"How to Steal an Election"

Senator Doctor Rand Paul is a well-educated man. Admittedly, his undergraduate degree is from a southern university where trustees later thought it would be a good idea to select Ken Starr as its president & chancellor. But despite Li'l Randy's flirtation with the little-known god Aqua Buddha (a religious episode he later could not recall), and despite the fact that he wasn't actually graduated from Baylor University, Duke University's School of Medicine found him good enough to accept into its program, possibly as a legacy (Li'l Randy's doctor-congressman father Ron Paul was a graduate of the same school of medicine).

All that education notwithstanding, Rand Paul does not seem very bright. I haven't the space to catalog all of stupid ideas Rand has shared with the public. A Google search for "stupid things Rand Paul has said" elicited about 4.7 million hits. And the hits just keep on coming. Steve Benen of MSNBC wrote Tuesday,

"The American Conservative website published this piece [by William Doyle] last week, which described the Democratic electoral strategy in Wisconsin this way: "Seeding an area heavy with potential Democratic votes with as many absentee ballots as possible, targeting and convincing potential voters to complete them in a legally valid way, and then harvesting and counting the results."

Rand Paul then republished Doyle's observation in a tweet, describing it as a lesson in "how to steal an election."

As Akhilleus wrote in Wednesday's Comments thread, "This is how democracy works." Benen agrees: what Democrats were doing "was simply democracy at work: Democrats targeted a competitive battleground state — a state the Democratic ticket has won in eight of the last nine presidential election cycles — implementing a strategy that involved messaging, access, and legal voter participation. There was nothing nefarious or untoward about it."

If you parse Doyle's sentence & Paul's analysis, you will no doubt come to the same conclusion Akhilleus & Benen did. But there are clues -- dogwhistles, you might say -- in Doyle's description of just how he and Randy believe this Democratic "election stealing" works:

Doyle describes Democrats "harvesting and counting the results." "Harvesting" is a loaded word. "Ballot harvesting" is a practice in which a partisan group distributes and collects ballots and takes them to polling locations. Particularly unscrupulous "harvesters" might "accidentally lose" any ballots they believe could be for the "wrong candidates."

AND built into Doyle's construction is the implication that it was Democrats who were doing the counting, not polling machines & elections officials.

Doyle also writes in that loaded sentence that ballot harvesters were "convincing potential voters to complete [ballots] in a legally valid way." In other words, harvesters were coaching voters on how to fill out their ballots so that they marked their votes for Democratic candidates.

In addition, Doyle describes this Democratic activity as taking place in "an area heavy with potential Democratic votes." That of course makes sense; Democrats would seek out Democratic voters & let Republicans get their own voters to participate in the election. But Doyle also is building in racist and ageist implications: those "areas" "with potential Democratic votes" are apt to be neighborhoods with a majority ethnic minority population, or -- in the case of Madison -- with lots of "leftist" students.

Doyle also is particularly exercised over the cost of the Democrats' outreach programs, which he addresses at the top of his article. He charges that a "shadow campaign" was secretly financed by none other than ... Mark Zuckerberg. and his wife Priscilla Chan. Zuckerberg is Jewish & Chan is Buddhist (but not Aqua Buddhist!). So besides leftist kids & Black people, we're to assume that an international cabal of non-Christians financed the "big steal."

While there was no evidence of vote harvesting in Wisconsin during the 2020 election (that I could find in a Google search), evidently Wisconsin Democrats mounted a robust GOTV effort in the 2020 election, one made crucial by the coronavirus pandemic. What Rand Paul, William Doyle and other right-wingers find galling is that GOTV activities tend to bring out more Democratic-leaning people: people who may not have time to stand in line to vote, may be preoccupied with student activities or may not have ready transportation to the polls. Or, as Rand Paul himself put it more euphemistically earlier this year, "The idea of democracy and majority rule really is what goes against our history and what the country stands for."

Comments

[Ken Winkes]

Rand Paul: "The idea of democracy and majority rule really is what goes against our history and what the country stands for."

Lil' Randy couldn't have said it better. If you believe you are the country, anything and anyone else is necessarily "traitorous," and "un-American."

And, of course, that makes you king.

In Randy's (or the Pretender's) case, a very dumb one.

[Akhilleus]

The bottom line is that preening, whining traitors like Li’l Randy believe that any electoral victory for Democrats is illegitimate because only Republicans should be allowed to rule. Trump and his brownshirts and their sycophantic supporters and fellow conspirators like Gym Jordan, Bannon, et al, have taken that belief to its post-logical conclusion, making not just allowances for violence in overthrowing Democrats who have been fairly elected, but making violence a requirement for restoring authoritarian, viciously anti-democratic rule by the Party of Traitors.

And once again, they’re saying the quiet part out loud. The fetid Fat One is now screaming that the January 6th commission is looking for evidence of criminal wrongdoing,

Exactly. Think he’s afraid they’ll find it? Why else keep running to judges begging for protection?

But this isn’t a one-off. This is a prologue. Much more of this to come.