By “they” I GENERALLY mean the right wing, and by “polls” I mean both pre-election day polls and what voters vote for election day.
    From the 2000 kerfuffle; where the majority of the Supremes decided Equal Protection meant making sure all the votes weren’t even counted ONCE, to 2020 Trumpian attempts to make mere claims of cheating good enough to change the results of an election, it’s obvious the right wing doesn’t give a damn about the polls. That’s election time or pre-election.
    This is the direction they have been heading for a long time. Any tactic, any way to get what they want, is not only defendable but holier than thou pursuit. A “how dare you question the only legitimate rulers” attitude. A “we don’t give a damn about the voters” tude. So making any excuse to prevent, or at least eliminate, politically incorrect votes is the holier than everyone else, dictator-like, pursuit of much of the right. Especially votes from politically incorrect groups.
    Dare I type a “Crusade?” YES! I dare! I dare!
    As I have stated so often; seeking a “One party dictatorship with (at best) a two party façade.”
    I believe our elections have been severely compromised by those who find popular opinion so problematic they want to make it irrelevant, inconsequential. They want a right wing dictatorship.
    Yet, day after day, I keep seeing from less than MAGA/extreme right pundits on the tube and the radio, “See what the polls say? Oh, they’re in trouble! How are they going to get out of this slide downward?” Then they go into more predictions. Predictions that so often turn into, “But how did THAT happen?”
    Ignoring the MAGA’s/extreme right’s obvious “we don’t care about the vote” attitude, and all their successful efforts to dampen down, to delete, is a BIG mistake. Ignoring that has been like encouraging an untreated infection to grow even bigger. Let’s look at just one example: Hillary losing. That has become the standard line left and right. Again how could that happen? But she DIDN’T lose the election, if polls matter. In fact she won the popular vote by a hell of a lot more than any candidate in our history who lost due to the Electoral College. Almost 3 million votes. Like in 2000 did you hear the overwhelming cry from pundits that the winner will need to compromise, appeal to both sides.
    Yet, even left pundits constantly parrot the line, “it shouldn’t have been that close.” It wasn’t.
    Again, how did this happen?
    Easy: there are those who have been busy, traitorous, beavers rigging the system so the popular vote means little to nothing. Even the Supreme Court got in the act in 2000, deciding counting the vote didn’t matter if it might have prevented the only legit party from getting the presidency. Odd how ma skewed court suddenly cares about equal protection when they mostly didn’t give a damn about it before.
    To be fair our forefathers started all this with the great escape clause that created the Electoral College. We were told in school that the reason for the EC was so some popular tyrant-wannabe candidate didn’t become president.
    Too late!
    And WRONG! It was a compromise intended to give the lower population states (generally slave states) more power so they would join with the other states. We probably wouldn’t have lasted long as a nation otherwise.
    You can bet since the party, that considers themselves entitled to power no matter what voters actually vote for, have computers working harder than hell to assure a Electoral College win, the popular vote be damned. They have been placing loyal, anti-vote, pols and appointees in crucial states, closing polls, intimidating poll works with ethics, using every trick they can to eliminate politically incorrect poll workers, voters, even individual voters.
    We have been having a barely hidden voter Holocaust where politically incorrect voters are today’s Jews. From voter purges, to “we will keep you from voting” voter ghettos, to actual knees on the necks, bullets in backs.
    Because they don’t give a DAMN about the polls or you.
    We live in an age where computer programs can gerrymander with precision, turn districts that tend not to vote the politically correct way into districts that have little to no impact. An age where purging voters, denying the vote, has become a rather nasty science. An age that includes closing politically incorrect poll locations like colleges, where more blacks live, removing ballot drop boxes, making it difficult to get IDs. We’re even starting to have armed poll and drop box militia-types “watchers” to intimidate certain voters, intimidate those that try to access drop boxes…
    SHORT LIST. I have more.
    Meanwhile, if anything, the Electoral College has become a means to placing tyrant wannabes in office. Office holders willing to do anything to stay in office. Where they insist they are so entitled that if they lose an election they HAD to be cheated. They have been building a superhighway to a one party system, with again a two party façade.
    They’re WAY ahead of us in getting the kind of courts they want that make sure they are entitled to rule. And the kind of courts they want make Taliban courts seem fair. And ESPECIALLY in circumventing the vote.
    Still partisans blather on and on about “what the polls say.”
    They don’t give a DAMN about the polls.

                                      -30-

    “Inspection” is a column that has been written by Ken Carman for over 50 years. Inspection is dedicated to looking at odd angles, under all the rocks and into the unseen cracks and crevasses that constitute the issues and philosophical constructs of our day: places few think, or even dare, to venture.
©Copyright 2023
Ken Carman and Cartenual Productions.
All Rights Reserved.