Friday, October 21, 2016

CAN THE PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION BE RIGGED?

Donald Trump has been telling his followers that the election is rigged. During the final debate, Trump refused to say he would accept the results of the election if he lost. So, can the election be rigged?

The election has already been rigged, but not at the polling place. It has been rigged by the media which has been out to destroy Trump and has done a pretty good job of it. The New York Times, among other stories damaging to Trump, released the story about him not paying any federal income taxes. NBC leaked the Hollywood Access pussygate video to the Washington Post which then gleefully released it to the public.

Meanwhile the media all but ignored Hillary’s steady stream of lies, but it pulled out old video clips to show where Trump was lying. It gave Hillary’s ‘basket of deplorables’ short shrift while jumping all over Trump’s big mouth. And it has pretty well let Hillary slide on the damaging emails released by Wikileaks.

That’s how the election has been rigged. The media has poisoned Trump in the minds of the voters.

I seriously doubt that a presidential election can be rigged at the polling place. Sure, ther will always be some voter fraud, but not enough to affect the outcome of the election. There just aren’t that many dead people voting. Nor are there that many people voting two or more times. And illegal immigrants are most unlikely to go out and vote.

Now that is not to say that local elections are not rigged. Chicago is notorious for votes by the dead being cast. In the Rio Grande Valley of Texas, there are some counties in which more dead people vote than live ones. How do they do that? Simply by not removing the names of people from the voter rolls after they have died.

But when you get to statewide and national elections, they are not going to be successfully rigged. There is only one statewide election that I know of in which the outcome was successfully rigged. It was subsequently uncovered that thousands of dead voters in Jim Wells County, Texas helped Lyndon Johnson overcame a 20,000-vote deficit to win the 1948 Democratic runoff primary for the U.S. Senate by 87 votes.

While Trump may not accept the outcome of the election if he loses, he will have lost because Hillary got more electoral votes than he did, not because the election was rigged.

2 comments:

bob walsh said...

I am old enough that I remember the 1960 Presidential election. Every grave yard in Dallas and Chicago voted, ensuring JFKs election. Nixon was told by party big-wigs that he could reasonably challenge the election, and very possibly do so successfully. He chose not to. Just because Trump is an arrogant loud-mouthed ass you should not necessarily assume he is wrong.

BarkGrowlBite said...

It is true there was voter fraud in the Cook County (Chicago) voting, but a recount requested by the Republicans failed to change the Illinois election results. In Texas there was widespread voter fraud, but not in Dallas. Discrepancies found in the Chicago recount were determined to have been largely due to errors rather than fraud.

The Texas voter fraud occurred in the same Rio Grande Valley counties that got Johnson elected to the Senate. Kennedy carried 3/4 of the vote in Fannin County where 6,136 votes were cast when there were only 4,895 registered voters. In one Angelina County precinct, there were only 86 registered voters, but Kennedy received 187 votes to Nixon's 24. However the voter fraud in the Valley counties was probably not large enough to change the outcome of the statewide election.