(This sentiment from 1973 Detroit echoes today. Copyright Detroit Free Press).

Well, it is a relief that the controversy is done. Stress is much reduced out here on a sunny country day. Former Vice President Joe Biden has assumed the Office of the Vice President Elect. Fox News told me so, and it is a grand thing. The Jubilee may be at hand!

Since back in the old days, America’s big cities were run by one party. The usual fraud has been accepted since the time of the Civil War. You know, the norm was to accept the Dead voting, over-counting, under-counting, all the rest. Voting rates at 130% of those on the voting rolls. I was born in one of those places, the City of Detroit, and after my folks joined the White Flight, grew up in a suburb close enough to watch the periodic electoral shows in some uncontested detail. After college, still infused with enthusiasm for the political process, I was living inside Eight Mile, when the last challenge to the machine was run.

1973 was an interesting time. The big disturbances of the late 1960s still echoed in the streets. Former Motor City Police Chief John F. Nichols was running against a man named Coleman Young, a handsome man in his prime. Primary issues of the time were crime, police brutality, and the Detroit Police program known then as “STRESS.” It had a cool name, derived from the phrase “Stop the Robberies, Enjoy Safe Streets.”

STRESS was the 1971 answer to Detroit’s 23,000 reported robberies in 1970. The big riots of ’67 and ’68 had dramatically changed the Motor City’s demographics, and the victims of the STRESS units were largely black.

Stop me if you have heard any of this before, but Coleman harnessed his campaign to expose STRESS’s ineffectiveness and brutality. Because Nichols was the architect of STRESS, Young was also able to effectively put Nicholas on the defensive throughout the campaign.

Mayor Young later served twenty years in the position and was popularly known as Detroit’s Mayor for Life. The machine he built was similar to the ones in Chicago and New York City. Strong central control of elections was the key, and most of the usual shenanigans were regularly employed.

I have had friends chime in to remind me that there was no indication of fraud in the election just past. Suitably chided, I put the traditional frauds aside, since the truce between the downtown machine and the suburbs was essentially to let what went on all the time stand. The voting base of each could only threaten each other, and who needed it?

So, just as a starting point, there has been an accepted level of fraud incorporated into our elections for a long time. Anyone who denies it just hasn’t been looking. Detroit is one of the places this year where the usual stuff went on, a little amped up due to the importance of removing the Orange Man Bad from the White House. That posed a bit of a problem, since the usual tactics over the last few general elections was operating at maximum levels. Many precincts reported many more votes than registered voters. We accepted the practice without much comment.

What surprised me about this election was the breadth and scope of the malfeasance. It shouldn’t have. The accepted level of fraud in the cities had essentially maxed out their capability to exploit every vote, whether the voter was living or dead. The key to The Big One was the advance of technology. From what we know, the expansion of the machine’s control of all votes was necessary to ensure victory. There was an interesting press conference from the current President’s legal team yesterday, reliably reported as absurd by the broadcast folks or ignored. The lawyers attempted to explain how it worked, done by traditional plain paper fraud and innovative digital manipulation.

I have been in the information business for our government, so much of this is familiar territory. In order to enhance voter counts, digital manipulation was used by at least Dominion Voting Systems, and possibly both of the other three major election systems companies. The system was originally devised for use in other countries in the interest of national security goals, approved by the American security apparatus. It provided a backdoor to tabulation systems which enabled manipulation of vote counts in areas not previously controlled by the big city machines. The system allowed valid votes to be manipulated to pre-determined percentages. That is to say, for a reliably Republican voting district, the Republican would still be permitted to win, but by a lower, pre-determined percentage. The theory was that since no office changed hands in the manipulated total, little opposition would be raised, but a dramatic difference in state voting counts could be achieved.

It is kind of cool, and there are suggestions that trial runs of the program had been conducted in previous general elections right here at home. I now live in one of those places, a state called Virginia. The program was useful, but the amount required in 2016 quite overcame the planned capability. Adjustments were made, but confirmation bias is a tricky thing. Despite four years of investigations into the current President, impeachment and constant hounding by the majority media, authoritative polling showing the challenger performing well from the safety of his basement, a remarkable number of citizens voted to retain the current President.

That is where things began to come off the rails. With all the traditional fraudulent means employed, with the media “calling” states like mine with as little as 5% of the votes counted, by the time the polls closed the incumbent was running comfortably ahead of a fully employed traditional fraud machine. In order to salvage the plan, five states did something unusual.

According to sworn testimony, counting stations were closed simultaneously and election observers sent home. Then a remarkable number of ballots for the challenger arrived- and were entered- before the counting stations re-opened. The numbers, subtracting from one and adding to the other, happened on screen in televised reports. And passed largely without comment.

Well, at least until yesterday. Considering the other stories that were killed along the way, it is not surprising.

As a long-time observer, there is no question that fraud is an endemic component of American elections. It has been accepted for generations. The new part of it was the dramatic expansion. You can find parts of it in House Resolution 1, the body of electoral “reforms” that the Speaker of the House could not get to the senate in 2019. Some parts of it did, though, as parts of the wild cavalcade of legislation designed to combat the COVID pandemic. Some of them enabled the adoption of mass unrequested mail-in ballots, a dramatic expansion in traditional fraudulent practice. A change that fundamental to the voting process immediately before a general election might not have survived public debate. But of course, it wasn’t debated.

That is the other aspect of this that is fascinating. The Congress, and specifically the House, has changed the way it does business. In my time on the Hill, the swirl was about passing the budgets. Now, and throughout the previous administration, we became accustomed to operating on what are called “Continuing Resolutions.” That means that essentially everything appropriated in some other year continues, with some enormous “omnibus” bills to cover emerging requirements across all the old appropriations boundaries. Those used to be sacrosanct, overseen by powerful members of congress. No longer.

Anyway, it seems apparent that a lot has changed since then. Our old form of deliberate governance has been replaced by something much more flexible. It would have been one of those things for debate, but we are beyond that now. In fact, I have no idea where we are. The central executive, governing by the provisions of the Administrative state and Executive Orders has replaced it. In order to get things back on track, it was vital to get rid of the outsider whose unlikely appearance seemed determined to hamstring the new order.

That is why things have been so unsettled for the last four years. That is why the current President needed to be deposed, and he was. There was no electoral fraud. Nothing unusual happened. Inaugurate the beneficiary of all that strange stuff. We will get back on track. The Jubilee was only deferred for a few years. Now, everything is going to be fine. There is much less stress.

Copyright 2020 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com