On the Presler Conundrum and Stockholm Syndrome

Topic: Elections

With yesterday’s national IT snafu making talk of the Vance selection and even Trump’s survived assassination attempt seem like old news, a lingering conversation has again poked its way out of the recesses of the mind and into full view.  It centers on Scott Presler and his efforts to get as many Republicans as possible not only registered, but to vote by mail and vote early.  Every time there is an incident like yesterday’s, especially the deliberate sabotage of voting machines greenlighted by Maricopa County in the 2022 midterms, people come to the loudest election integrity truthers and ask if it’s still a good idea to wait until Election Day to vote in person when there are so many documented and potential hazards that may prevent one from registering said vote.  Here is Presler driving his point home yesterday as to why Republicans need to vote early and/or vote by mail:

Imagine if a technology outage happened on Election Day.

Millions would be disenfranchised.

Democrats would have already voted early, voted by mail, & ballot harvested,

while Republicans waited to vote on one singular day (when everything can go wrong).

Now, let’s be objective about Presler.  Some people love him, and some people hate him.  Some people think he’s controlled opposition.  I don’t know him, but as far as this piece is concerned, I view him objectively.  I, for one, think voter registration efforts are good because they yield data that prove my points and make it much more difficult for stolen elections to be explained away.  I wrote about this dynamic two days ago when highlighting the massive pro-Trump shift occurring in Maricopa County for the past four years that went into overdrive since the shooting.  I do not and will not take issue with Presler registering voters.

I will, however, stick to my guns in telling you that the best practice for any voter is to vote in person on Election Day.  If you live in an all mail state, take your ballot with you on Election Day and drop it in the collection box at the voting office.  After all, it is Election Day for a reason, and the spirit of early voting, which is to permit a truly absent voter to cast a ballot with a valid excuse for not being available to do so on Election Day, is destroyed when states like Texas push through 91% of the total vote before Election Day.  For more about how convenience has destroyed elections, read this article.

I will be voting in person on Election Day so long as I am alive and breathing on November 5.  If I show up and am not permitted to vote because of some discrepancy with ballots or any other associated materials, I will create the biggest uproar anyone has ever seen and involve as many law enforcement personnel as possible to ensure that the issue is corrected, or it will be highlighted accordingly all over social media.  I am responsible for my own decision to wait to vote on Election Day to provide anyone who wants to rig an election as little data as possible beforehand as I can.  You are responsible for your own decision, too, but this doesn’t prevent hand wringers from getting upset that I’m going to lead us into a Maricopa 2022 situation and hand the election to the bad guys.  It’s a needless worry.  I am one of the biggest election voices out there, and if I have perhaps 200,000 unique subscribers across all platforms, that accounts for barely one quarter of one percent of Trump’s 2020 votes, and an even smaller percentage of his 2024 count.  People will be voting by mail and voting early whether I like it or not, because Donald J. Trump and his election machine said so.

In this sense, I recognize that the Presler conundrum presents a Catch 22.  Democrats are going to be receiving ballots in mid-September in Pennsylvania, 50 days before Election Day.  They will come up with over 3 million ballots even in a loss for Joe Biden, so trying to come up with a winning number that is going to need to be closer to 4 million than it is to 3 million is a risky proposition to get done in just one day.  Keep in mind, the massive Trump Election Day vote there in 2020 resulted in a comically bad effort that included stopping the count and dripping out Interstate trafficked ballots for four days before they gave Biden the Keystone State. Feeding the system for 7 weeks would have allowed for Trump votes to be scrubbed or flipped and a much more graceful theft involving far fewer ballots (which made it obvious) to get the result in line with polling in a believable timeframe that didn’t give the impression bad people were cheating.

Trying to win fraudulent elections by playing into a corrupt system that wants you to vote early is like displaying all symptoms of Stockholm Syndrome – the condition in which hostages begin to sympathize with their captors and rely on them for companionship and provision.  In acting this way, we are acting as if bad actors who rely on more data at an earlier time will somehow just honor our vote choices if we give them to them earlier, almost as if we forgot the Runbeck screwjob of the Arizona top of the ticket in 2022 (and by the way, about three-quarters of Maricopa County Republicans are on the Permanent Early Voting Mail List).  We are acting like battered girlfriends hoping that if we vote early, they won’t hit us again.

Flip the script with me for a minute.  Imagine, if you will, statewide Republicans holding to a 2-point lead in Michigan, with ominous news on the horizon.  Reports are that there are still 250,000 expected to be counted out of core Detroit, which with margins of 90% common for Democrats in much of the area, spells certain doom.  GOP leadership responds to this news by epoxying shut all remaining drop boxes and spike stripping all ballot delivery buses, while orchestrating a plumbing failure in the counting facility.  Days go by and the GOP stays ahead, and the courts declare their candidates the victors.  If you think this is far-fetched, this happened in reverse to the Arizona GOP in 2022.  Lake was down only about 10,000 votes when the supposed “early vote” was tabulated, with Hamadeh even closer, and all we heard was how many hundreds of thousands of Election Day votes remained to be tabulated with a 3:1 GOP turnout.

How do you think things would have worked out in Michigan for the Republicans who orchestrated a scheme to keep citizens from being able to cast a ballot?  Do you believe Detroit would still have any buildings higher than a single story that weren’t burnt to the ground by radicals, BLM, and other professional chaos agents?