the presidency in exchange for ending Reconstruction in the South.
That may seem like ancient news from a far-off and alien time, but one doesn’t really have to dig that deep into political history to find examples of contested elections and candidates refusing to concede.
The 1960 election was a narrow race between Sen. John F. Kennedy, D-Mass., and Vice President Richard Nixon, and it was rife with accusations that Democratic political machines—in Chicago, in particular—manufactured votes for Kennedy.
Hundreds of election officials in Illinois were indicted, but only a handful were convicted in 1962, after admitting to witness tampering in Chicago’s 28th Ward.
Nixon did in fact organize to challenge the election results in Illinois and a number of other states, but ultimately decided to concede for the sake of the country and his political career. Nixon was a young man and had every intention of running for president again—which he did in 1968, winning a three-way race.
It took then-Vice President Al Gore more than five weeks to acknowledge defeat in the 2000 election to then-Texas Gov. George W. Bush, decided by just 537 votes in Florida. That was after more than a month of legal battles, recounts, and the famed Bush v. Gore Supreme Court case that ultimately delivered the election to Bush.
Gore hardly went away without a fight, calling for selective recounts in heavily Democratic Florida counties while attempting to block the inclusion of military absentee ballots.
When all avenues for victory had been closed, Gore finally called it quits on Dec. 13, 2000—over a month after the Nov. 7 election.
Many Democrats around the country refused to accept that Bush had been legitimately elected—or reelected in 2004.
What we are seeing here in 2020 is hardly unique, nor does it signal the end of democracy. To the contrary, this is democracy in action, in all its messiness.
The way to quell electoral disputes is not to simply expect politicians to immediately concede close and hotly contested races, but to ensure that our voting system is safe and secure, and that it’s designed to minimize impropriety, fraud, and unintentional errors that could throw elections into dispute.
Maybe elected officials should take that more seriously in 2022 and beyond.
The Genteel Authoritarian
A lot of folks, some whom may not think of themselves as populists, are going to be fed up when they board that full flight home for Thanksgiving in a few weeks. Despite all the warnings and all the proclamations, America is still doing its annual November migration, though in fewer numbers and with diminished gatherings and less to be thankful for. In the city of Pittsburgh this year on the holiday before Thanksgiving, Mayor Peduto echoed CDC guidance in declaring to his citizens that trick or treating was permitted – encountering dozens of strangers and exchanging food – but private gatherings with a single group of people, also known also as costume parties, were banned. That’s right, the government told you who you could have in your own home.
The point is this: if you think we’re living in a populist moment now wait until you see what happens as Democratic leaders move forward with another round of lockdowns or a real mask mandate. Wait until you see what happens if more local governments follow the example of New York City and forcibly break up religious worship or, as more governors seek to prevent blood relatives from gathering at their Thanksgiving, Hannukah, and Christmas tables.
Several states this week did in fact announce limitations on the number of guests in the homes of their citizens, and a number of other byzantine rules that I’ll refrain from spending a few sentences mocking because of the serious nature of this level of intrusion. While details on enforcement of the in-home gathering rules are unclear, this is a degree of overreach that cannot square with the First Amendment right to free assembly. We have already seen in the state of New York police entering the homes of citizens to break up parties and religious gatherings. COVID is an insidious terror and close to a quarter million of us are dead, but Americans were not meant to be ruled this way, even in extremis. Even the suggestions that any government body – state, local, or federal – within any square inch of their jurisdiction have this type of power is inherently dangerous.
If Joe Biden comes into office and calls for a national lockdown or, even worse, tries to implement a national mask mandate, we may learn what a real resistance looks like. He’ll seek to use his age and demeanor to lure Americans via fireside chat-style missives for common sacrifice. However, we need to ask ourselves one question: yes, we’ve seen movement up and down the phases as denoted by number (1, 2,3) and colors (red, green, yellow), but has any state that declared one ended their state of emergency?
This is an incredibly painful time, and it’s about to get worse. More than 100,000 businesses have shuttered permanently, and our right to peaceable assembly is suspended, all while people are dying at an alarming rate. But we cannot let our state of emergency remain so. What will sound like common sense measures today become the precedents and justifications for permanent bans and mandates, and the subsidies that are supposed to make submission bearable. That will not bode well for how we mark our response to the other crises we’ll face this decade.
As early indications come in on the type of staff Biden will surround himself with, make no mistake this rule-by-experts – on COVID and across the policy landscape – is too top-down, too sanctimonious, and too divorced from the populace to be successful. The DNC was successful in controlling their primary process and maneuvering to get in place a candidate who offended the sensibilities of the fewest, and at the time of writing, it appears they got this guy across the finish line. Assistance with distribution networks for an available vaccine, yes. But this is not the time or place in our history for the federal government to take on an even bigger role in our lives via new and sweeping rules and mandates. That will not be unifying, and it may be dangerous.
https://townhall.com/columnists/jasonkillmeyer/2020/11/14/the-genteel-authoritarian-n2580045
Gov. Kristi Noem Reacts to Obama's 'Ridiculous' Election MessageFormer President Obama (D) has written a new book called "The Promised Land" in which he imagines an America that can one day "finally align with all that is best in us." He shared an adapted excerpt with The Atlantic, which they published last week.
He starts by regretting what has become of the country.
The country is in the grips of a global pandemic and an accompanying economic crisis, with more than 230,000 Americans dead, businesses shuttered, and millions of people out of work. Across the nation, people from all walks of life have poured into the streets to protest the deaths of unarmed Black men and women at the hands of the police. Perhaps most troubling of all, our democracy seems to be teetering on the brink of crisis—a crisis rooted in a fundamental contest between two opposing visions of what America is and what it should be; a crisis that has left the body politic divided, angry, and mistrustful, and has allowed for an ongoing breach of institutional norms, procedural safeguards, and the adherence to basic facts that both Republicans and Democrats once took for granted. (The Atlantic)
Obama's skepticism about America's future is a theme throughout the piece. Toward the end of the excerpt, he wonders if we Americans "can actually live up to the meaning of our creed."
"The jury's still out," he answers.
It couldn't help but remind us of when former first lady Michelle Obama said she was finally proud of her country after so many Americans had voted for her husband in the 2008 presidential election.
"For the first time in my adult lifetime, I am really proud of my country — and not just because Barack has done well, but because I think people are hungry for change," Mrs. Obama said. Obama would later defend his wife and claim she was talking about American politics.
But Americans like South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem (R) reject the Obamas' way of thinking. On Twitter, she argued that Obama's new book is "ridiculous" considering that in his eight years as president, he singlehandedly upended the American Dream.
Gov. Noem is one of what seems like only a handful of governors that truly get it when it comes to both keeping citizens safe and protecting their livelihoods. She refused to lock down her state, even when it seemed like the trend. Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, for instance, just shuttered Michigan again over the weekend after a rise in COVID cases. But Noem has kept businesses open. In doing so, she likely saved thousands of jobs.
And that's why she's sending a warning about a Biden-Harris administration.
No sex please, we’re feminists
Louise Roberts comments on some recent Australian partings
It’s ironic that after decades of telling them that they are strong, empowered goddesses who can make their own choices, the feminist left is now calling for society to protect women from their own occasionally bad choices.
It doesn’t make it right, but those who claim to speak for all women need to accept that sometimes those same women will make bad choices.
They’ll sleep with the boss, hook up with a junior staffer after too many after-work wines or implode their textbook spouse and kids set-up when they’re caught indulging in a long term affair.
If we are going to accept that women and men are equals, then the fact is they will do equally dumb things.
Yet consensual sexual relationships seem to only become scandals if it is man having an affair with a subordinate female — the line is that he must be somehow exploiting her, never mind her own choice in the matter.
It’s all so puritanical, and thanks to the overreach of modern woke feminism someone has to pay the price for the weakness of an office romance, preferably the bloke.
Even better if both parties have to resign their lucrative positions because then someone can play victim, a bonus point for the sisterhood.
In recent days we’ve seen dragged into the open a secret 2017 affair between former Coalition media adviser Rachelle Miller and then Human Services Minister Alan Tudge.
Both were married at the time and both have since separated from their partners.
And the chief executive of Channel 9 Hugh Marks has quit after his relationship with the company’s former commercial director Alexi Baker was publicly revealed on Saturday. Baker left the business on October 1, the suggestion being that she was keen to avoid any allegations of favouritism.
But isn’t it something amid the personal carnage we’ve witnessed in federal politics and at Channel 9 to see the left side of politics defend traditional marriage again.
If we want equality then we have to accept that there is, what some might regard, a downside to the celebrated war on gender — personal responsibility.
Miller has gone one step further by lodging a formal complaint regarding the way she was treated in the office post affair, alleging federal Employment Minister Michaelia Cash forced her out with a fake redundancy.
The Liberal Party had a “women problem” and was rife with “sexism”, is the message on high rotation.
In effect, Miller says she was punished for an affair that she “bitterly regrets” and performance at work was in question as a result.
“I lost a lot of self-confidence because I didn’t feel I had any power at all to be able to stand up for myself,” she said.
“I knew I was leaving a job that I really loved, but I didn’t see that there was any other way out.
“You know, I actually at that time viewed myself as damaged goods and I was really worried about this coming out and impacting our chances at the election.”
A workplace relationship has the sisterhood salivating for a witch hunt.
Lust must be punished, you don’t have a right to a private life and so on.
But the truth is this — we wanted equality and sometimes the results of that aren’t fabulous.
So how exactly do we see women? We need to make up our minds as a society.
Do we support a woman’s right to have an affair and make her own mistakes or do we want to be the new morality police and crowbar every woman into the victim slot?
As one colleague noted, according to the new rules you can only sleep with people at your level on the org chart.
Feminism is held up as a blueprint for life and we’re all supposed to conform. But is this the space we want to occupy with our daughters — raising them to be a victim and someone without sexual agency?
While neither Miller nor Baker have gone this route, what we’ve seen too often in others is women having affairs and blaming men when it all goes wrong, no matter the real victims such as wives who have been discarded and the bewildered children scarred for life.
The so-called “sexual revolution” was never really about sex but overthrowing staid bourgeois institutions like the nuclear family.
That having been achieved, now the left is anti-sex again.
George Orwell, in his way, predicted this in his novel 1984, which featured a “junior anti-sex league” that promoted complete celibacy for both sexes.
And that means that professional women are victims in an illicit affair, as despite all their achievements, they have no will of their own or power to resist the entreaties of men.
So how is it that women can have total free choice as decreed by the feminist yet absolutely none at all? It makes no sense.
Cheating is no more of a hardwired tendency for males than for females. We need to stop treating women as shrinking violets.
And file modern feminism where it belongs — as the annoying friend who stops you doing what you desire.
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My other blogs. Main ones below:
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com TONGUE-TIED)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://john-ray.blogspot.com (FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
https://heofen.blogspot.com/ (MY OTHER BLOGS)
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Kristina Pimenova, once said to be the most beautiful girl in the world. Note blue eyes and blonde hair
Bliss: What every woman wants: to feel safe and secure in the arms of her man. Robert Irwin and Rorie Buckey. See 
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