Our old partisan Erick Erickson is taking up the fine art of ignoring the obvious in the usual e-mail:
Now we have a week till election day. The race is close. Democrats are privately growing confident in winning the presidency. The Senate is really up for grabs. The House will probably be a bit more Democrat leaning in a week. I am most interested in state legislatures due to redistricting, but have no idea how that will play out.
What I do now, and there’s no reason to write a thousand words on this, is that ballots should not be accepted after Election Day.
I don’t care that you took the time to get it postmarked by Election Day. If you really care about your vote, get your damn ballot in on or before Election Day.
Dragging out the Election so some slackass who waited until Election Day to drop his ballot in the mail is irresponsible. Have you not been paying attention to the kooks, conspiracists, and rabble-rousers out there? If states keep changing votes based on ballots that come in after Election Day, the paranoid on both sides are going to destabilize an already volatile situation.
All the while ignoring the real-world problems of weather, interference by outside forces, and even interference by internal forces. The voter, prior to mail voting, had all the time up to Election Day to consider their choices; why should the mail-in voter have less, especially if they are, say, immobile? Why does Erickson insist on penalizing those voters who feel that mail-in voting is far safer than in-person? Does he hate the disabled? (No, of course not; his emotional needs are in the political realm.)
But notice how Erickson is forced to rely on emotional prose to take and keep the reader’s attention. His use of slackass to denote an undecided voter in the general situation – perhaps a scarce commodity in our particular election – is the remark of the zealous partisan who cannot conceptualize a voter who analyzes issues and policies, rather than engaging in the cult practice of backing the leader, no matter what their flaws.
Even if they’re gaping abysses.
This emotional prose serves to conceal another logic error:
Ballots need to be in the hands of elections officials on Election Day or the worst tendencies of a lot of people on the left and right will get amplified online and spill offline in dangerous ways.
Which is to say, they’ll believe that fake ballots are being mailed after Election Day.
Yeah, think about that for a moment.
I won’t bother with the defense that fake ballots have never been successfully submitted en masse, as that’s better asserted by actual experts, and any scheme put together by humans can be picked apart by humans.
No, let’s ask the easier question:
Why do the fakers wait until after Election Day to send fake ballots?
Are they idiots?
If either side is planning on acting out, being un-American, and generally getting their asses arrested or shot-off, late ballots are not the problem. The political atmosphere promoted by our national adversaries and their domestic clients are to blame.
In the end, Erickson’s mail’s real purpose is simply to tap-tap-tap away at the abyss between conservatives and liberals. It’s how you cement your audience into place, by not letting them have any respect for each other.
And it’s a real shame.
