{"id":910,"date":"2016-10-20T09:32:13","date_gmt":"2016-10-20T13:32:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.davideriknelson.com\/sbsb\/?p=910"},"modified":"2016-10-20T06:36:45","modified_gmt":"2016-10-20T10:36:45","slug":"its-rigged-i-tells-ya-rigged","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.davideriknelson.com\/sbsb\/index.php\/2016\/10\/its-rigged-i-tells-ya-rigged\/","title":{"rendered":"It’s Rigged, I Tells Ya! *Rigged*!!!"},"content":{"rendered":"

Seeing lots of concerns about a “stolen election,” not just from<\/span> the Nativist Right<\/b> <\/span>(e.g.,\u00a0 <\/span>Trump himself speaking in Novi, MI last month<\/a>\u00a0and repeating at basically every whistle-stop since, it his inability at the third debate to commit to honoring any election outcome other than his own unlikely victory), but also from broad swaths of the Progressive Left<\/b> (e.g., That viral image showing #TrumpWon starting in Russia is fake<\/span><\/a><\/span>, #TrumpWon? trend vs. reality<\/a>, Troll armies rig polls to deceive you into believing Trump won first debate<\/span><\/a><\/span>, Trumpism Is the Symptom of a Gravely Ill Constitution<\/a>, concerns of voter suppression via Trumpian “poll watchers,” etc.) and the Rational Center<\/b> (largely around the possibility of Ruskie agitators: FBI Says It Has Detected More Attempts to Hack Voter Registration Systems<\/span><\/a><\/span>, Newsweek Website Attacked After Report On Trump, Cuban Embargo<\/a>, The Russian Hack of U.S. Election Systems is About Delegitimizing, Not Changing, the Result, and It Feeds Trump Vote-Rigging Claim<\/a>)<\/span><\/p>\n

Here’s the thing: at the national level the U.S. election system\u2014being a bass-akward county-by-county patchwork with little network connectivity and lots of different paper trails\u2014is broadly unriggable. Yes, many pockets are vulnerable to manipulation, but that can only tip a close election\u2014and this once hasn’t really been close for a year or so.<\/span><\/p>\n

What this latest paranoid politico-cultural tulip mania<\/a> really <\/i><\/b>puts me in the mind of is the classic Twilight Zone<\/em> episode “The Monsters are Due on Maple Street<\/a>“\u2014minus the last 2 minutes are so.\u00a0 <\/span>Just watch this video, stop at ~22:40 seconds, and you’ve got our current predicament (of course, keep going and SPOILER ALERT!!!<\/i><\/b> you’ll discover that the episode’s Big Bad Alien looks distressingly like a young Vladimir Putin\u2014but I’m positive that’s just<\/i> a coincidence).<\/span><\/p>\n