Voting procedures, a race to the bottom: Fascist Regime Style vs. Banana Republic Quirks.

This article contains the ultimate argument in favor of Voter ID laws in the US. Please sit back and enjoy the ride; alternatively you can skim it, relax and skip entire chapters.

Swedish polling station with an assortment of ballots for different parties, from which voters normally have to choose openly for all to see.  Image by Jens O. Z. Ehrs for Southerly Clubs (CC BY-SA 3.0)

I’m not used to being surprised anymore.
But I was floored by the revelation that international observers, called to oversee the Swedish election for the first time due to fears for a victory for the party of xenophobes, found an unbelievable flaw in the system. One that is obviously favoring the establishment. A hideous ulcer hiding in plain sight.
This is as good an occasion as any to discuss US election frauds too.

Let me be clear: I don’t want to cast aspersions on Sweden or the United States. Don’t get me started on my country!
I’m singling them out precisely because they’re generally regarded as stellar examples of advanced western democracies; America the Superpower, Home of the American Dream™; Sweden the Social-democratic Alternative, with its enviable life standards.
And yet I’m flabbergasted by the absurd voting rules implemented there.

-The US is definitely not a banana republic, but some aspects of its politics, like how voters are accounted for, somehow fit the description.
-Sweden is not a Fascist regime, but even if millions of self-appointed anti-fascists would call it their ideal country, its voting system shows a surprising overlap with that of Mussolini’s Italy.

1-The Compliant Swedes

One of the key factors in the success of Nordic countries (economic and social development, efficient institutions, low crime rates…) resides in their homogeneous populaces, comprised of good, honest, polite and reliable citizens that weren’t exposed to violent societal conflicts for generations. That’s a society that is bound to be productive, orderly, clean, boring.
They’re ill-prepared for times of radical change, when you’d need to question authority and find a different course of action before falling off a cliff.

I now may understand how in such a trusting environment a policy like the one discussed here may be adopted without causing significant protests.
The voting procedures require that you pick an easily recognizable ballot for your preferred party from a table, in the open, with little opportunity to prevent others from gazing.
Of course plenty of extra ballots available to passersby constitute also a tempting opportunity for parties willing to tamper with the election.

But wait! Aren’t the citizens of Sweden proverbially scrupulous and honest?
Turns out no rosy picture survives the impact with an inquiring and disillusioned eye.
Which makes sense: when everybody is taking for granted that it’s unthinkable to accuse others of foul play, you can expect criminal activity to grow significantly, especially if there’s a lot at stake; the dirt accumulated under the rug in the end becomes a giant stinking mess.
(After all, isn’t this conviction that certain people are above all suspicion also how so many pederasts and pedophiles chose to become priests in the Catholic Church, in order to find a perfect cover?)

Unsurprisingly then, international observers found that cheating occurred in almost half of the polling stations they visited. Plus hundreds of complaints were filed to the authorities regarding a vast assortment of irregularities, from missing polls to manipulating computers. In the town of Degerfors allegedly a Social Democrat politician followed voters around in all the phases of voting up to the ballot box, while another representative of the same leftist party is accused of bribing electors with cash!

And this is on top of the basic issue of people knowing that their vote isn’t secret!

In fascist Italy people had to choose either to vote for or against the Party, the tricolore (green white and red) “yes” ballot immediately set apart from the plain white “no” ballot: you knew you could risk a beating or worse if you were voting incorrectly in front of your local black shirts.
Of course this is different: there’s a choice between many alternative parties, the absurd voting procedure isn’t (I hope) designed on purpose to control the electorate and you’re not expecting to be specifically targeted by political opponents.
And yet there’s a sort of overlap: you’d suffer a beating, if only figuratively, if your neighbors were to know that you’re pushing against the highly civilized system you’re supposed to be proud of, giving instead your support to some deplorable far right party…

This is precisely the time in which the role of the push to conformity, which is so strong in Northern Europe, is critically able to cause maximum damage, due to the existential threat represented by mass immigration and Islam. A turning point.

The rise of a (populist?) anti-immigration party called SD (Swedish Democrats, which -I must say- is confusingly vague as a name) is probably too little, too late, and yet we should also remember that there’s a distinct possibility of the reaction becoming uncontrollable in its manifestations.

It’s silly to discuss SD by choosing to either emphasize their success in the last election or to point out that they were expected to do better, as many commentators did.
It’s neither a triumph nor a defeat, and as I pointed out before this perfectly follows the behavioral pattern of the European voter in times like these: in a word, punt.

This is Sweden for you these days: a country where people may feel ostracized or actually lose their job for daring to discuss Islamization, mass immigration or gender theory-based indoctrination of children.

No longer the orderly society most outsiders still remember and idealize, in their vain hope to stay civil they’re making matters worse: oppressing dissenters and empowering invaders that want to build something completely different.

2-The problematic American Electoral System

There are many possible angles we could choose to question the viability of the US election procedures. For instance voter intimidation and voting machines tampering are real concerns.
Absentee ballots laying around for weeks represent probably the weakest link in the chain.

But the real issue is how the electorate is influenced through intense media bias: recently it was revealed that Google proactively tried to shift the balance in favor of Hillary Clinton by pushing for more Latinos to vote, only to be disappointed by the unprecedented amount of them who chose Trump (close to 1/3); plus of course a video was leaked where Google top executives react with bitterness and dismay to Trump’s victory, promise in many ways they’ll do their best to contrast him and the ideas of those who voted for him. Which is both a chilling scoop and entirely predictable.
Who needs voter fraud when you’ve already got such an enormous advantage through traditional media and academia?
Well, now if you open Facebook, Twitter, search online with Google, use Google’s Youtube: plenty of filters and censorship, as much leftist bias they can get away with. So much for alternative media.

In a way yes, the electoral process -offering significant opportunities for foul play- isn’t the most pressing issue.
And yet one notices the abundance of intricacies: for instance trying to understand how in 1960 Kennedy was elected without winning the popular vote requires a dive into the quirks of the nomination process for the Democratic Party in Alabama, where a majority of the indirect votes went to an alternative candidate, representing the racist Democratic southerners…

At the same time I’ve once read apparently credible allegations that both Kennedy in 1960 and Nixon in 1968 were the beneficiaries of voter fraud, although they say Nixon didn’t need those extra votes to win but pushed for the tampering anyway because he pettily wanted to obtain a more resounding victory… go figure…

You may recall the 2000 election and the headache-inducing Florida recount. Although in that case I couldn’t find a credible case for a Gore victory.

We’ve heard of mechanical voting machines with “hanging chads” and indentations that could have signaled an imperfectly expressed intention to vote… We’ve learned about touch screens that allegedly registered a vote for certain candidates if you put your finger on an area so large that it was invisibly superimposed to a portion of the name of their adversary…
It’s a mess.
A good thing is that the system is too fragmented and complicated: no one can directly control the entire process. But a few swing states, and a few crucial precincts in them, could determine the outcome of the election and the future of America; a tempting opportunity for unscrupulous activists.

There are plenty of things that don’t work in the American system, but the Electoral College, i.e. the fact that a candidate could win despite losing the popular vote, isn’t one of them. (Interesting starting point for a future article: this is about a crucial aspect of democracy.)
Nor we should lose our sleep over unsubstantiated Russian plots to influence the result.

Facilitating illegal votes.

What I find appalling is the way in which the Democrats have been fighting for years to preserve the right to vote without showing a proper ID, in many states even no ID at all.
People could show up and vote, even multiple times in different places, by just impersonating others or registering without being citizens… Well, this is Banana Republic Territory.
(If you want another example of this Banana Effect, consider that Creepy Porn Lawyer™ Michael Avenatti is discussed by some as a credible candidate for the Presidency of the United States… Or, again, consider the slow motion coup performed by the Muller investigation against Trump. More on this on another occasion.)

I don’t care if it’s easier to cheat by other means. People shouldn’t be facilitated in their fraudulent behavior.
Also, the other typical objection, pointing out that casting a vote isn’t worth the risk of getting caught (therefore such incidents must be exceptionally rare) doesn’t take into account that there are many urban polling places where basically everybody is a fully committed Democrat, therefore at least theoretically an organized effort could be put in place where a group of illegal immigrants is casting votes with the more or less implicit support of those tasked with the responsibility to prevent fraud.

Some people point out that Australia has no voter ID requirements too, but the comparison doesn’t hold water because Down Under there’s a compulsory voting law: essentially everybody votes (and there are very few non-citizens to begin with). No room for impersonators. In the US on the contrary millions of people apparently are registered without being eligible, most of them because they moved to another state or they died.

A number of reports in fact point out that voter fraud is a tangible phenomenon in the US, although voter impersonation isn’t the most common tactic at all.

See another example here: in sanctuary cities illegal aliens may vote without fear of reprisal due to the widespread support they receive, including from elected officials and state/municipal bureaucrats who take their side against federal law.

When the brave undercover journalists from Project Veritas tried to unmask the dirty tricks played by Dem activists, as you can see from this video, I had the impression that there were nonetheless significant logistics problems. The Democrats involved have absolutely no moral qualms, would really love to be able to cheat on a grand scale, this Scott Fovalthe very talkative Dem operative that was framed in the Project Veritas video guy even assumed as a fact that bussing people around to vote illegally was a venerable tradition in the Party. It’s just that performing such a trick isn’t that easy. Or at least it’s become complicated.
As confirmed by their earlier undercover video from the 2012 election: again, no organized effort but a very warm welcome to any attempt to cheat in the election, if done by a Democrat. Because, y’know, it’s for a good cause…

We can also appreciate how absentee ballots almost nullify the risk of getting caught: you register using false information (eg: in a state you don’t reside in, thus voting twice), then vote by mail. You could always pretend it wasn’t you: possibly someone stole your identity (!).

Obama’s evasive manoeuvre: don’t ask/don’t tell/wink wink

The general attitude on the left regarding this problem of facilitating voter fraud can be exemplified by this (in)famous Barack Obama interview, where the then President astutely avoids directly supporting voter fraud but also doesn’t contrast the idea. The link I posted here goes directly to the Snopes page that supposedly debunked the “false” meme.

Did Obama “openly call on illegal aliens to vote” as many insisted on the Right? Well, technically no, he didn’t.
But Snopes et al. were more than devious in their reconstruction absolving Mr.”Fundamentally Transform America”. Saying that Obama supported cheating is closer to the truth!

Let’s read the crucial passage of the interview:

RODRIGUEZ: Many of the millennials, Dreamers, undocumented citizens — and I call them citizens because they contribute to this country — are fearful of voting. So if I vote, will immigration know where I live? Will they come for my family and deport us?

OBAMA: Not true. And the reason is, first of all, when you vote, you are a citizen yourself. And there is not a situation where the voting rolls somehow are transferred over and people start investigating, et cetera. The sanctity of the vote is strictly confidential in terms of who you voted for. If you have a family member who maybe is undocumented, then you have an even greater reason to vote.

Here this Gina Rodriguez is playing a hyper-partisan angle. The framing of her question is meant to undermine the concept of citizenship and encourage people to vote illegally.
In fact the people she identifies as “fearful of voting” are, in order (remember the meaning of Dreamers, from the Obama DREAM Act): those born between 1980 and 2000; illegal aliens that the Obama Administration is in the process of regularizing; illegal immigrants in general.
The first item of the list doesn’t make sense: young adults as a group don’t belong in a list of non-citizens who desire to cast their vote. Unless you want to murky the waters (a possible weak, irrelevant connection being that the so-called Dreamers are young-ish).

Dreamers indeed came to the US illegally; the fact that the Democrats want them to become legal residents (and possibly in a future, citizens) tolerating and de facto encouraging their disrespect for the law doesn’t obviously make them eligible for voting.
Notice how the third group is identified: “undocumented citizens” could be misunderstood for a curious way of describing US citizens that happen to lack a proper ID. But not only this is a known euphemism for illegal immigrants. The interviewer explicitly states that those undocumented (=unable to obtain documents because they’re in the country illegally) are in her view to be considered as citizens because they contribute (i.e. they work and possibly pay taxes, which is an absurd and really low threshold.)
It’s an emotional push. She’s internally screaming she doesn’t accept reality because she wants to be fair.

She’s asking directly the President if their party’s pro-immigrants stance is so advanced that illegal immigrants could vote without a fear of deportation, for them and their family. Notice how in her question the voting subject is not eligible to vote and is at risk of being deported alongside the others.

Obama evidently is an expert in this kind of rhetoric, therefore he’s able to dodge the compromising bullet without skipping a beat. Better: he manages to implicitly greenlight her suggestion.

To a woman who’s undermining the very concept of what constitutes a citizen, he’s deliberately ignoring his duty to defend the sovereignty of the USA and redefines the terms of the question.
It’s not that if you’re (not) a citizen you can vote, but if you vote that means you’re a citizen… (wink wink) …plus of course nobody will run background checks on you if you show up at polling stations (wink wink).

To seemingly obfuscate what he meant he adds that the vote is confidential “in terms of who you voted for”, which has nothing to do with anything. It doesn’t make sense to bring that up (since you’re not in Sweden, eheh…) but it helps mount a defense of his words: “See? He just inexplicably changed the subject, he’s not really saying that if you vote no one will check if you weren’t eligible…”

He finally proceeds to suggest a benign interpretation of the question, where the undocumented immigrant is just a relative of the voter; of course that’s when the latter should feel motivated to choose the Democrats, the champions of the cause of illegals…

Splendid: a formally unassailable answer, if only a bit bungled, at the same time reinforcing the interviewer and their public in the conviction that cheating is good, they’re on the side of the less fortunate…

The Race Excuse

Somehow you’re supposed to believe that by requiring people to show a proper ID card at the booth you’d be oppressing blacks and minorities!

Ostensibly, the idea being that people in underprivileged groups, including inner city African Americans, may often be too poor and destitute to obtain a state-issued document, therefore by requiring them to prove their ID you’d be suppressing their vote, at least in part.

Let me be very clear: to anyone who’s not American, including yours truly, this whole idea is total lunacy.
It’s shocking, I mean really, really SHOCKING to see (as I saw) leftist thought leaders like Jon Stewart or John Oliver (I know, I know, they’re comedians: that’s what I wrote. Thought leaders) not only insist with a straight face that requiring documents to vote is racist, but even building the script of some allegedly humorous jokes/skits on the concept.

This is basic common sense.
And yet leftists try their best to confuse the public with mental gymnastics memes like the following:

The Meme War on Voter ID

Did you spot the problem with this assertion?
They compare
a) voter ID as a means to stop voter fraud with
b) preventing gun violence through extensive checks when someone applies to purchase a gun.

This is The Mother of All Apples and Oranges!

1. a) Proving your identity to a public official and voting happen in one single action, b) background checks may happen years before in very different conditions, there’s no connection;
2. a) what your documents certify is straightforward and easily defined; b) there’s no way to verify if someone won’t use a gun for nefarious purposes: those checks represent generic criteria to weed out only the most obviously dangerous folks;
3. a) no ID verification, no vote for you; b) it’s easy for criminals to acquire guns while bypassing any law.

Another popular meme pretended to show an elderly Texas woman who allegedly couldn’t vote (as she was used to) after the introduction of ID law in her state. But even Snopes had to say that this was a piece of fake news.
You get the picture: when even the proponents of this stupid idea need to resort to a fabrication, because they couldn’t find a single genuine case of a voter who was stopped by ID laws…

This is such a no brainer!

In reality providing the entirety of the population with photo ID is perfectly normal for governments around the world; even the poorest of India get their ID card. There’s no excuse for American legislators to drag their feet.

A reality check comes courtesy of Adrian Norman, a black conservative writer, via Twitter: people interviewed on the street; first a) white liberals imagining black minorities unable to function in a society then b) blacks showing their ID cards with a giant, puzzled “So what?”

The Ultimate Argument in favor of Voter ID

I’m surprised I’ve never heard anyone else pointing out this, but here’s my two cents on the subject. An easy to follow line of reasoning that should seal the deal.

Let’s say you’re so poor and disadvantaged that you’re somewhat unable to obtain an ID card, for instance because you don’t have the resolve, mental stability, money, whatever… to take a bus to a local government office.
That means you have no place in society: performing easy tasks seems already too much. Even assuming that stuff like food stamps and other forms of help are administered to you through a documented relative, you’re still in need; in order to hope to elevate yourself you’d need a document anyway, as a basic starting point.
Since even third world countries issue ID cards to all of their citizens, there are no intrinsic obstacles to doing just that.

Therefore if the Democrats really care, as they say, for the well being of the poorest and most disadvantaged people, mostly part of ethnic minorities, they’ll push for universal ID issuance, among other things.
If instead they don’t care about those unfortunate brethren, but all they want from them is their vote, then yes, they shouldn’t bother giving them proper documents, only continue fighting for their right to cast a ballot.

Conclusion

All this being said, Sweden still gets the crown: for how convoluted and exploitable the US electoral system could be, it still isn’t the most crucial factor.
On the other hand in the Land of Ikea the effective psychological pressure coming from neighbors and peers is having a major impact on the chances of survival of the nation, and it’s appalling to find out the actual voting procedures reinforce this sinister trait, pushing for conformity.
There’s no Ikea instruction leaflet that could help you rebuild that.

Appendix-Post Mortem

We witnessed again the crude spectacle of protracted counting operations and successive recounts in Florida and Arizona, with the customary gobs of new ballots “found” in the days following the election. All in favor of the Democrat candidates, obviously. With the honorable mention of Broward County as the worst offender. This is the Left.

With high stakes comes the push to exploit any possible avenue for tampering with the result. This includes the extraordinary case of California.

They weren’t content with the social transformation that shifted the Golden State from Red to Blue, through massive immigration and the middle class fleeing to friendlier states. There were (are) some pockets of resistance that weren’t voting right. Luckily they came up with a solution:  a California law meant to facilitate cheaters, since now activists are permitted to collect the ballots and bring them in bulk to the polling stations at their convenience, when they feel like it.

Hundreds of thousands of new votes, counted more than two weeks after election day, were sufficient to reverse the results in 7 of the 14 precincts that stubbornly pretended to go Red. Talk about a mockery of a process.
Even if you wanted to check, what could you try and verify? Nobody believes those are real votes: at best a plurality of them come from eligible voters, but mostly old, mentally frail, ignorant or disinterested citizens who wouldn’t have participated and were pressured into doing it by militants that put a foot in their door.

A number of pundits seem to enjoy the Banana Republic trope now.