Remember Remember the Tuesday Immediately After the First Monday in November

Democrats of a certain age, and just to be clear I was once one of you before I burned my voter registration card, will remember a little thing called the 2000 Florida recount, and also a little court case called Bush vs. Gore in which the Supreme Court settled a presidential election because Florida, due of its confusing ballots, and antiquated voting methods, couldn’t seem to count the votes fine enough to accurately determine the result of a statistical dead heat.

You may remember four years after the Bush vs. Gore nonsense another presidential election marked by reports of hours long lines at the polls in poor neighborhoods, and some funny business to do with the results in Ohio, and the Democratic candidate John Kerry vowing not to concede the election until all votes were counted, but moments later, before all the votes had been counted Kerry gave up the fight when he realized he would lose whether Ohio accurately counted all of its votes or not.

You may have even read the extensive work of investigative journalist Greg Palast on the subject of elections in the US.

Even setting aside the gaming of the vote through gerrymandering, unequal allocation of voting machines, arcane voter registration requirements, the distribution of misinformation with regard to polling places and dates, voter intimidation, skewing of exit poll data, media influence… Even excluding all of this, if you remember 2000 and 2004, you have to at the very least admit WE CAN’T EVEN ACCURATELY COUNT VOTES in this country.

So to say Trump’s skepticism of the process shows ‘a lack of respect for democracy and everything America is built upon,’ is extremely disingenuous. The system is clearly and unquestionably dysfunctional, anti-democratic, and open to manipulation, (ie: rigging.) If you truly and deeply cared about democracy, and not just getting Gore, or later Kerry, or now Clinton the victory, you might see the opportunity for a win-win here: You get a Trump loss, and through his challenge of the result you might have an opportunity to investigate the process and put an anti-democratic system on trial.

Unless of course you want your president’s-of-choice legitimacy to be based on the same footing as was, say, a George W. Bush’s.