When he returned and shared his photos, the ones he took on election day were especially interesting. When you voted, you were required to dip your thumb into a jar of ink so that you were "marked" as having voted. My friend showed photos of smiling people holding up their black thumbs.
What I seem to recall is that voting there was compulsory, so failure to vote meant you did not get tagged with the ink. This also may have served to help ensure no one voted twice. (In theory, you could cut off that thumb and vote again, but then again, that's a pretty extreme method of cheating.
These past two years a lot of noise has been generated by the media regarding the lack of confidence in our election integrity.
Cheating and ballot box stuffing is nothing new. Read Theodore White's The Making of a President, 1960. Mayor Daley helped JFK win Illinois by cheating. The difference between Trump and Nixon is how they responded to it. When Nixon called JFK in the middle of the night to concede, he let JFK know that he knew it was stolen, but for the sake of the nation he was not going to press it. He learned that he would have to win by a larger margin next time.
The cheating was not widespread, but it was real.
Ironically, even though much has been made of Trump's efforts to deny the results in 2020, the Democrats did the same in 2016, as this NBC News story points out.
When Trump won in 2016, busloads of people went to Trump Tower in NYC to protest, with signs that had been mass-produced in advance. (Eyeroll here.) I'm a little anxious for what we may see tonight.
My prayer is that the we tone down the rhetoric and find a way to recapture civility.
Feel free to comment.
