{"id":5514,"date":"2016-10-17T08:14:05","date_gmt":"2016-10-17T14:14:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/janetheactuary\/?p=5514"},"modified":"2016-10-17T08:14:05","modified_gmt":"2016-10-17T14:14:05","slug":"lets-talk-about-election-rigging","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/janetheactuary\/2016\/10\/lets-talk-about-election-rigging.html","title":{"rendered":"Let’s talk about election-rigging"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

No, the Democratic Party isn\u2019t engaged in nationwide, coordinated voter fraud, or some kind of systematic hacking of voting machines or vote totaling equipment or the files that contain the totals as forwarded from local precincts.<\/p>\n

But at the same time, the major networks and newspapers have played a concerning role in this election: \u00a0promoting Trump in the primaries, and only after he was the Republican nominee, discovering that he was Hitler reincarnate. \u00a0Or at least it feels that way to many Republicans \u2014 that, either in pursuit of high ratings or in pursuit of an easy opponent for Hillary, they gave Trump far more airtime than he deserved, and only covered scandals once it was too late for another Republican to claim the nomination. \u00a0And it\u2019s not unreasonable to say that Democrats, and pundits and journalists in general, have \u201ccried wolf\u201d with prior years\u2019 GOP candidates, repeatedly claiming that one after the next was a dangerous extremist, so as to have seriously damaged their credibility in now announcing that Trump really is about to lead us to a fascist state.<\/p>\n

(Or, according to Slate<\/a>, will\u00a0start a Race War even if he loses \u2014 which seems to be an invitation for a pre-emptive strike by progressives.)<\/p>\n

Now,\u00a0Trump\u2019s allegations of a rigged election \u2014 at least in terms of what he has to say on Twitter, seem to be largely a matter of the latter. \u00a0For instance, \u201cThis election is being rigged by the media pushing false and unsubstantiated charges, and outright lies, in order to elect Crooked Hillary!\u201d on October 15th<\/a>.<\/p>\n

But Rudy Giuliani did raise the specter of voter fraud. \u00a0According to CNN<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m sorry, dead people generally vote for Democrats rather than Republicans,\u201d the former New York City mayor told CNN\u2019s Jake Tapper on \u201cState of the Union.\u201d \u201cYou want me to (say) that I think the election in Philadelphia and Chicago is going to be fair? I would have to be a moron to say that.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

And in both cases \u2014 the question of voter fraud and the question of whether journalists are behaving inappropriately \u2014 the response of the media, pundits, and politicians, is to call these questions and accusations wholly out of bounds. \u00a0No one should ever question the integrity of the electoral process of the United States.<\/p>\n

How soon\u00a0we forget that the Left cried out in 2000 that the election was \u201cstolen\u201d and unjustly decided by the Supreme Court rather than the American people, and for years after activists claimed that George Bush was not the duly elected president of the United States!<\/p>\n

And it wasn\u2019t that long ago that voter fraud was routine. \u00a0Here\u2019s the bottom line of an article from Slate<\/a> that popped up on the question of the 1960 election: the belief\u00a0that Nixon refused to fight for a recount of the election \u201cfor the good of the country\u201d is largely untrue \u2014 recount efforts were indeed mounted, that didn\u2019t change the totals \u2014 but<\/p>\n

The GOP\u2019s failure to prove fraud doesn\u2019t mean, of course, that the election was clean. That question remains unsolved and unsolvable. But what\u2019s typically left out of the legend is that multiple election boards saw no reason to overturn the results. Neither did state or federal judges. Neither did an Illinois special prosecutor in 1961. And neither have academic inquiries into the Illinois case (both a 1961 study by three University of Chicago professors and more recent research by political scientist Edmund Kallina concluded that whatever fraud existed wasn\u2019t substantial enough to alter the election).<\/p>\n

On the other hand, some fraud clearly occurred in Cook County. At least three people were sent to jail for election-related crimes, and 677 others were indicted before being acquitted by Judge John M. Karns, a Daley crony. Many of the allegations involved practices that wouldn\u2019t be detected by a recount, leading the conservative Chicago Tribune, among others, to conclude that \u201conce an election has been stolen in Cook County, it stays stolen.\u201d What\u2019s more, according to journalist Seymour Hersh, a former Justice Department prosecutor who heard tapes of FBI wiretaps from the period believed that Illinois was rightfully Nixon\u2019s. Hersh also has written that J. Edgar Hoover believed Nixon actually won the presidency but in deciding to follow normal procedures and refer the FBI\u2019s findings to the attorney general\u2014as of Jan. 20, 1961, Robert F. Kennedy\u2014he effectively buried the case.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

That was 56 years ago, of course. \u00a0And, with the exception of Philadelphia, maybe, none of the big cities with a history of Machine politics are in battleground states. But to claim these very real practices\u00a0of voter fraud are so long ago in the past that it\u2019s offensive to even question ballot integrity in the present is itself an injustice.<\/p>\n

But that\u2019s only part of the issue.<\/p>\n

The bigger question is this: \u00a0is the media playing an \u201cunfair\u201d role in this election?<\/p>\n

Did the media in fact, manage\u00a0its reporting on Trump in the primaries to ensure that he would win \u2014 and, if so, was that because he was a ratings-boost, or was it a deliberate act to give Clinton a weak opponent? \u00a0Regarding the latter, it is, I suppose, reassuring that none of the DNC e-mails that revealed so much support for Clinton despite official neutrality, show any coordination to boost Trump, though the media would hardly need marching orders from the DNC to do so.<\/p>\n

And is the media now eagerly promoting stories that put Trump in a bad light while intentionally staying silent on similar news about Clinton, out of a desire to avoid anything that contributes, in any way, to drops in support for Clinton? \u00a0 There\u2019ve been plenty of statements from journalists that so much is at stake that they can\u2019t take any chances (but, no, I don\u2019t have any direct quotes).<\/p>\n

Consider this:<\/p>\n

Only 32 percent of Americans say they have \u201ca great deal\u201d or \u201ca fair amount\u201d of trust and confidence in the media \u201cto report the news fully, accurately and fairly,\u201d an eight percentage point drop from 2015 and the lowest in Gallup\u2019s polling history.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

That\u2019s according to at US News summary<\/a> of the recently-released poll, which continues,<\/p>\n

The highest trust level was 72 percent in 1976 in the heyday of media investigations of government corruption such as the Watergate scandal and government failures such as the Vietnam war. During the next two decades, the media\u2019s reputation eroded badly, with only 53 percent in 1997 trusting the media, defined by Gallup as newspapers, television and radio.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

That\u2019s a dramatic shift.<\/p>\n

So what next?<\/p>\n

Me, I have to log on and get to work . . .<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

No, the Democratic Party isn\u2019t engaged in nationwide, coordinated voter fraud, or some kind of systematic hacking of voting machines or vote totaling equipment or the files that contain the totals as forwarded from local precincts. But at the same time, the major networks and newspapers have played a concerning role in this election: \u00a0promoting […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2209,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[374],"tags":[442],"class_list":["post-5514","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","tag-election-2016"],"yoast_head":"\nLet's talk about election-rigging<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"No, the Democratic Party isn't engaged in nationwide, coordinated voter fraud, or some kind of systematic hacking of voting machines or vote totaling\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/janetheactuary\/2016\/10\/lets-talk-about-election-rigging.html\" \/>\n<meta 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