In response to an FT article by Barney Jopson and Courtney Weaver on 20th October 2016, entitled ‘Trump stokes furore over whether he will accept result’
https://www.ft.com/content/250e1b40-96e8-11e6-a80e-bcd69f323a8b
‘Donald Trump has continued to stoke the controversy over whether he would accept the count in next month’s presidential election, saying he would “accept a clear election result” but would file a legal challenge “in case of a questionable result”…
John McCain, the Republican party’s failed 2008 presidential nominee, chastised his successor for questioning the integrity of the US election system, saying it was the duty of all losing candidates to accept the result…
Lindsey Graham, a South Carolina senator who lost to Mr Trump in this year’s battle for the nomination, said Mr Trump was “doing the party and country a great disservice” by questioning the election’s integrity while Jeff Flake, an Arizona senator, described his comments as “beyond the pale”…
Hillary Clinton, Mr Trump’s Democratic rival, said his statement was “horrifying” and told reporters on her campaign plane after the debate that “when he is losing he blames the system, whatever the system…
Mr Trump’s claims appear to have had an effect on public opinion. Thirty per cent of voters said they were not confident their votes would be counted accurately, according to a recent Politico/Morning Consult poll. That sentiment was particularly strong among Trump supporters, where 48 per cent said they doubted the result…’
The scenario being presented by the FT and the vast majority of the press seems to be this: Trump questions the integrity of the process...then the voters question the process...then the process is brought into disrepute...
I think it's much simpler than that: The process is disreputable...now people have started to notice...
These are politicians…slightly north of professional wrestlers on the integrity scale…but well south of double-glazing salesmen and ambulance chasers. Sorry chaps…me thinketh the lady protesteth too much…
It is not a ‘crime against democracy’ to doubt the integrity of groups of people who will beg, steal, borrow and cheat in order to put their candidate in the White House, particularly not when we’ve recently experienced:
1. One of the parties admitting to, and apologising for, loading the dice against one of it’s own – as the DNC did after sacrificing Bernie Sanders on the altar of Hillary Clinton
2. Political operatives captured on film describing: a) how to disrupt their opponents’ rallies by inciting violent reactions, and b) how to add illegal voters to the register and bus them around on polling day…paying them for their ‘trouble’
Not only is it not a crime against democracy to challenge undemocratic scams like these, nor is it a crime to say, ‘I don’t believe that you won’t do it again’. On the contrary, it would be rank stupidity of anyone to deny the possibility that given what we’ve seen so far, there are likely many players involved in this election who, if they think they can get away with it…will.
People seem to have very short, or perhaps very selective, memories. Richard Nixon got caught trying to undermine his opponents in the biggest crime against democracy in modern times - Watergate. More recently George W. Bush was handed his 2000 win over Al Gore courtesy of his brother Jeb, the Supreme Court, and a guy called ‘Hanging Chad’. Then in 2004 there were challenges to Bush’s win in Ohio: In a subsequent article John Kerry said "the widespread irregularities make it impossible to know for certain that the outcome reflected the will of the voters”. In the same article, DNC Chairman Howard Dean said: "I'm not confident that the election in Ohio was fairly decided...we know that there was substantial voter suppression, and the machines were not reliable. It should not be a surprise that the Republicans are willing to do things that are unethical to manipulate elections. That's what we suspect has happened”
As for the concerns about how this is seen abroad, we really need to get a life on this one…that boat sailed decades ago. Given the CIA’s inglorious record for interfering in elections across the ‘developing world’, all in the name of ‘democracy’ of course…irony lovers on four continents are having a field day listening to the cacophony of hypocritical bull echoing around Washington right now…‘ah, don’t you just love the sound of sanctimonious claptrap in the morning…’
So…if we are serious about ‘democracy’, then we have a choice...we can clean it up...or we can demonstrate our shallow indignity at the fact that someone, yes even Donald Trump, has had the audacity to call us out on it.