It's ridiculous to question our elections, until it's not. Plus, return to masks? Good luck with that.
By Gary Abernathy
Trump supporters have field day with NYC voting mess
If there’s one way to make sure we all move past the allegations of fraud in the 2020 presidential election, it’s to hold a clean election in the highest-profile race of 2021.
Instead, from the New York Times:
The New York City mayor’s race entered a new chapter of uncertainty Wednesday morning following a vote-tallying debacle that stunned the nation and stoked concerns about whether voters will trust the ultimate results of the election. On Tuesday, the Board of Elections released what was supposed to be a preliminary tally of voters’ preferences in the Democratic mayoral primary under the city’s new ranked-choice voting system, through which voters could rank up to five candidates in order of preference. …But within hours of releasing that tally, the elections board issued a cryptic tweet citing a “discrepancy” in the report, after (Eric) Adams, who had held a significant advantage on primary night, pointed out differences between the vote total released that day and those announced on Tuesday.
I’m among those who accept that the 2020 presidential election result was not fraudulent. Joe Biden won, Donald Trump lost. But in hammering home this point, many in the media and elsewhere completely mock the idea that we could have real election problems. Now comes the New York City mayor’s race, and real election problems.
I don’t blame a lot of Trump supporters for having a field day with this. Already, derisive memes and tweets abound, and other digital haunts are cluttered with jabs contrasting the insistence that significant election mistakes are virtually impossible with the reality on the ground in New York City.
Here’s one: “Democrats: ‘How dare you question the results of the 2020 election!’ Also Democrats: ‘Oops, we counted 135,000 accidental votes in the NYC race yesterday!’”
The ranked-choice voting idea was always a bad one for lots of reasons — confusion among voters, a good chance the candidate leading going in won’t win in the end, and the length of time needed to determine the victor, which always leads to greater suspicion. Hopefully, this mess will end the practice once and for all.
WaPo examines swing of West Virginia from Dem to GOP
Washington Post data analyst and political reporter David Byler wrote an insightful piece this week on West Virginia swinging from Democrat to Republican over the past 20 years. Plus, he quoted from my 2005 book, “Elephant Wars,” which remains available on Amazon.
LA County wants vaccinated to return to wearing masks due to Delta variant. The correct answer is, “No thanks.”
Los Angeles County’s health officials are urging residents — unvaccinated and vaccinated — to wear masks again due to their fears of the Delta variant. The response, especially by the vaccinated, should be a polite “no thank you.”
The Washington Post story quotes Robert Kim-Farley, an epidemiologist and professor at the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health, saying, “It’s just a small inconvenience for those who have been vaccinated to try to be good citizens by wearing masks indoors.”
What?? It’s not up to someone else to determine for everyone what’s “just a small inconvenience” or what makes someone a “good citizen.” The arrogance overwhelms.
The same story quotes Monica Gandhi, professor of medicine at the University of California at San Francisco, disagreeing with Kim-Farley, saying, “You just told the unvaccinated, ‘Yeah, get vaccinated, it’s so scary, but of course, you’ll still have to mask because it’s so scary.’ If I were an unvaccinated person who was debating whether to get vaccinated, I would think, ‘Oh wow, there’s no point, looks like the delta variant would break through the vaccine anyway.’”
Gandhi is correct, but once again, we have health “experts” disagreeing, which is apparently allowed, but on social media the average person can’t disagree with health experts without being banned or at least having their comment slapped with a warning label or deleted.
The LA County thing is only a recommendation, some will say. Yes, but then businesses and government agencies use those recommendations as a reason to enforce mandates. The fact is, the vaccines are proven extremely effective. If a vaccinated person does get covid, the vaccine both prevents serious illness and makes it highly unlikely to transmit the virus to someone else, and that includes variants of the virus. Don’t send mixed messages, and please quit treating Americans like mindless zombies or participants in a lab experiment who can be randomly switched on and off at a whim.
Sign up or share this newsletter
Please sign up to receive this newsletter directly into your inbox or, if you are already a subscriber and reading this by email, share with a friend using the convenient button below. Thank you!