I voted yesterday in Michigan, where the winners are already known

…by Jim W. Dean, VT Editor

I decided to get a first hand experience by entering the labyrinth of voting in the 2020 Ottawa County, Michigan primaries in what was a statistically rigged primary, the reason being my county is overwhelmingly Republican with many local offices having no Democrat even running.

This is Amway Country with the DeVos family compounds and their helicopters.

I first had to register, as this is my first election since I moved here from Atlanta. There were no lines at the register’s office, but I could see everyone was busy and I soon found out why.

Lots of people were voting by mail, which had already come in, and which has to have included mostly Republicans as they are most of the voters.

The registration process piggybacked a request for a November 3rd ballot to be mailed to me, which I can send before the big election day rush. This county is 35% Dutch heritage, very organized, and known for efficient administration.

As I was leaving I noticed cars coming in driving around to the back, lined up even, so I walked around the corner to see people were using a drive by ballot box on the side of the building so they could be sure their ballot did not go astray in the mail.

When I got home, the late afternoon news was covering that Red States were now beginning to see that Trump’s dissing the vote on concerns of mail safety was hurting early Republican mail in voting, and they were scrambling to correct the Trump representation of mail fraud.

Trump’s concern was having ballots mailed out to all registered voters, which always includes those recently died, but of course limited in numbers. Death certificates are generated quickly and immediately digitized into the respective State systems, and then forwarded to the Feds.

With computer voting, dead voters can be uncovered quickly by checking via the Fed death registry, and for a close race, even the names of recently deceased persons are being processed, especially in a recount which is typical of very close races.

There is an issue where Trump’s new appointee to head the Postal system, Louis DeJoy, who donated $2.5 million to the Trump campaign, the first head with no actual experience with the job, just happens to be chopping the $200 million annual overtime pay used to keep the mail running on schedule.

Now why would a Trump appointee do that? Congress is already investigating, the same Congress that is spending huge amounts of red ink public money in a blink of an eye on everything imaginable. So why would that include slowing down the mail by several days? Would it be to discourage voting by mail?

When the dust settles on this political year, and if we end up with a new administration, one of the reforms at the top of the list will be Trump’s significant use of interim appointments to insert political hacks into any slots he wanted complete political control over to serve his interests first.

The Democrats will need control of the Senate to be able to begin doing any change in this area, so expect to see a special war kitty set up to battle for Senate wins in those key states. A win or loss in one race can determine whether the needed reforms can even begin.

Jim W. Dean

Jim W. Dean is VT Editor Emeritus.  He was an active editor on VT from 2010-2022.  He was involved in operations, development, and writing, plus an active schedule of TV and radio interviews.  He now writes and posts periodically for VT.

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