This is the third time dirty tricks have cost us the loss

[planetc]

44. The 2004 Ohio vote was audited, and Kerry seems to have won. But that was probably the only state

that was audited, which means that we cannot be sure how the popular vote went, either. Many of our state elections cannot be audited.

This means that we can have no confidence in the announced winners of many state elections, and thus, no idea which of two candidates for an open seat won. Perhaps the Republicans haven't controlled anything except the balloting process for a very long time.

To repeat: we have no way of knowing who won any given election unless we can audit it, and we can only audit the ones using paper ballots, hand counted. The electoral process is rather like ordering a sweater we liked online, in green, and getting shipped a brown one in the wrong size, and then being told to shut up and like it.

Unless the people control the means by which the vote is collected and counted, it won't matter how many Democrats turn out, because the people who control the balloting will announce the results. We cannot audit the announced results. Many of us have no confidence left in the announced results of any state or national election unless the ballot process is a) paper ballots, b) hand counted.

The American people have been ill served especially by the press, who keep assuring us, even up to election night in 2016, that it's impossible to steal an American election. It's not impossible; it has certainly been done; all we lack are the specific numbers. As you recall, the press in 2015 and 2016 assured us, ad nauseam, that Mr. Trump's sexism was significant (true) and Mrs. Clinton's email server was important (false). None of them had more than a few carefully crafted words to say about the safety of that election, and we were assured that tampering with electronic voting machines was "unlikely." Bullfeathers.

We're neither a republic nor a democracy at the moment. We're a captive population. To the New York Times and the Washington Post I say: do your jobs. Tell us how safe our national and state elections are, and then face the large quantity of feathers that will be blown in your faces by outraged but uninformed ninnies. Your newspapers may close, but you will have gone down fighting.