I want to start this out by saying there’s nothing wrong with distrusting the system that is the gateway to our country’s future. You should. Having a healthy dose of paranoia around how the system works and operates makes it that much harder for anything to go wrong.
It never sat right with me that it became taboo to even question the 2020 election in mainstream society. Even if there wasn’t any cheating and it really was the “safest election in history” the fact that we weren’t allowed to talk about it was only ever going to stoke doubt. To this day a lot of questions still hang in the air that aren’t going answered, and getting angry with people who have these questions says a lot more about the people refusing to answer them than it does the askers.
Right now, there are some very odd things happening in Arizona. Maricopa county is seeing one in five polling locations experience trouble with their machines. The fact that gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake went down to a heavily blue area only to find their machines worked fine only makes this look worse.
As of this writing, Maricopa is severely under where it should be in terms of turnout.
But let’s say Lake wins despite all of this weirdness. In fact, let’s say the vaunted “red wave” is actually a tsunami that sweeps far more seats in the House and Senate than even the most biased of analysts predicted. Do we put our minds at ease and say “well it would appear we were just being paranoid?”
According to The Hill, that’s exactly the prediction when it comes to a Republican reaction to a big night of winning. Judging by the calm that settled after the 2016 elections, a red wave will ease the paranoia Republicans felt in their bones after the 2020 election:
GOP electoral confidence plummeted in 2008 as the presidency passed to Barack Obama and the Democrats. It sank further in 2016, when Trump, lagging in the polls, theorized the election system might be rigged against him. Republican confidence rose anew when Trump won, only to plummet again when he failed to secure a second term.
They likely aren’t wrong. A red wave would do a lot to quell people’s belief that there’s something odd in our election system.
The thing is, I can’t advise against that enough.
There are enough stories of bizarre occurrences and outright illegal activity to know that cheating in our elections is real. Lest you forget, Project Veritas blew an illegal ballot harvesting scheme connected to Ilhan Omar wide open. In 2021, 1,334 cases of voter fraud had been registered and 1,147 people had been convicted.
This isn’t counting the cases of suppression and intimidation that go relatively unprovable. To be sure, voter intimidation is oftentimes hard to prove, but so were black holes. We had every reason to believe they were out there, but we wouldn’t actually discover them until later. If all the signs point to something existing, then the chances that it exists are high, much like billowing smoke indicates fire.
If Lake takes it and Republicans sweep, they should continue looking for smoke in the sky. In fact, with Republicans in charge, it’s one of the best times to begin firefighting. Getting lazy because we won will only open the door for it further, making Republicans as guilty of inaction as Democrats are of the action.
Despite what mainstream society says, it’s okay to be wary of how safe the systems that play a part in controlling your life are. Continue to push for investigations into anomalies and possible cases. Oddities should be looked into and questions answered. This isn’t anything to play games with. This is your life and the future of your children we’re dealing with here.