It is my opinion that at this time, there is no issue more important than "election integrity". Everything else in the political sphere is a distraction.
Election integrity is critical because the 10% who believe that the end always justifies the means are driving the nation off a cliff. Zealots are dangerous and they are able to illegitimately grab the reins of power through corrupt elections.
We can recover from an economic collapse. We always have. We can recover from bad policies and bad adjudication. We cannot recover from "Kings" or mandarins and the systemic corruption that results.
Look at Israel in the Old Testament. They survived 120 years from the coronation of Saul (the first King) to the end of Solomon's rein. Then the kingdom shattered into chaos. Absolute power corrupts at an absolute level.
The two sides (D. and R.) are going to quibble about which side "wants to be king". But how do
- One citizen, one (and only one) vote
- Vote in person
- No vote without picture ID from an authoritative source
- Real-time reconciliation of voter to the rolls
...result in "Kings"?
The argument that "it will suppress the vote" tells me that there are legions of would-be voters who simply don't care enough to go to the polling place and to vote in person...and yet, miraculously, their votes get cast. If they don't care, then "their vote" should not count.
The cynics will undoubtedly start commenting that "voting doesn't matter". If that is true, then the cynics would also have to support the contention that there would have been no difference between a Donald Trump administration and a Kamala Harris administration. I don't know anybody who would support that position.
Read about Gadianton Robbers. They are alive and well in our political class today.
ReplyDeleteYou've always had a King in the USA - your Constitution defines your elective monarchy. To take the obvious example, your elected Monarch has far more power than ever George III had.
ReplyDeleteWhich just supports your point: it's crucial that elections be hard to rig. But then I'm old enough to remember, vaguely, the JFK vs Nixon election. Everyone seemed to accept that it was rigging that gave JFK the win. Certainly American Democrats whom I later met at university didn't bother to deny it. One was even rather proud of it.
Well that’s an interesting take. I’m curious the difference between the longest ruling President (FDR) vs that of your longest ruling Monarch?
DeleteWhy does length of time matter? What matters is, firstly, how the monarch is appointed. In the British case it's by Act of Parliament namely the Act of Settlement of 1701; in the American by a combination of popular election and fraud. In the case of the Vatican it's by popular election among the Cardinals, in the old Polish/Lithuanian Commonwealth it was by popular election among the Aristocracy (estimated to have been about 10% of the population), in Venice by ..., in The Holy Roman Empire of the German People by ... etc etc
DeleteSecondly what matters is how heavily he or she is constrained. Our last monarch who actually ruled was James VII/II who was booted out by the Glorious Revolution of 1688/9. His successors, the joint monarchs William& Mary, were appointed by the two parliaments.
Your recent Monarch, Obama, boasted he could ignore Congress because he had a pen and a telephone. If our monarch, King Charles the Chump, tried that trick he'd be out on his backside within hours.
I'm baffled how Americans can't see that their Constitution defines an elective monarchy - I suppose it's a triumph of all the propaganda they've been fed throughout their lives.
As the old joke had it: do you prefer the American system of Elective Monarchy or the British of a Crowned Republic?
In Illinois with mayor Richard Daley, the crookedest
Deletepolitician to run the state. Make no mistake he ran the state and guaranteed Joe Kennedy there would be enough votes for JFK to take the state. Lots of dead people voted that day and JFK won Illinois. And yes everyone knew and was a joke for years.
I absolutely agree about one thing that often gets lost in the noise: legitimacy matters. A democracy that cannot convince its citizens that elections are real, fair, and binding will eventually fracture. History—biblical or otherwise—backs that up.
ReplyDeleteBut I think we might be confusing “more restriction” with “more integrity.” Those two things are not the same.
Election integrity already exists—and is boring by design. Modern U.S. elections are not casual affairs. They include: voter roll maintenance, signature verification, chain-of-custody procedures, bipartisan poll workers, post-election audits, and criminal penalties for fraud.
That’s why actual, proven voter impersonation fraud is vanishingly rare—measured in dozens nationally, not millions. When systems are working, they look boring. When someone insists they’re broken despite no evidence, that’s not vigilance—that’s narrative.
“Kings” don’t arise from voters — they arise from control of access
Historically, kings don’t seize power by letting too many people vote. They do it by controlling who is allowed to vote, controlling how votes are counted, controlling which votes are discarded and delegitimizing results they don’t like.
A system that says “only certain forms of participation count” quietly hands power to the people who define those rules. That’s not democracy hardening itself—that’s gatekeeping authority.
Voter ID sounds simple—until you look at reality
“Just show ID” sounds neutral until you ask:
What IDs qualify?
Who issues them?
What about name changes (marriage, divorce)?
What about rural voters hours from issuing offices?
What about elderly voters born at home?
What about costs, time off work, transportation?
When access depends on administrative hurdles, voting stops being a right and becomes a conditional privilege. That’s not theory—it’s history.
Vote-by-mail isn’t apathy—it’s modernization. The claim that people who don’t vote in person “don’t care” ignores reality: soldiers, caregivers, shift workers, disabled voters, rural voters, and people avoiding long lines deliberately created by underfunding polling places.
Mail voting didn’t appear to help fraud; it appeared to help participation—which is precisely why it’s attacked.
The real threat to integrity isn’t fraud—it’s disbelief.
The most corrosive thing happening right now is not illegal voting—it’s the insistence that any loss must be illegitimate.
Once that belief takes hold, no safeguard is ever enough, because the goal quietly shifts from accuracy to control. That’s how republics fall—not with ballot stuffing, but with people deciding ahead of time which outcomes they will accept.
True election integrity requires two equal commitments; secure processes, and maximum lawful participation.
Sacrificing one for the other doesn’t prevent kings—it creates the conditions for them.
A democracy doesn’t die when people vote too easily. It dies when some people get to decide whose votes are allowed to count.
Odd how it is so difficult to actually EXAMINE the evidence when Elections are SO FAIR and Above board.
DeleteBut the COURTS said... Yeah the Courts say a lot well beyond their job description in the Constitution. Like stopping every action the Democrats dislike by Duley ELECTED President Trump.
BTW America is not a Democracy, read the original documents America is a REPUBLIC. Our forefathers were classically educated and knew QUITE Well the dangers of Mob Rule.
SNIP A demagogue (/ˈdɛməˌɡɒɡ/; from Ancient Greek δημαγωγός (dēmagōgós) 'popular leader, mob leader'; from Ancient Greek δῆμος (dêmos) 'people, populace' and ἀγωγός (agōgós) 'leading, guiding'),[1] or rabble-rouser,[2][3] is a political leader in a democracy who gains popularity by arousing the common people against elites, especially through oratory that whips up the passions of crowds, appealing to emotion by scapegoating out-groups, exaggerating dangers to stoke fears, lying for emotional effect, or other rhetoric that tends to drown out reasoned deliberation and encourage fanatical popularity.[4] Demagogues overturn established norms of political conduct, or promise or threaten to do so.[5]: 32–38
ID isn't difficult to get. That's a nonsense phrase used every time some Demagogue wants to keep the illegal voters in their payroll.
How many people voted in the 2020 election?
According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the 2020 presidential election saw the highest voter turnout of the 21st century with "66.8% of citizens 18 years and older voting."
In 2020, the population of US citizens aged 17 and over was estimated to be approximately 183 million according to the U.S. Census Bureau.
Credible, repeatedly cited tallies list Joe Biden’s national popular‑vote total in 2020 at approximately 81.2 million votes — often reported more precisely as about 81,284,000 — while Donald Trump received about 74.2 million; these totals are reflected in major reporting and election‑data aggregators that draw on state certifications and Federal Election Commission summaries.
Lets do some MATH... 183 million X 66.8% = 125 million -81 million for Biden = 44 million LEFT but, But, But Trump got 74.2 Million votes....
WHERE DID 30 Million 18 and older votes COME FROM...
All the above data comes from Google.
Michael, your conclusion rests entirely on a math error caused by mixing incompatible datasets. Once that’s corrected, the “missing 30 million votes” disappears.
DeleteYou’re multiplying the wrong population by using 183 million, which you describe as citizens 17+. But the 66.8% turnout figure applies to the Voting Eligible Population (VEP), not “citizens 17+.”
The VEP includes citizens 18 and over, minus ineligible citizens (felons, etc.), plus eligible overseas voters.
For 2020, the VEP was about 239 million, not 183 million.
Correct math, same data source. Using the correct population:
VEP: ~239 million
Turnout rate: 66.8%
239 million × 0.668 ≈ 159.6 million votes cast
That matches the certified total almost exactly: Biden: ~81.3 million, Trump: ~74.2 million, Others: ~4.2 million. Total ≈ 159.7 million. No excess votes. No mystery. No “extra 30 million.”
Why your subtraction fails is because you subtracted Biden’s votes from your incorrect total and then treated Trump’s votes as if they were separate from that same pool.
But: Biden + Trump + third-party votes all come from the same electorate. You can’t subtract one candidate’s total from an undercounted population and then add another candidate’s votes as if they’re additional people. That’s double-counting by construction.
“Republic, not a democracy” isn’t a rebuttal. The U.S. is a constitutional republic that uses democratic elections.
That distinction doesn’t change how arithmetic works, how voter eligibility is defined, or how turnout is calculated. Rome was also a republic. It still counted votes.
Courts didn’t “block investigation”. They didn’t say “you may not examine evidence.”
They said: evidence must exist, claims must be specific, standing must be established, and affidavits must allege facts, not suspicions.
That’s not courts overreaching—that’s courts doing exactly what the Constitution assigns them to do.
Bottom line: There are not 30 million phantom voters. There is one incorrect population figure plugged into an otherwise correct percentage.
When the right denominator is used, the 2020 vote totals reconcile cleanly—no kings, no mobs, no math miracles required.
If election integrity matters, then getting the math right matters too.
LOL I had to look up VEP.
DeleteSNIP Approximately 230–231 million Americans are commonly counted as “eligible to vote” under the Voting-Eligible Population (VEP) or citizen voting‑age definitions used by researchers and the Census Bureau, while the pool of actually registered voters is substantially smaller—roughly 161–168 million depending on the year and source
https://factually.co/fact-checks/politics/how-many-people-eligible-to-vote-in-us-378612
AGAIN
In 2020, the population of US citizens aged 17 and over was estimated to be approximately 183 million according to the U.S. Census Bureau.
US CITIZENS.
Try again and hope the citizens don't think that 4th box is getting important.
Its a dog-whistle. The people promulgated that idea don't really believe that. They know better, as demonstrated, it's completely and entirely illogical.
ReplyDeleteWhat it should also demonstrate to anyone capable of logical thought, is that they are lying through their teeth, they KNOW illegals are voting, they KNOW fake mail-in ballots are being cast, and they also KNOW they will never win another election if they're actually legit and straight. Existential even.
It seems to me that if there are no restrictions (like ID required) on who votes it's not really an election, it's a contest to see who can stuff a ballot box better.
ReplyDeleteIf we are not having elections it's hard to call it anykind of a democracy anymore, let alone a constitutional republic.
That comment cuts to the chase.
DeleteI cannot comment on the postal vote process in the US, but in the UK it is carte blanche for widespread fraud, and has been described as so lax as to be shaming even to a third world banana republic.
ReplyDeleteFunny how India can manage ID, voting, and counting in ONE day... And they don't have kings.
ReplyDeleteRead on the InterNets that Democrats will be accepting death certificates as voter ID.
ReplyDelete