Free and Fair Elections

I really enjoy reading articles by Peter Heck. He is a very reasonably minded individual who is very good at keeping things in perspective. That's why I'm unsurprised by his take on the subject of this article, as it is a very level-headed analysis, but I cannot help but disagree with it in part.

I don't disagree with his argument that there has been no professionally produced evidence that Trump actually won the 2020 election. He's obviously right. The grandiose promises of the people who were sure they could produce extraordinary evidence that the election was rigged did not come to fruition. That's obviously true. Is confidence in fair and free elections paramount for our particular governmental system to endure? Yes, I'd say it is. To save from going through every little detail, I agree with most of the arguments as standalone statements. The facts are facts, unless they aren't - to make my stance a little more clear. We couldn't know any differently because no hard evidence has come of it. The election process is innocent until proven guilty, persay. But just as many people have been acquitted under shaky and suspect terms, I'm wholly unconvinced that the "judicial process" has confidently acquitted the 2020 election. We're looking at the Casey Anthony of presidential elections.

So do I disagree that it's dangerous and irresponsible to "continue to peddle" the claim that Trump actually won the 2020? It could be interpreted that way, but it's not so clear cut. It's actually a little strange that Heck makes this argument considering that there is no sanctity of the election process from the leftosphere - especially when this is discussed at length in the article. Confidence in the election process is nonnegotiable for the survival of our country as is. Yet we have been seeing Democrats et. al. contesting the results of elections since George Bush in 2000 and 2004. Suddenly, after Obama won, elections are free and fair again. Trump wins in 2016 and the democratic process is hopelessly corrupt and endangered. It's all okay, though, because Biden won in 2020, so all those glaring issues with the election process that allowed Trump to incorrectly win in 2016 have been fixed and now it's dangerous and irresponsible to believe the elections are anything except the freest and fairest in all the land.

Peter Heck insists, essentially, that it's wrong for Our Side to say that the election process is corrupt to its very core because Their Side is saying it, so we must instill confidence in the populace about the integrity of the process by discontinuing to vocally doubt it. If we stop that, then there can be confidence in our election process once again and everything will somehow be fine.

This premise makes little sense if the democratic process is, in fact corrupted. If our elections are not, in fact, free and fair, then we do nothing but doom ourselves to an accelerated takeover by a one party rule. There appears to be little hard evidence of fraud, whether it's 2000, 2004, 2016, or 2020. Very few people are found guilty for voter fraud every year. The amount of fraud or otherwise tampering of the election process would have had to occur in multiple states and affect many thousands of votes for Trump to have actually had the election stolen from him as he so claims.

Yes, of course, there has been no hard evidence. Every lawsuit was denied processing, so evidence they had was never admitted to court. Events that have long passed, like Georgia's conspicuous burst water pipe that was resolved many hours before they sent people home and "stopped counting" but didn't actually stop counting, and every other state that was an all-but-guaranteed Trump win suddenly stopping votes in the middle of the night, shutting out Republican watchers, barring up windows and blocking all oversight, dumping ballots in through the back doors under cover, some states taking many multiples of days to finish counting and the subsequent gaslighting that "this happens all the time" (it doesn't), and then suddenly multiple states inexplicably turning around for Biden at the very last second, are not things we can really go back and examine, as they were real time events that do not have quantifiable numbers. Multiple YouTubers have been suspended and videos taken down for going to registered voter addresses and finding condemned houses or empty lots. People attest to having received many multiples of mail in ballots to their address. But there is no hard evidence, I'll admit. Nothing was admitted in court because all of the lawsuits were not allowed to proceed, so how could we have the evidence? People who investigate are blocked, silenced, and stifled. The mainstream media would never write dozens of highly amplified articles about canvassers going to registered voter addresses who voted in the 2020 election and finding empty lots, so speaking about it is a "conspiracy theory". There's nothing anyone can do except shrug their shoulders and say, "Well, there's no hard evidence."

What all of these events and this, I suppose, softer evidence points to, however, is absolutely a justifiable suspicion that perhaps our elections are not the freest and fairest elections of all time, and that they may, in fact, be compromised. The confidence in our elections is paramount to a continued functioning democratic republic. Which is why it's such a crying shame that it's entirely justifiable to believe that these elections are in fact not free, nor fair, and have been rigged in various covert and unquantifiable ways. We have articles all but admitting the "shadow government" rigged the election ahead of time by changing election laws and altering as many aspects of our democratic process as possible entirely under the radar, without the people's consent and even admittedly illegally in some cases, and yet we are somehow supposed to believe it's all good. Freest and Fairest Election of All Time. Never mind that many of the events that occurred while votes were being counted that night are the same schemes that are pulled in corrupt third world elections. Claiming it is very important for us to stop questioning the validity of the 2020 election to help instill confidence in the election process ignores that questioning the validity of the 2020 election isn't the problem. The problem is the incredibly suspect validity of the 2020 election.

And that's where Mr. Heck and I will simply have to disagree. I watched these bizarre and highly suspicious situations play out in real time the day and night of Nov 3rd 2020. This isn't a random dossier that showed up from an unknown source with unproven claims that got published by every mainstream media outlet who all declared it simply must be true. This is what I saw with my own eyes. I won't allow the MSM to gaslight me into believing it is very normal for it to take many many days to declare the presidential election winner. I have watched the news coverage for the presidential election in 2004 and 2008, as well as of course 2016. 

Trump was declared the winner in 2016 by 2am on Nov 4th 2016. No states suddenly stopped counting, threw out bipartisan vote watchers, had trucks of ballots dumped into the back doors while the vote counters taped poster boards all over the windows, nor had various "counting errors" giving statistically unlikely solid chunks of votes to a single candidate at 4 in the morning. Bipartisan vote watchers were not barred entry despite having been court ordered by a judge to be allowed in. Yet I am to believe no one would have committed any fraud in an election where a significant number of people genuinely believed they were going to "vote out" a literal dictator? Impossible. I contest it is in fact irresponsible to tell people to believe that there was not malicious behavior in the 2020 election. Our democratic republic does not require only confidence in the election process, but actually fair and free elections. The illusion of a properly functioning democratic republic is not an actual properly functioning democratic republic.

I wonder if the real reason Heck insists we should no longer question the integrity of our election process is simply because it's clearly no longer valuable or useful. I don't suspect this is the case, as a man who has written before about the importance of truth. I wonder then if it was not the fruitless endeavor and hopeless doomerism of the burden of knowing the election process is most likely compromised, but there's little any of us can actually do about it which prompted him to simply explain away the problem like this. Simply believing we have fair and free elections will not actually help us have fair and free elections, but it would surely help promote a comforting illusion. 

There is absolutely no reason not to bring up these highly suspicious behaviors by vote counters, the rushed patchwork legislation changes people did not vote for, the non-zero number of registered voter addresses located at empty houses. It is imperative not to simply put our fingers in our ears and sing loudly that we have confidence in the democratic process. We must be able to have dialogue about what kind of behavior is not allowed in order to have that confidence in our elections. Barring watchers, stopping counts at midnight and sending the Other Team's counters home, taping paper over the windows, trucking ballots into backdoors at 4am - these are not behaviors conducive to a fair and free election. Do not bar discussion about these things - and if you believe that casting doubt on the 2020 election while having this discussion does not help the case, then just say that. We can speak objectively about what does not happen when a country's elections are actually fair and free without invoking the alleged "Big Lie". But it's offensive to say that we must simply drop the whole thing and start having confidence in our election process after nothing has changed.