How Do We Know Who to Trust?

We are in a time where we’ve seen the obvious political agendas of the news outlets and where opinion is offered as fact. How then do we know whether or not we can trust the results of the election?  Each side will make its claims, each side will say the other is lying, and each side will find fault with something about the election.

In the past, we looked at politicians as trustworthy public servants.  Can the same be said today?  We’ve had four years of the vilification of the President so can we trust him?  Then again, we had eight years of the celebration of a President who claimed his administration was “scandal free.”  Unfortunately, even the smallest amount of research shows that is a pure fabrication.  If we consider President Obama’s time we see:  A gun running scandal that led to the death of a federal agent.  An IRS targeting scandal that called into question the impartiality of the IRS approval tax of free status when it came to requests from conservative organizations.  The unexpected withdrawal of forces from Iraq that led to the creation of ISIS.  The claims  the Islamic riots in Egypt and the over throw of Libyan’s dictator were due to some minor YouTube video.  The failure to help the Ambassador in Libya when he was attacked by violent mobs.  The dispersal of Kaddafi’s stockpiles of weapons after he was overthrown.  How about the cages he built to house children at the southern border?  The list could go on, but I think I’ve made my point.

These same observations can be made of Representatives, Senators, Governors, State officials, and so on down to the lowliest bureaucrats.  How many politicians have enriched themselves and their families while claiming to make life better for their constituents?

So, now we come to the question, who can we trust to reassure us that our vote was counted and the election was fairly run and the results legitimately reflect the will of the people?

Our Constitution delegates the running of elections to the individual states.  It is their job to organize, train and equip the state to run a fair and unbiased process.  For most of the states the job falls within the purview of their Secretary of State and if history is to be understood they have done that reasonably well, although there are always exceptions.  If there weren’t those exceptions the jokes about the dead voting in Chicago, the paying for votes of Irish immigrants coming off the boat to support Tammany Hall, or the resurrection of newly found ballots wouldn’t exist.  The controversy of recounts, having people try to determine what a voter really intended, or what constituted a legal ballot would not be a consideration.

Now, in this information age we come into a new spectrum of data manipulation.  We see in the nature of polls a natural bias that may exaggerate one set of data or eliminate another.  With our transition into massive voter data collection, we also see the potential for vote manipulation.  When one side points this out, and the other side dismisses the possibility we are left with a legitimate question, why would one side not acknowledge the possibility?

My conclusion is a simple one.  One side thinks they have control of the data and the other side does not. I’ll leave it to you to decide how you answer that question.  But at the end of the day, we individual voters really don’t get to say who we trust or not.  Until something remarkable changes our system we must accept the decisions of the individual Secretaries of State, and of course the court challenges that arise from questions about those decisions.  My takeaway from recent elections is we can no longer trust the media projections sent out to support a clearly bias agenda.