Sue the bastards

My first vote was cast in 1972, when I proudly voted for George McGovern. I voted at Gates Lane School, where I'd gone to kindergarten, in Worcester Massachusetts. I went over to a quasi-private area, filled my ballot in with the pen they gave me, and then handed it to poll worker, who cranked it into a ballot box.

I suppose someone could have taken this ballot box and dumped it or its contents in the Blackstone River, but I never had a worry about whether my vote would be counted. (Whether it mattered was another story, other than that it mattered to me. And I did get to say "Don't blame me. I'm from Massachusetts.")

When I began voting in Boston in the mid-1970's, I went behind a curtain, pulling it shut with a lever. I then flipped switches to pick my candidates. Finally, I pulled the big red lever that recorded my picks. It made a very satisfying thumping noise.

And I never had a worry about whether my vote would be counted.

When Boston moved to a scanner system, I missed flipping those pinball-ish switches. Instead of voting behind a curtain, I was now taking my ballot to a partitioned-off table, filling in the circles - SAT style - with a special pen, and then slip it into the scanning machine. (I have the most delightful polling place. It's a former firehouse on Beacon Hill that was used in the 1980's TV series Spenser for Hire as the place where Spenser lived. 

I always worry a bit about whether my vote gets registered. More than I ever did with the old-fashioned mechanisms. But it's only a teensie-tiny bit of worry.

This time around, I asked for ballots by mail for our Senate primary in September, and for the Presidential election in November. Not trusting the Trump-depleted US Postal Service, I walked those ballots into City Hall, and kept checking online until I saw that they had been accepted. 

Overall, I have 99.9999% faith in our election system. Which is more or less in keeping with the rate of fraud that have been found to be, according to the Brennan Center, at 0.0003 percent and 0.0025 percent. 

The Republicans can keep hollering fraud as a means to support their voter suppression efforts, but we're well beyond the days when ward heelers were bringing out the dead to vote. When the instances of suspected voter fraud are investigated it always comes out that there will be one or two examples. I.e., one or two voters out of millions. 

Most of our voting chicanery is about closing down polling places in areas with lots of Democratic-voting Black folks, purging the names of Black voters from the rolls, etc. And blaming election results that don't go in their direction on organizations like Dominion Voting Systems, makers of the voting systems used in many states. 

But the truth hasn't gotten in the way of Trump and his cronies/enablers lying about voter fraud.

One of the most vociferous (and bat-shit crazy) critics of Dominion has been (bat-shit crazy Trump or Trump-adjacent or Giuliani-adjacent) attorney Sidney Powell.

For weeks, Powell has claimed that Dominion was established with communist money in Venezuela to enable ballot-stuffing and other vote manipulation, and that those a bilities were harnessed to rig the election for former vice president Joe Biden. Source: Washington Post)

And now Dominion is fighting back. They're looking for "more than $1.3 billion in damages for havoc it says Powell has caused by spreading 'wild' and 'demonstrably false' allegations, including that Dominion played a central role in a fantastical scheme to steal the 2020 election from President Trump."

And Dominion is serious about going to trial and not settling. 

Good for them!

They've had it with Powell et al. harming their business. And with the fact that employees have been "stalked, harassed, and [have] received death threats." 

Powell is not Dominion's only target. 

Dominion has sent retraction demands or document preservation letters, often precursors to litigation, to more than 20 individuals and entities, including to Wood, White House Counsel Pat Cipollone and Trump’s personal attorney, Rudolph W. Giuliani; and to Fox News, Newsmax, One America News and the Epoch Times, media companies that have lent Powell an enormous platform in the two months since the election.

Some of the news outlets, including Fox, have since backed off the claims or issued corrective statements.

Trump, it is rumored, may find his way onto the list.

Hit them in their pocketbooks. Fight back. Enough is enough. Sue the bastards!

Yay!