Election... Day?

Or Week? Or Month??

By now, it's obvious to anyone who cares to look that John Fetterman, running on the Democratic ticket for one of Pennsylvania's Senate seats, has not fully recovered from the stroke he suffered five months ago. It's also obvious that the mainstream (i.e. American Pravda) press has been working double-time not only to hide this reality, but to scold and shame anyone who dares speak it. The 'emperor has no clothes' moment was the one-and-only debate between Fetterman and his GOP opponent, Mehmet Oz.

Which, conveniently, was delayed until just two weeks before Election day.

By which time, half a million early mail-in votes (3/4 of them by Democrats) had already been submitted.

We will never know how many who early-voted for Fetterman now regret those votes, nor how many would vote for Oz, third-party, or nobody if they had to vote on Election Day.

More of course, we all know that, were it Oz rather than Fetterman who had suffered the stroke, the press would have been wall-to-wall with "Don't The People of Pennsylvania Deserve A Capable Candidate?" headlines.

This episode and race, beyond again revealing the press's blatant bias and utter untrustworthiness, also argues against unrestricted early/mail-in voting. Politics being a dirty business, rule changes are almost never benign. Strategies and tactics are inevitably built around them, and in this case the strategy appears to be hide-and-delay so that lots of Democrats' votes get cast before the candidate's weaknesses are exposed. It's a variant of the Biden-in-the-Basement gambit that relied on Trump imploding and Joe's incoherence being kept under wraps.

Everyone claims to want electoral integrity.

Nearly everyone is lying.

Some more than others, of course. Many of the prevailing arguments are moralizing pretenses that overlay the reality: wanting to tip the scales in their party's favor.

Stacey Abrams, down in Georgia, finally stopped hollering that she wuz robbed last election, shifting instead to how the GOP is all about voter suppression. No matter that voter tallies in Georgia hit record levels after the new voting laws (still looser than those in true-Blue-New-York). I don't need to rehash my coverage of the Left's hypocrisy on voter ID. The GOP’s a bit better, but neither party is making much noise over things that should be done to improve the process’s integrity, such as clearing the rolls of duplicate, relocated, and dead voters. And, yes, voter ID. The canard that some people don’t have an ID good enough to vote with could be solved with a relatively minor Congressional appropriation to fund such IDs.

Early voting appears to produce more ballots for Team Blue. We can ponder reasons for that, but knowing the reasons won't change the fact of it. Therefore, of course Team Blue will scream that early voting is necessary to ensure access.

Problem is, conditions, in the world, in the political sandbox, and in elections themselves, change over time. They can change rapidly, and they can really roil in the lead-up to Election Day. I'm increasingly skeptical of early voting, given how it's an incentive to hide and stall, and I don't see much to support it being offered beyond people who have a legitimate conflict that'd keep them from the voting booths on the second Tuesday in November.

Can it be inconvenient for some? Of course. But how inconvenient, given that schools and employers accommodate, that voting precincts are open 12-15 hours, and that it's not much more complicated than going to the local supermarket. Voting is a right, but it's also a responsibility, and I can't abide the notion that it's such a heavy burden that we should be given a window of weeks to vote. America's voter turnout lags behind many other nations, many of them "third world," and that's excluding the sham one-party vote-or-be-killed events. Voting should be easy, but there's nothing wrong with expecting that voters put some effort into the process. If you care enough to have an opinion on who should represent you, you should be able to carve out half an hour or whatever once a year to vote. No matter if you know, today, that you will vote for ‘your’ party in every election you live to see, no matter if you’d rather chew hot gravel than ‘betray your team.’ Vote, in person, on Election Day, and show your commitment to the process.

Big-government types speak of a 'social contract,' which is mostly an excuse to take money from people, but we do actually have some obligations as citizens of a nation. Among them are the respect for others' rights (personal and property), as in my right to swing my fist ends at the tip of your nose. Voting is not a requirement, but it is a "civic duty." You can choose to withhold your vote, of course, or to vote third-party - both send a message to the Big Two. But, if your level of engagement is such that you can only muster enough effort to walk to the nearest mailbox, rather than getting to your local voting precinct, what does that tell the rest of us?

Elections should happen on Election Day, not across weeks or months. Would it be proper for me to cast my vote in the 2024 election tomorrow?

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