So now that we really, really know for sure with absolute certainty that Russia truly was indeed behind creating chaos in our last presidential election—with the sole intent to denigrate Hillary Clinton and install Donald Trump—we gotta come up with the perfect plan to protect the next U.S. election. We gotta think of an equally terrible, evil and mind-boggling scheme … to save American democracy in our lifetime! Even Mexico is calling for the return to U.S. domination and world leadership. The U.S. used to be the Good Guys, remember? Here’s what we do (chuckle, snort). It’s so simple, a child could have thought of it. But, sh sh sh, don’t tell anyone.
OK, since high tech got us into this colossal political pickle (for those of us who think Trump’s presidency is a train wreck,) for our next major election, we simply go back in time! Let’s pick a year like 1984 or 1989. Throw a tarp over those newfangled computerized voting machines and store ’em in the closet at the county clerk’s office. We can vote by hand, just like our forefathers and a lot of our foremothers did for generations, since our nation’s founding. We just handpick all our candidates. Pssst. You know, you don’t have to vote for every race on the ballot; just pick and choose the ones important to ya. An incomplete ballot’s legal, maybe just requiring our hand-written signatures like in days of yesteryear.
I’m afraid I can’t do that, Dave
Isn’t this a fabulous idea?!! Wouldn’t the Russians be confounded by our decision to beat them at their own game? Just dump computer technology for our upcoming election, see how it works. Oh, and we all must agree to forget about Facebooking and surfing the ’net for political information. Most voters don’t know how to tell the difference between news and views anyway. That’s how we got tricked by the Great Russian Bear.
For those of us old enough to remember how voting used to be before the days of computers and the prevalence of hacking, it went like this: We’d show up to the polls, get a ballot, and then poke out the holes beside the candidate names we chose. The ballot first was manually checked—probably at a cost much cheaper than hooking every county in the nation to a computer ballot system—and in a day or so, we knew who our elected officials would be. Simple as making apple pie.
Even with the new voting computers in the 2000 presidential election, voters claimed the lights of the name they touched did not go on and instead another name lit up, meaning their ballot was incorrect if they didn’t repress the candidate of their choice until the correct light went on. Along with this was the Florida mess where the old punch-card ballots were somehow unclear to read. We learned related terms like impregnation and chad, but the state’s election board called it. It got messier when the U.S. Supreme Court was called in to finalize between Bush and Gore. At the turn of the computer age century, it was like we were living back in Mayberry USA. The entire nation was left rocking in our front porch swings awaitin’ the presidential results, strummin’ on the old guitar and singing folk songs. Yehhp, yep, yep, yep, yep, yep. We got the news about the new president in a couple of weeks. It wasn’t that big of a deal in the great scheme of time.
And our obsession over time for election returns also played a part in the disastrous 2016 presidential results. Americans have become the most politically impatient people on earth. Come on, ya’ll! The rest of the world population is laughing at us. Who can blame them? We’re immature, most of us hardly voting to begin with, then we want to know election results a few hours after casting ballots.
Whoa Nelly
We gotta hold the brakes when it comes to our future national elections. Our entire form of government, still just a crazy cock-eyed 242-year-old philosophical experiment, is at stake. Besides relying on super fast voting computers that can be hacked, half the country got sucked into Russian Bots. These were somewhat cleverly disguised hard-punching nonsense political ads casting Hillary as the devil incarnate and Trump as the choice of Jesus Christ Himself. What kinda American idiot would believe such a thing? Tens of millions did.
So the Russians got us and got us good. We don’t have time to be smartin’ over it. What’s done is done, and we can’t let it happen again … ever, never again. Voting sans computers is a start. Voting is just too precious a right, a right a lot of people on the planet would love to have and as human beings deserve.
Why are Americans so cynical about our own elections, saying things like the choice is always ‘the lesser of two evils?’ American cynicism stems from money—money, money, money, money, money. We allow this pervasiveness to buy elections when we agree money’s the root of all evil; well the love of money is evil. That would be another thing to change: campaign financial caps. We could promote campaign finance reform in a national ad like “Who loves America more?” That usually gets our countrymen’s attention. Which party, Dems or Repubs, would be willing to cap candidate election spending? And what would be the cap? Not billions of dollars again! That’s how we got into our current political nightmare.
My fellow Americans, the Russians proved to know more about us than we know ourselves. They played on our deeply held Christian beliefs, distorted history, racial prejudices, class jealousy, job insecurities, pop culture worship, and pitiful education. Many of us were duped, dare I saw were ‘patsies?’ We started believing whatever we read on the internet. Isn’t that a bit un-American? Wasn’t it Will Rogers who used to quip, “All I know is what I read in the papers?” That means we have to check all accounts to get the full story.
This next election, let’s agree to be on guard by the oncoming flood of Russian internet ads that feature Christ, crime, guns, immigrants, jobs, economic future, fear and panic. Think before we click. It takes time to research the facts and find the truth. We can start by researching the small print campaign ad notice ‘Paid for by.’
But make no mistake: Russia is out to create havoc and chaos in our American political system, playing on our deepest, darkest fears. Yet the one thing the enemy doesn’t understand about being a real American is our independence. We all call ourselves American, even feel empowered within a political party. Yet each one of us has our own views … about everything. Many Americans rarely vote straight ticket. Thinking for oneself is the seed to a perpetual democracy. A lot of us forgot about our individual independent “I’ll think for myself, thank you” streak back in 2016—and in so doing totally freaked out.