The first time I remember going with my Dad when he voted was 1960, New York had these wonderful mechanical voting machines where you changed the state of a mechanical lever to vote, and opened the curtain with a big red lever which locked your votes and reset the levers. These machines were invented to limit paper ballot cheating, but like paper ballots, they would yield a tally by the early morning hours of the following day, and that was that. Yes, you could recount the ballots or re-tally the machines, but the results existed in physical form in the possession of authorities (i.e., the results were “analog”). In essence, “Election Day” was when everything happened and by Wednesday morning it was over.
What has been happening since 2000 (and maybe before) is the use of media, and technology, to create a condition where nobody knows what the result truly is - nobody knows how many votes were cast, nobody knows which votes count and which ones don’t, and the final tally can change for days and even weeks (or until the Democrat wins). Most of the results, and now a lot of the votes themselves, are no longer analog but digital, and exist only as an ordered set of electrons, subject to change in many ways by many people.
This has created a fundamental change in public perception, and you can see it even here on FR. People go on and on about whether or not a winner has been “declared”, usually by media people who have no access to the real data. As electronic voting, and now even apps meant to run on handhelds, define reality, we may be approaching or already be at the point where most people are accepting of the proposition that “nobody knows who won, we have to rerun the program, we have to call in the experts, it was Russian bots, it was Craig Livingstone, etc., etc.).
This problem is of course compounded by early voting, mail-in voting, drop boxes, absentee voting, overseas voting, etc.
On election night in 1932, everybody knew that FDR had won a big victory - that in a country with no electronic media, no computers, and half paralyzed by depression. On election night in 1952, there were more votes for Eisenhower than Stevenson, and everybody knew THAT.
Eight years ago (a century in digital years), Hugh Hewitt wrote a book called, “If It’s Not Close, They Can’t Cheat”. As long as people believe that only digital wizards can actually determine the result, that may no longer be true.
If we could conduct and tally elections in 1932 and 1952, we should be able to do it now - except that would upset our masters, who have worked so hard to create the status quo. They certainly won’t give it up without a fight.
It matters not who votes, but who counts the votes. That was how Joe Stalin stayed on as head of state until his death.
Our Joe Stolen may very well achieve the same goal.