Here we are, a week after the 2022 elections, and we are still in the fog of ballot-counting. A nation who put a man on the moon a half-century ago somehow cannot tally the votes of the people in a day. Read into that whatever you wish.
Over at the Conservative Treehouse, site owner Sundance provides an excellent article distinguishing the difference between ballots and votes. Votes are the expressed intention of a voter for a particular government leader. Ballots are filled out pieces of paper that express the choice of a particular leader. Both are counted for an election. In the current system, ballots are gathered or harvested either, legally or illegally, and submitted. Given the lack of prosecution, the legality of it apparently does not matter. Votes represent the will of the people; ballots may or may not.
This disenfranchising process could not happen if one political party vehemently opposed it. Another excellent, must-read article by Dan Gelernter on American Greatness observes that the fault lies not with a particular political party, but with all “the politicians,” to include their supporting cast of donors. It’s not a grand coordinated conspiracy based on an ideology. It follows the fractal pattern of self-organization with a common motivation: greed.
Our first president, George Washington, provided a warning of the eventual power political parties could attain. In his farewell address, Washington cautioned, “However [political parties] may now and then answer popular ends, they are likely in the course of time and things, to become potent engines, by which cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men will be enabled to subvert the power of the people and to usurp for themselves the reins of government, destroying afterwards the very engines which have lifted them to unjust dominion.”
We, the people, see two opposing political parties with competing platforms, governing ideals, and value systems. How scary is the thought that despite their opposing rhetoric, they secretly collaborate based on mutual self-interest and greed? The concept of “never let a crisis go to waste” has now been advanced to create a string of crises (inflation, debt, gas/diesel shortages, pandemic-inspired business and school closings and mandatory vaccination, rampant illegal immigration, child-grooming/transgenderism, etc.) that keep the nation in a chaotic environment such that more funding of corrupt projects and controlling governmental laws can be passed. One political party pushes it while the other raises money to oppose it, yet they both profit off it and could not care less about the outcome. In a global environment of food and energy scarcities, the greatest shortage in America today is the integrity of our leadership.