It's Who Counts the Votes...A Grim Warning to Ballot Chasers to Get Your Acts Together

Topic: Perspective

Late last summer, I wrote a detailed piece that clearly gives away that I was a rabid pro wrestling fan when I was younger, particularly in the 1990s.  As I approach 40, I find that people more than eight or ten years younger than me fail to catch on to various references my classmates would have understood in 1998, and perhaps still do.  Wrestlers in those days were larger than life, inflated by the adoration of fans, love of country and, of course, the sharp end of a needle.

The point in giving away my past wrestling obsession was to compare Golden Age pro-wrestling to modern American politics.  To the seasoned observer, this is not difficult to spot, and I remain shocked when I find so many Americans who continue to belly up to the “if we don’t vote for the Republican, then the Democrat will win” bar.  While in the case of Donald Trump versus Joe Biden that is a valid imperative, for most elections, there is little difference between Uniparty-approved choices.

I spend much of my observation time trying to stake out a position between extremes.  My own viewpoints often align with one extreme or another, but as for what I believe will happen and can realistically happen, my ideology usually differs from the solutions I propose.  For instance, I wholeheartedly oppose early voting, mail-in voting, and ballot chasing/harvesting as a matter of ideology, common sense, and best practice; however, speaking pragmatically, I am not going to win a battle of influence against the RNC and Donald Trump now that they are behind the early vote, get out the mail-vote plan that people like Scott Presler and Turning Point USA are pushing; therefore, I aim to make the best of the reality that millions will be voting early who could vote on Election Day, and millions more will vote by mail instead of showing up in person. Furthermore, I acknowledge the Catch 22 situation in which Democrats will be piling up votes for 50 days in Pennsylvania, and it is foolish to try to beat them in just one day. We have painted ourselves into this corner on our own, but the trouble is that feeding the system more votes earlier requires us to believe they will be fair in counting the election returns this time around. Why would they?

I sincerely hope Presler and TPUSA are right that somehow our political enemies gave us the winning formula to deprive them of office by giving elections officials in the most corrupt state more votes, earlier, than we did last time, when Trump’s vote totals were off the charts and his losses there, when viewed over at least 128 years of incumbent performance data, were absolutely impossible outcomes.  In my desk, I have a copy of Turning Point USA’s ballot chasing plan for Arizona, and I’ve meticulously reviewed it and found that much of the data aligns with my precinct-level findings for the state’s 2020 quasi-election, and I once again assert that our problem isn’t getting enough votes, but rather, preventing enough fraudulent ones (and they are buried from top to bottom, and all across the state, and other decisive states).

Returning to a favorite topic, history, I must make it clear that most scholars don’t believe Joseph Stalin uttered the famous and dark election-related quote, “It’s not who votes that counts, it’s who counts the votes.”  That may be the truth, but fictitious or not, that is a 100% accurate quip that underscores the ultimate problem in our elections today, which is a complete lack of transparency and accountability that allows election fraud to occur downstream and throughout a lengthy early voting season.  Consider your last trip to the bank, which ultimately determines how much cash you have to your name.  You probably brought cash or checks with you, or a combination, and the teller stood right across the desk from you and counted your cash from big bills down to small bills aloud.  The intake form back to you contains a listing of everything the teller counted, and once agreed upon, that amount is credited to your virtual account.  No one would dump piles of cash off in large quantities, then go back out for more, without having confirmation that the totals were accurate, and that nefarious activity wasn’t occurring within the bank, authorized by its top officers.

That is where we find ourselves in elections, and again back to pro wrestling.  Non-wrestling fans who can’t let go of the fact that match outcomes are scripted can’t understand why people enjoy so-called sports entertainment, even though they most certainly don’t bother themselves with the nuance that Hollywood’s biggest films aren’t realistic or authentic, either.  The enjoyment of pro wrestling requires the viewer to suspend reality for a few hours and understand the story that is being told.  Some of the great wrestlers of all-time, like Bret “Hitman” Hart, were masters of the mat who could make anyone look good in the ring.  It didn’t matter that he was massively undersized compared to some of the oak trees he felled in the ring - his fans were able to effectively suspend reality to buy into the storyline.

Believing we are going to announce plans to out-harvest the masters of ballot harvesting and electoral manipulation and then win requires us to suspend reality and forget entirely that it is those who count the voteswho ultimately put the rubber stamp on final ballot totals.  They turn their states from “messaging states” into “ballot states” (a phrase I heard from Brad Parscale), sever chain of custody requirements, allow for lax or nonexistent signature verification requirements to validates thousands of “ballots” in mere seconds, and employ third-party vendors to mail and receive ballots (Runbeck in Arizona is a prime example).

Let me recount for you the 2022 midterms in Arizona.