OCTOBER 14, 2018 | JONATHAN SIMON <https://whowhatwhy.org/author/jonathan-simon/> ELECTIONS MATTER — SHOULDN’T WE BE TAKING BETTER CARE OF THEM?Opinion [image: Donald Trump, Brett Kavanaugh, Associate Justice, US Supreme Court] President Donald Trump celebrates during the swearing-in ceremony of Brett Kavanaugh as associate justice to the US Supreme Court at the White House on October 8, 2018. Photo credit: The White House / YouTube <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mmchWzCXqQM> Share Share Tweet Email
*Ahead of next month’s midterms, *WhoWhatWhy *has not just put a team on the ground in key states to investigate voter suppression, problems with election procedures and other shenanigans, but has also decided to turn over our usual slot for the Sunday editorial/cartoon to election integrity experts. This is the first piece in this series. * ------------------------------ *It’s been two big weeks for election integrity in America. It all kicked off late last month when the New York Times Magazine led with an article titled “The Crisis of Election Security <https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/26/magazine/election-security-crisis-midterms.html>,” which seemed to leap out of the perennial MSM comfort zone and, for the very first time, treat the peril of concealed, computerized vote-counting seriously and urgently — as the crisis that it is.* *In addition, other news outlets which often remain on the sidelines while plucky organizations like WhoWhatWhy expose cases of blatant voter suppression, have published articles on the issue this month. * *In a related event (bear with me), Brett Kavanaugh was confirmed as our newest Supreme Court Justice, his nomination rammed through as Republicans gave the virtually unanimous finger to public disapproval and outrage <https://www.cnn.com/2018/10/08/politics/cnn-poll-kavanaugh-confirmation/index.html>.* *What the Kavanaugh confirmation had to do with election integrity may not be immediately apparent, but first it told anyone in our cruelly divided country who may still have been harboring any doubts, that elections matter. * *America was just profoundly shaped by a virtually party-line margin of two senators — for the rest of many of our lives. The Senate voted on a nomination by a popular vote-whipped president <https://uselectionatlas.org/RESULTS/> put in office by the electoral votes of three states, which he won by an average margin of slightly more than one half of one percent. * *At least a half dozen of the senators who voted to confirm Kavanaugh were themselves in office courtesy of razor-thin electoral victories in 2012 <https://uselectionatlas.org/RESULTS/data.php?year=2012&datatype=national&def=1&f=0&off=3&elect=0>, 2014 <https://uselectionatlas.org/RESULTS/data.php?year=2014&datatype=national&def=1&f=0&off=3&elect=0>, or 2016 <https://uselectionatlas.org/RESULTS/data.php?year=2016&datatype=national&def=1&f=0&off=3&elect=0>. * *All these elections mattered.* *The Kavanaugh battle and its outcome showed us a Republican Party behaving as if the word had been passed that it was immune to all electoral consequence. It is a party that has serially doubled and redoubled down on a historically divisive and unpopular <https://news.gallup.com/poll/116677/presidential-approval-ratings-gallup-historical-statistics-trends.aspx> president; joined hands with him like Thelma and Louise for what should be, according to the classical (i.e., pre-computerized voting) laws of political physics, a disastrous plunge over the electoral cliff; and thrown down the gauntlet to the electorate: “Good luck voting us out!”* *When you put together the Times piece and the Kavanaugh power-play, what emerges is a setup for November that one dares to hope might finally be enough to tear the protective veil off the sacrosanct computerized voting industry, and the vagaries of concealed vote counting that have been all but overlooked by media observers searching for the causes of both the veer and the corrosion of American politics. * *snip>* -- You received this message because you are subscribed to Mark Crispin Miller's "News From Underground" newsgroup. If you'd like to donate to News From Underground, please visit http://markcrispinmiller.com/donate - we appreciate your ongoing support. Ways to unsubscribe, 1) send a blank email to [email protected]. PLEASE NOTE: you must unsubscribe using the SAME email with which you subscribed; 2) go to http://groups.google.com/group/newsfromunderground and click on the "Unsubscribe or change membership" link in the yellow bar at the top of the page, then click the "Unsubscribe" button on the next page. For more News From Underground, visit http://markcrispinmiller.com
