by Sandra F. Beckard, SON columnist
Sandra Beckard
For those of us who remember the ‘Hanging Chad’ incident in the swing state of Florida, during the 2000 Presidential Election between (Bush v. Gore), they had to do ballot “recounts.” On November 26, then Florida’s Secretary of State, Katherine Harris, certified that Bush had won the election by a 537-vote margin. Gore sued Harris because all the recounts were not completed when she certified the results. Florida’s Supreme Court sided with Gore, ordering punch-card ballots that had been cast but not registered because of a problem called a ‘Hanging Chad’ needed to be recounted. Bush appealed to the United States Supreme Court, which ordered the recount to be halted on December 9. On December 12, 2000, The Supreme Court’s decision went against the Florida Supreme Court, and Bush remained the certified winner. Gore conceded the next day.
The voting process has changed over the decades but is still subject to failures and hacking. The CrowdStrike outage on July 19 affected Microsoft Windows and has been called the largest outage in the history of Information Technology and Historic in scale. 8.5 million Systems crashed and got the “blue screen of death” worldwide. CrowdStrike is a cybersecurity technology company that services millions of computers, including Dominion Voting Systems. The company said it was a “faulty software update discovered within hours, and a fix was released.” But the damage had already been done. Was it a software update or a dry run? In this time of electronic hacking/breaching, you must wonder.
Dominion Voting Systems are in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania, all swing states that may determine the outcome of the 2024 Presidential Election. All it would take is for any of these machines to malfunction to cause a delay in counting the votes, and we’ll be back to the year 2000. Keep in mind that the Supreme Court is now “padded” with Justices who are part of the GOP agenda.
The GOP is already sowing distrust in our elections like they did in 2020 when Trump, realizing that he might lose to Biden, started the Big Lie about the election is being stolen. In August of this year, Alabama Republican Secretary of State Wes Allen announced that he had begun a process of removing more than 3,200 individuals previously identified as being noncitizens from the state’s voter rolls, even as he acknowledged the possibility that some of those people have since become naturalized citizens who are eligible to vote.
Trump said he won’t run again in four years if he loses to Kamala Harris in November. Wait! What? First, he will be 82 years old, and second, he might be on house arrest. Trump is “The Great White Hope” for the racist GOP, and they are pulling out all the stops. This is the “dog whistle” to get it done by any means necessary. One of the means is having the “Flies in the Buttermilk” like Tim Scott (who was the Herman Caine of the GOP), Mark Robinson (who is falling hard because of his past), and the flies you see who are strategically placed behind the podium at a Trump rally. The most dangerous flies are the ones who are in the shadows and have forgotten or think they have “arrived” and don’t care about White Supremacy. Remember, the “farmer” who owns the cow will remove the flies from the buttermilk if it is to remain “pure.”