A pre-election look at how the mid-terms in Wisconsin and nationally will shake out
Whoa! Biden tells us it will take days to count ballots
Author’s note:
Substack has introduced a useful feature called Chat, in which writers can follow-up longer pieces with short updates, or offer shorter thoughts and commentary, as well as live feeds of news events. Even post stand-alone threads as in Twitter. The feature can be used on the iOS system—meaning iPhones and iPads—with Android coming soon. Readers (who must be subscribers, free or paid) can join the chat with replies, comments, and discussions of their own. It will look much like text messages or a Twitter thread, and readers can just simply read or participate actively. There will be special threads offered for paid subscribers only.
Using it requires the Substack app for iOS, and I’ll be sending out an email to describe just how to use it. Right now, though, I intend to have an election night thread in Chat with ongoing live updates from elections around the country. As soon as I know, you’ll know!
Thank god for technology. In the old days when the country used paper ballots and hand-counted them, we had the results, with few exceptions, the same day. Now, in the digital age, it takes days and weeks to see who won. So much for progress.
According to Joe Biden, in his speech this week at a homeless encampment in Washington, D.C., otherwise known as Union Station, it’s again going to take days and weeks, and we should just shut up and trust the process.
Of course, as journalist Emerald Robinson has pointed out, it doesn’t take days to count votes in elections—virtually every democracy still gets the results in a day and even in hours (see the recent election in Spain)—it takes days to steal elections. That said, I don’t believe these mid-term elections will be stolen because, the truth is, Democrats (who have a long history of stealing elections dating back to, well, forever) can only steal close elections. And these mid-terms don’t seem to be close. So there.
But some will be, so beware the possibility of shenanigans in places like Milwaukee, where Democrats might be tempted to try some after-hours affirmative action if they don’t win on the merits.
Now for an overview of the mid-terms both here in Wisconsin and nationally, but before I launch into where these elections seem to be heading, just a word about election denialism, aka the right to question questionable outcomes. These days questioning election results gets you branded as a MAGA extremist out to destroy democracy, unless you are a Democrat, in which case you can yell about elections being stolen all you want.
Of course, one of the most questionable outcomes ever was whether the Democratic Party stole enough votes in Cook County, Illinois, in the 1960 presidential election to tilt Illinois and the election to John F. Kennedy. There were lawsuits, there were investigations and vote recounts, there were Republicans howling from the rafters, and, guess what, a lot of journalists howling about it, too. All in all, it’s pretty much accepted that votes were stolen. What we still don’t know, and likely never will, is if they stole enough to actually rob Richard Nixon of the election. In one of the most authoritative examinations, published in 1985 in the magazine Presidential Studies Quarterly, scholar Edmund Kallina explained that two partial recounts in Cook County showed “that there was a pattern of miscounting votes which worked to the advantage of all Democratic candidates involved in the recount.” But it also showed, Kallina wrote, that Nixon suffered the least:
By comparing the two recounts and by making estimates based upon them it is possible to approximate a minimum number of votes Nixon lost as the result of election irregularities in Chicago. This figure of slightly less than 8,000 votes is not sufficient to make a convincing case that Nixon was cheated out of Illinois' electoral votes.
So not a convincing case but maybe, and of course the underlying consensus is that cheating was going on, whether it was decisive or not. I have no idea what the truth was; the point is, back then, journalists demanded accountability and fair elections, and it was considered not just a right to question suspect ballot counting but a moral responsibility to the principles of democracy. Back then, those raising questions—many of them in the news media—were were treated as citizens with legitimate concerns, and their allegations worthy of investigation and due process. The difference between 1960 and today is, if you even raise questions about what’s going on in an election, you’re a traitor.
Now on to the mid-terms and what’s about to happen in Wisconsin and around the country…