Yggdrasill wrote:Doug, thanks for posting these numbers. They seem about right to me, but what do I know for certain about how millions of people think and why? I don't want to come across like I'm splitting semantic hairs, but "winning the election fairly" and being "legitimately elected" are to my mind two very different things.
Ask any sports fans that have had their team lose a game because a ref blew a call whether the other team "legitimately won" the game. You're confusing "officially" with "legitimately"--Biden
officially "won" the election because he had sufficient states certify that he won a majority of their validly cast votes. The fact that a number of those states
lied about that, that the Supreme Court refused to step in and correct it (admittedly,at least in part because Republican state legislators hadn't challenged the unconstitutional actions of the state executive officers and judges in a timely manner), and that Congress had no choice but to accept those lies because all the Constitution allows them to do is to
count those Electoral College votes, doesn't change the fact that Biden did
not receive a majority of valid votes--meaning votes cast in accordance with the laws as instituted by the state legislatures--and therefore was
not legitimately elected and never will, no matter what the official record says. Like Rutherford B. Hayes, for all of time going forward there will be an asterisk after "President" Biden's name. And unlike Hayes's Republicans, today's Democrats don't have massive voter fraud on the part of the Republicans as an excuse.
For example, I never felt that Bush won the election fairly against Gore (subsequent research showed that Gore in fact won Florida, had the Supreme Court not weighed in and the ballots been properly counted). However, the process played out as it was supposed to and Gore did not further challenge the Florida count, though he could have.
If the process had played out in 2020 as Florida state law required, it would have been over much faster--but Florida judges tried to step in and give the state to Gore. The interesting thing is that, according to the statewide recount carried out by the press after it was all over, the only way Gore could have won
was a statewide recount ... and according to Florida law, that couldn't happen because for any recount to occur one of the campaigns had to request it within a set time limit, and the Gore campaign tried to get cute by only asking for recounts in a couple counties favorable enough to Democrats that they hoped to pick up enough votes to put them over the top. If Gore had acted the statesman instead of the politician, he probably would have been president. Mind, the only reason the election was that close was likely because some news stations called the state for Gore while the polls in the Florida panhandle--traditionally more conservative--were still open and a bunch of voters walked away without voting.
Society cannot exist, unless a controlling power upon will and appetite be placed somewhere; and the less of it there is within, the more there must be without.
—Edmund Burke