All About Eve
Eighteen years ago, Governor Gray Davis, a career politician was removed from office and replaced using the Recall Provision of the California State Constitution. Arnold Schwarzenegger, a Progressive Republican, replaced Governor Davis and was able to hang on for another term, leaving office in 2011. Without getting into details, in the intervening years since Gray Davis’s recall, California has rapidly moved to a single party state. Mail-in voting and ballot harvesting have accentuated the shift away from republican “turnout” on election days.
There has been much talk about the 2020 election and the effects that widespread mail-in-voting had on the outcome. Many points can be argued about the validity of election outcomes and veracity of the votes in such a method of elections. Three of these points are unassailable. First, mail-in-voting is more prone to fraud than is in-person-voting. Second, voting without ID or signature verification requirements is more prone to fraud than is voting with ID and/or signature verification. Third, vote tabulation that is run by a single political party is more prone to fraud than is voting tabulation that is run by an independent board unaffiliated with political parties.
Leaving out of this discussion both effects of ballot harvesting and multiplication of fraud effects when the above are used in unison, we still have significant problems with integrity of the new methods of voting in America.
Over the past four years, American citizens have been subjected to tantrums, accusations of sedition and attempts to silence or censor large sections of the electorate. These actions are based on the premise that voters with viewpoints different from one’s own must have malicious intent. This rationale is in turn the reasoning behind claims that effective leaders are “unfit” to lead and that voter fraud accusations are conspiracy theory.
Now we get to the crux of the issue. How do honest American citizens defeat this scourge. This political cancer that has metastasized and is quickly eating away America’s heart and soul? Do we lower ourselves to the same level, calling people names, leveling false accusations, and hiding behind veils of duplicity like so many third-grade bullies prowling the playground?
No, the answer is far simpler than that. Let us look at the once proud state on the west coast. We once sought a world of California Dreaming. Visions of beautiful weather and happy people living in some idyllic world of beaches, parties, and sunsets. After twenty years of solidifying one-party control, the state has become a nightmare: cities overrun by homeless, public schools to which politicians won’t send their own kids, crime blatantly disregarded as thieves walk into stores, pile booty in their shopping carts, and wave to the security cameras as they leave.
Defeating this cancer is as simple as letting the bullies think they have won. U.S. government is not so powerful and resilient that it can survive this top-heavy hubris for long. It will collapse in on itself. The power-hungry bullies will no longer be the envy of the world. They will become aging actresses looking at their wrinkles in the mirror, desperately remembering life when it was All About Eve.
Remember in high school after the third-grade bully had already peaked? Wasn’t it the best feeling when their eyes met yours and you didn’t have to say a word? The bully knew they had lost. You had moved on and all that remained for the bully was sullenness and remorse.