About the election

[Friday: 2 miles; Saturday: 6 miles of walking while hunting; Today’s run: 3 miles]

I am not deep into social media except for Facebook. And there I still see various aftereffects of the November election, people who insist that Trump is being cheated and people who insist that any questioning of the election is also a form of cheating. But I think it is dying down.

Today the electoral college does it’s thing. I am hoping, maybe this will be the end of it.

My belief is that there was, and always is, some level of election fraud. I don’t think it is very big in absolute numbers and not enough to overturn any of the Trump/Biden results. I think it is a long-running mistake of the Democrats that they have tried to downplay _all_ election fraud and paint election reform like voter ID as an expression of racism. And I think it is an equal or worse mistake for Republicans to inflate distrust of election systems that put them into office and which they often are responsible for.

But generally I think the local officials who run elections are normal people and want to be thanked for doing a good job. They may be somewhat incompetent and maybe slightly corrupt, but generally speaking they want to get the job done and not have people rioting in front of their house.

I think that the judges have been doing a good job sorting out the various fraud claims.

I think the shift to mail-in ballots because of the virus made things unusual for the election-night forecasters. It doesn’t seem at all surprising to me that Trump could win the in-person vote but Biden’s numbers would come up as the mail-in ballots were processed. We’ve always had the election-night national time-change shift as polls closed. But this time there were added shifts due to mail-in votes. And close watching of the tally numbers looks goofy but in the end has no meaning.

Possibly I am wrong about all of this because I am biased. The Obama administration was full of let’s-change-the-world true believers and put into effect a bunch of overreaching rules. By reversing some of the that, the Trump administration improved things quite a bit. But Trump himself is not an effective public leader. And as the election ramped up he seemed incapable of saying things that were inclusive or common-sense. I think he lost the election himself, refusing to sell the good results of his administration or even to tack back to the things that worked in the first election like immigration reform.

I am a stable-ist. I tend to think that the bureaucratic systems that are in place generally do a good job. The American system works for me, so the perpetual call for suspicion and paranoia doesn’t get a lot of traction, usually.

I have to say though that the excesses of the Obama administration and the progressive movement have me not as stable-ist as I used to be. The idea that a majority bipartisan vote of the congress, signed by a democrat president, could then be undefended and overturned a few years later during the very next democrat administration (I’m talking about the defense of marriage act) to satisfy what looks like a whim of social engineering, that has me somewhat shaken. So I can empathize with those who think the system is seriously broken.

But no, I won’t be taking up arms to defend Trump’s shaky claims when he himself did so little to obtain a clean election victory.

I hope that my low expectations for the Biden administration meet with unexpectedly happy results, as has happened with the Trump administration.

Oh, and if you haven’t been completely turned off and disgusted, check this out. I found it very interesting and even encouraging.