It is very true, and dangerous, that both sides are unreasonably demonizing each other. And yes, both sides are inclined to assume they are always right. I would say that both sides are usually wrong, but that one has been a lot wronger than the other in the past decade.
Voting has mostly become more difficult in recent years, but many states encouraged mail voting during the pandemic. Our poll workers around here are all senior citizens and protecting them, as well as high-risk voters, as much as possible did seem very reasonable to me. The assumption that it is Blue people who vote by mail is not supported by surveys; supporters of both parties like vote by mail, and Red voters are more often elderly, so making mail voting easier didn't only benefit Blues.
However, those suggesting that states should be flipped post-facto by discarding all the ballots from the most urban counties claimed that it was because of "fraud." They did not say, in public, "Too many non-white legal registered voters managed to vote, who we think might have been unable to if voting had been more difficult, so let's toss them all." The claim was that those votes were faked: the voters weren't real, the votes were cast by paid operatives voting repeatedly or the counting faked by the Urbanites or voting machines altered by Italian satellites or bamboo ballots or Sharpies or something.
None of these claims held up. They were all lies. Yet Trump and his acolytes continue to tell the Big Lie, which is dangerous, because it encourages everyone to distrust the basic mechanisms of democracy, and encourages violent extremists to believe that their hold on power, hence "their country," is being "stolen" from them - and, therefore, might rightly be "taken back" by anything from skulduggery to bloodshed. The Democratic Party has a lot of incompetence to answer for, but this is one game they have not been playing.
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timeasmymeasure
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Date: 2022-08-27 05:18 pm (UTC)Voting has mostly become more difficult in recent years, but many states encouraged mail voting during the pandemic. Our poll workers around here are all senior citizens and protecting them, as well as high-risk voters, as much as possible did seem very reasonable to me. The assumption that it is Blue people who vote by mail is not supported by surveys; supporters of both parties like vote by mail, and Red voters are more often elderly, so making mail voting easier didn't only benefit Blues.
However, those suggesting that states should be flipped post-facto by discarding all the ballots from the most urban counties claimed that it was because of "fraud." They did not say, in public, "Too many non-white legal registered voters managed to vote, who we think might have been unable to if voting had been more difficult, so let's toss them all." The claim was that those votes were faked: the voters weren't real, the votes were cast by paid operatives voting repeatedly or the counting faked by the Urbanites or voting machines altered by Italian satellites or bamboo ballots or Sharpies or something.
None of these claims held up. They were all lies. Yet Trump and his acolytes continue to tell the Big Lie, which is dangerous, because it encourages everyone to distrust the basic mechanisms of democracy, and encourages violent extremists to believe that their hold on power, hence "their country," is being "stolen" from them - and, therefore, might rightly be "taken back" by anything from skulduggery to bloodshed. The Democratic Party has a lot of incompetence to answer for, but this is one game they have not been playing.