General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: Y'know what? I suspect there WAS fraud in this election. [View all]planetc
(7,789 posts)I was trying to point out how the Republicans seize innocent terms and use them for their own purposes. "Voter fraud" coordinates nicely with the Republican base's fear of immigration, of job theft, and of "socialism", a term they equate with anything to the left of Genghis Khan, as Paul Krugman said. And in the case of the "red shift" in elections from 2000 onward, the media remain functionally ignorant of what the term means, and what it might imply. The media have been covering attempts to suppress the vote for several years, without ever admitting that there's another way to affect the outcome of elections--by direct manipulation. NPR is now giving full coverage to the "inexplicable" gaps between poll predictions and election outcomes, but they can only conceive of bad polls. So far, they haven't taken the next step, which would be to explore the ways an election outcome might be illegally changed after votes are cast.