Something that always bothers me during election time, even in leftist spaces, is the lack of any discussion of direct election tampering. In addition to voter suppression and gerrymandering and such, we know electronic voting machines are seemingly designed for the purpose of tampering, and the dem primaries were blatantly rigged with shitty apps, coin flips, and "rouding errors" that somehow all went for establishment candidates. So, are we really sure any vote totals are legit, or is it a giant psy-op whose results are tailored to produce the preferred political climate for capital?
If I had a conspiracy theory, it's that the ruling class needs Biden to win this election so they can attempt to restore liberalism and faith in the electoral system.
Imagine if Biden does lose. It will completely destroy the illusion that voting for one of the two capitalist parties works and that your vote really matters when it's two candidates who are more or less the same.
They're scared shitless from all the protests back in June and the momentum that was on our side with all of the uproars and rage in the streets. That's why there has been such a concentrated effort to push ID-POL and divide the protesters up with petty infighting (talk about "white agitators" and "white anarchists") cause for a moment, everyone was united regardless of race, gender, and culture, all united in the streets railing against the system. The ruling class got scared when the protesters nearly took the white house and that's when we saw all these corporations unironically using Black Lives Matter and pretending they give a shit about systematic racism.
I think Biden is going to win for this reason alone. They have to restore faith in electoralism and they need to try and restore liberalism one last time.
I agree. The ruling class is desperate for a Biden victory. They see the line go down under Trump and now they care.
It's not just about the line. The stock market is still higher than it should be. When it went down, it only fell to the point it was at before Trump's presidency.
Liberalism has been dying this year, and what I mean by that is the original job of liberalism - negotiating between the exploited worker class and the capitalist ruling class. All these protests and the movements out in the street show that people no longer are trusting the system. Republicans have proven more than once that they are willing to replace liberalism with full blown fascism if it will save capitalism. Democrats have acted confused throuh all of this cause all they have to offer anymore is empty platitudes and identity politics, two things that are no longer working anymore. They lean authoritarian cause they don't see much else to do, and we saw this with all the Democrat mayors in states with the riots calling for the national guard and just escalating things, like in Seattle and Portland.
The ruling class sees a Biden victory as restoring liberalism and making the masses happy again, so they no longer have to worry about a unified people who are breaking their divisions and rising to the call of class war. The ruling class know and understand that if people start to see the class war and realize that there is nothing left beyond naked class conflict, things are going to get bad for them.
Which isn't going to happen. Friedman isn't the only one saying that. Even Biden himself thinks that Republicans will "come back to their senses" with Trump gone, and I see a lot of liberals that are true believers in this.
The Republican party has not been "normal" for many decades. It hasn't been normal for a single day throughout my entire life (born in 92). They were bat shit fucking crazy back in the 2000s in the last era of the original neocons, and this was before the Tea Party who were even more radical.
None of them see that Trump really is the endgame result of the Tea Party. They sprung up out of nowhere and completely dominated 2010 midterms. The GOP basically had to accept them and they embraced the Tea Party people once they realized that it was their best shot of getting back into power and saw how they were dominating elections.
Conservatives started rejecting the older Republicans around 2010-2013 and even earlier. They grew to hate John McCain who just barely survived the Tea Party's onslaught and fact remains, they never really liked Mitt Romney all that much. Liberals are so fucking delusional when they talk about how amazing George W Bush is as if he holds some power over conservative voters. Talk to them, they don't like Bush. They got sick of him the minute he left office and they aren't nostalgic for him.
The "never Trump" Republicans are a myth created by the liberal media. He currently holds a 94% approval rating making him the most popular Republican president since Ronald Reagan and that approval rating has been over 90% since his inauguration. The anti-Trump republicans all have media jobs and are a vocal minority, but they are so few that they don't represent the majority of conservative voters.
Moderate amounts of election tampering, and the taboo on discussing it, serves as an extra advantage for incumbents and institutional power brokers. If you're in power you have the influence to juice the results in your favor a bit.
Of course, this only extends to moderate tampering. You can pull off Bush v. Gore, but you can't reverse a landslide or pick a new candidate a week out and give them 120% of the vote. We'll probably see exactly how far you can push it in the next several weeks.
Didn’t Bernie do like 10% worse than almost all of the exit polls on Super Tuesday? Not suspicious at all
When your choice is shit and less shit does vote tampering even matter?
It for sure happens in primaries. We saw it happen in iowa
they've always been rigged in one way or another.
in the 1940s there were rotten counties in Texas that would report whatever vote totals were necessary to help their guy over the top in statewide races, so there was a brinksmanship game about reporting last.
are we really sure any vote totals are legit
In my opinion even entertaining the idea of election tampering is ceding the point that an ideal election in the USA (100% turnout, 0 fraud), even by capitalist liberal standards, is just not democracy. First-past-the-post precincts and districts, staggered primary voting, extremely lax election spending laws, media blackouts, the list goes on.
I prefer this framing because it basically forces the other person to try to imagine a radically different system that would counter these problems, and from then on every time they see "Iowa straw poll" they'll remember that this shit is bananas and anti-democratic.
There was absolutely some foul play involved in both of Bush Jr's election wins.
Liberals proved way back in 2000 they cared more about civility than power with how they just bowed down and accepted SCOTUS' ruling for the 2000 election. Instead of being mad at SCOTUS or the Republicans, they blamed it all on Ralph Nader and spent years whining over that.
2004 isn't talked about as much cause Kerry was such a weak candidate and ran a wet fart of a campaign.
It seems absolutely insane to me that you would ever use electronic voting machines. It's just impossible to trust them. Voting needs to be low-tech, paper ballots marked with a pen (pencil would be even better tbh), and a sealed urn. What's so difficult about this?
What they should do is combine electronic voting with electronic gambling. You can put in your vote for free, or you can add a dollar and get a spin of the voting reels and have the chance to hit a jackpot.
Voting percentages would increase and the election could find itself. It's a perfect, capitalist, exploitative idea.
Robert Caro wrote some of my favorite looks behind the curtain of the American political process, in “The Years of Lyndon Johnson” and (less relevantly) The Power Broker.
In the LBJ books, we see how stealing is essentially “part of the game” in American politics. In some of LBJ’s early races they talk about stealing whole ballot boxes from unfavorable districts. One person who allegedly had proof of that theft “committed suicide” after talking about said proof with a journalist, while the journalist was on the way to visit him in prison.
So no, the vote totals were never legit, even in the days of all paper ballots.
The way I had to eventually look at it to avoid being completely doomerized, was to see someone’s ability to steal elections effectively as a mark of some level of political competence , even if its really just base cunning.
Cheating is part of the game, but both sides can do it, so it's something like a test of organization, followers, and competence?
Well there are all sorts of efforts at voter supression, so...
I just commented on this exact thing the other day, here's my take:
I’ve seen this exchange a bunch of times, and I think it’s interesting. At first blush, it seems maddeningly circular. Basically, if voting could effect change, those in power wouldn’t allow voting. This implies that the presence of electoral mischief is proof of the efficacy of voting. Meaning, the more voter suppression or fraud you see, the more powerful voting must be. You can guess where this kind of shit ends up, and yes, I have literally seen a lib suggest voting out electronic voting machines because the vote totals can’t be trusted.
The solution is simple, instead of “if voting mattered they’d fuck with voting” it should be “voting doesn’t matter because they fuck with voting.” Before it was gerrymandering, closing polling places and hacking voting machines it was property ownership and race requirements, it’s just the modern way of ensuring the ruling class gets it preferred outcome.
Take all the money, voter supression, and election tampering away for a minute. How much farther left would our politics be?
Capitalists have to massage elections to frustrste the popular will. They can't ignore it completely because they have to maintain the pretext that we're a functioning democracy. Voting matters because there are limits to how far capitalists can go.
Voting matters because there are limits to how far capitalists can go.
This fact means that there is every incentive for capitalists to bring electoral politics under its direct control. So suppose you had methods of manipulation like gerrymandering, voter purging and such, but you innovated a way to get direct control over results, by replacing paper ballots with electronic machines, say. You would still need to monitor and pander to the public, in the manufacturing consent style of vigorous debate within tightly controlled bounds (mainstream electoral politics), but you would never need to worry about the public getting out of hand, you could tailor the results and the partisan reactions and rationalizations. That's why it's conspiracy theory hours, it's kind of unproveable.
Voting determines how much effort it takes to alter the results, and there are limits on the ability to do that.
Perception matters as well. A ham fisted system of control might be more robust short term but eventually gets overthrown, a system that dupes you into believing that shitty outcomes are just a matter of bad luck and you should just try harder within the given framework next time and next time, and next time is much more sustainable. Just like how casinos are more profitable than street robbery.
"Libs and their trust and obsession with rules and norms are so embarrassing" -> "I'm sure if we reach the magic ballot representation number that will do the trick"
I've seen this argument posed for Hawkins a lot more than I have seen it posed for La Riva, but regardless, I completely agree. These bastards are never going to let themselves be voted out of power and silly rules like this can be changed at the stroke of a pen.
I mean, this is kinda my point. If this is true, if votes are completely meaningless and "results" were agreed upon and produced by the CIA or whatever, why do we bother with Beltway Garage type shit at all? Why do we discuss trends and polls and shit?
I mean I don't think it's that conspiratorial, gerrymandering, voter registration purges, closing polling stations in poor communities, disenfranchisement of convicts are all examples of the capitalists choosing who voted and therefore who wins. Not to mention PACs and corporate media controlling the perspective. They don't need the CIA to fake numbers or anything that direct, they have all the tools they need and they have all been normalized
