Heads I Win! Tails I’m President!

When was the last time that you were with a group of people who couldn’t decide what to do, so you took a vote… and the minority won?

And in what kind of Democracy does the lead vote getter in an election get 5 million more votes than his opponent and yet everyone is walking around for days trying to come to a consensus as to who won the vote?

Since the year 2000 in the United States of America, this has happened twice in 5 presidential elections and now in 2020, 70 or so million people would like to see it happen again to make it 3 times out of 6!

“Gee, who has the most votes after 150 million citizens cast their ballots?”

” Why it’s Mr. Democrat that’s who by a margin of over 5 million!”

” Well, at least he has a 50% chance of winning!”

In fact 5 presidents in the history of the United States’ presidency did not win the popular vote. That’s 11%! Not bad if you don’t receive the most votes in any election you always lose… But in a presidential election…You still have an 11% chance of winning?

And now many folks (Republicans) want it to be 6 out of 46 or 13% of US Presidents winning the White House while losing the people! Who thought of this crazy idea anyway? Our Founding Fathers, that’s who! Supposedly the smartest, most revered men on the Earth at that time…and possibly the most overrated?

And so now we have a president who, when he won with 306 electoral votes in 2016 but lost the popular vote by 3.5 million votes, said that it was a landslide victory and a mandate from the people! And that he lost the popular vote because millions of illegal votes had been cast against him.

Then after presiding over the country for 4 years, while making us great again…he once again loses the popular vote, but this time by over 5 and a half million votes!… and he loses the Electoral College by 306 electoral votes to 232 and yet… he announces that the election is too close to call! and was probably rigged! (again) and that millions more people voted illegally (and all against him) than in 2016!

Some job he did, huh? It was “American Carnage!” at his 2016 inaugural and this time, 4 years later, he’s crying: “America 2020! Now with MORE Carnage!” And he is refusing to concede his defeat and accept the new President-Elect and he is refusing to aid in the transition of presidential power and carry out the people’s will.

So now! Oh Great Founding Fathers! What do we do with a petulant and childish President who refuses to abide by the Constitution of the United States of America but yet is still supported in his refusal by 1(only) of the (only) 2 political parties that you saw fit to create?

Oh right…now we go to The Electoral College…of course! Where state electors, chosen by their own state legislators, go to cast the electoral votes that we citizens have instructed them to do with our popular votes, that we cast in each state…in the first place!

Another election? Because one is just never good enough?

Good grief! What could possibly go wrong there?!

Illegal voting?

They say it can’t be done!

Stay tuned! It all happens Monday! (after the second Wednesday in December of presidential election years) When else?…

So save that date: December 14th, 2021… Only in the USA!

Breaking News from the White House Press Secretary…(republicans, you will not want to miss this!)

The White House press secretary has just announced that in 2016 President Trump had the largest, greatest and most attended inauguration in the history of the United States!

(Note: images may appear doctored depending on your point of view and/or mental health)

And in News from the Justice Department: The Attorney General of the Unites States has announced that U.S. prosecutors may begin looking for the strawberries!

Meanwhile: The President-Elect, Joseph Biden, is not receiving his daily intelligence briefings as per U.S. law, and national security officials are being fired and/or resigning from office.

The CDC says that Democracy may have contracted a terminal illness but their findings as of yet remain unclear…

Stay tuned for more breaking news!

Why Is Voting So Hard To Do in America?

And during this year’s election with the coronavirus and the partisan politics it seems even harder…even though they have supposedly made it easier with early balloting and mail-in voting.

However, It always amazes me that whenever I walk into a polling station it feels like I’m time traveling back into the 1970s when I was first able to cast a ballot in an election. When it comes to voting in the United States, it seems to me as though nothing has changed in the last 40 years…not even the machines…or the tables or chairs or buildings or the people inside. They too all seem to be about 40 years older than they were when I first encountered them back in the day…another reason why mail in voting is a good idea, not just to keep the voters safe but our aged poll workers too!

What gives? How come everything else in the world has become modernized and electrified and computerized to the point where it can be accessed with a hand held device and the point of a finger tip, but not voting. And now in certain states they are making it even harder for people to get to the polling stations and vote in person, requiring them to wait on longer lines and making it more difficult for people to prove who they are…in person!

And all the while still asking us to push a button on an old machine, or punch a card, or mark a paper ballot and drop it in a box…and all because there supposedly just isn’t any other safe way to do it… for after all what could be a safer and more accurate way to count votes in an election than by having people count paper ballots by hand or reading numbers from machines and then adding them up together and then handing them over to other people who continue to do the same. Did you ever play telephone? It seems to me that that is how archaic our voting system is.

And why is everyone who works in the polling stations old…and getting older? (At least where I vote) Where are all of the young voters and volunteers? And why is the largest voting block in America the non-voter? It seems as though everyone is being turned off by America’s “Can’t Do” voting policies.

We can’t get to the polls. We can’t keep them open. We can’t count the votes quickly. We can’t keep the voting machines secure. We can’t rely on the Post Office. We can’t secure the ballots. We can’t trust the states to make accurate counts. We can’t keep the dead from voting. We can’t keep the ballots from bursting into flames in a ditch down by the river???

What can we do? Are we living in the 21st century or am I just dreaming? Is this the age of the iPad and smart phone and Ebay and Etrade and E banking and computerized, drone warfare? Or isn’t it?

Can we at least start to modernize our voting system in what most Americans seem to agree is the greatest democracy in the free world (I’m always saying this…is it really true?) so that each and every one of our citizens, of voting age, can vote in a timely, safe, quick and easy manner? I know it can be done because it is the 21st century and voting should be convenient, computerized, simple and secure…just like on-line shopping for crying out loud.

If our economy worked this slowly and tried to prevent 1/3 of all shoppers from getting out to the stores and buying stuff, we’d be a third world country!

Did you know that there are 118 electoral democracies in the world and all but 11 of them guarantee their citizens the “right to vote” as part of their nation’s constitution?

And Amazingly enough, The United States, is one of those 11 democracies that does not guarantee its citizens the right to vote within its own constitution. When the country was founded, the U.S. Constitution did not define who could vote and ironically the United States, while always helping and encouraging new democracies to include the guaranteed right to vote for all citizens in their constitutions, has never adopted an amendment that afforded such a right to its own.

In 2005 the United States helped Iraq to write its new constitution which included the declaration that Iraqi citizens, both men and women, would have the right to vote. And now in Afghanistan thanks to the U.S. all citizens are also guaranteed the right to elect and be elected. When the U.S. army occupied Japan after World War II we helped them to write a constitution guaranteeing “Universal adult suffrage” and in Germany after that same war the new German constitution was written to include the phrase, “Any person who has attained the age of 18 shall be entitled to vote.”

Yet here in the United States Over 30 states recently passed new and more prohibitive voter ID laws in efforts to supposedly thwart voter ID fraud when there have only been 31 recorded incidents of identity impersonation since 2000… out of over 1 billion votes cast!

So what’s the deal? Why are so many political forces trying to scare, deceive and suppress the American electorate? And now those political forces even include our President. Why doesn’t the United States pass a constitutional amendment simply and explicitly guaranteeing all of its citizens the right to vote? Was this a right that our forefathers overlooked or was there method in their mistake by accidentally on purpose creating an escape clause that might come in handy someday when say a Congressman’s approval rate was at 9 percent while at the same time their reelection rate was over 90 percent?

How are those statistics in any way shape or form indicative of a democratic and representative form of government for the “Greatest democracy the world has ever seen”?

Anyone?