It’s finally over. The Mid-Term elections have finally come to an end. Senator Warlock, I mean Warnock, defeated Herschel “It’s not my Baby” Walker in a very tightly contested race. The Democrats have a 51 to 49 advantage in the upper chamber of Congress and I am not that sure it will mean all that much. Sure, it has serious implication as far as the Judiciary but otherwise, it is a lame victory.
Before I rattle on about some other things, let’s first unpack the election in Georgia. Again, I am no conspiracy theorist and I truly believe the Republicans are equally adept at election shenanigans as the Democrats, yet, I still think something was not right about this election.
It was close, very close. Until it wasn’t. That’s what gets me. I followed this election throughout the night on the NYTimes website and as the precincts were reporting, Walker would lead by 1,500 votes, Warnock would lead by 3,000 and so on. All night. Then as they came to around the 92% reporting phase, Warnock had a lead of 3,500 or so. As it got to 95%, Warnocks lead grew to over a 100,000. Huh? Yes, thats right. Whatever precincts that hadn’t reported before were now overwhelmingly voting for Warnock. See, the math doesn’t really work for me. He had an increase of let’s say 95,000 votes. That means that at least 180,000 votes were added to the tally. that means that at least 5% of the votes came in late, yet, the total tabulation went from 92% to 95%. Doesn’t add up, sorry.
Funny, I seem to recall the very same thing happening in Pennsylvania during the Trump-Biden election.
So far, I haven’t seen any Republicans storming the capitol in Atlanta. The Republicans lost. They knew they put up one of the worst candidates possible and the guy came very close. No crying and bitching. Rest assured, if Walker had squeezed out a victory, the Democrats, the NYTimes, Washington Post would all be screaming for an investigation.
One last tidbit on this absurdity. At 10:19 last night, Walker was ahead by 2,100 votes. Too close to call for me but yet, the venerable NYTimes had this funky looking gauge on their website and it had Warnock as a 99% chance of winning. How is that? As a matter of fact, that gauge had Warnock at 90% or better the whole night. Obviously the Times got the memo early.
It stinks to be sure. Thankfully, the Democrats have put into the Senate two of the worst candidates in modern history and next time around, hopefully the electorate will try to avoid the mistakes of this election cycle.
If you haven’t gotten the undertone of this column, I will give it to you straight. The American political system is not broken. Not by any means. It is the voting population that needs to take a step back and envision what they want from their elected leaders. That is who is to blame. Sure, there probably hundreds of men and women in this country that would make a good candidate. Solid people with solid ideas. Unfortunately, they didn’t get elected and it isn’t their fault, it is ours.
We may say that we are trying to vote for the best candidate at the time of each election and that may be true but how does Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez get elected and re elected. Or any other super left leaning Democrat? Surely the Democratic party can put up a more moderate candidate. A candidate who will work in the best interests of his or her community and the country.
Same goes for the Republicans. How do you back a guy like Dr OZ? How does a party that clearly has a divisive factor in Donald Trump not move past him and come together behind potentially better candidates?
Party leadership sucks on both sides and given the poor choices people are going to vote for “The Name” instead of the person. I have said it before in multiple columns, we are to blame for the political mess we are in. Unfortunately, the political machines and the media control the narrative and not the people.
Contrary to what it may sound like, I don’t want to burn the system but I do think that there should be some major changes in that system.
I think there should be a complete overhaul of the election process in this country. We have all these nerds, stealing cryptocurrencies with sophisticated programs. Get these geeks to build a nationwide system of election systems. Everyone needs to prove they are a US citizen. A citizen of that community where they are voting. In person, show legit ID. No ID no vote. If you are too lazy or too chicken to go to a polling place. Make the process airtight for at home. It can be done. We have sent a minimum of 30 billion dollars of hardware to Ukraine to fight the good fight, what about the fight at home.
I know everyone will hate this idea but election requirements and processes should be the same in every state. Polls open and close at the same time in each time zone. Votes are all electronically tabulated and certified so there should be no 100,000 vote swing at 11:22 pm election night.
Come up with a more stringent rule about donations and PACS. Enough with someone outspending someone else and winning an election.
I know, none of these things will ever happen. These will take acts of Congress and Congress is who benefits most so forget it. We will just have to suffer through this for the foreseeable future.
That was an excellent description of the "folly", but, sadly very accurate. Your last paragraph was golden.
And we wonder out loud how we got here and what we have become???