One Politician’s Dilemma

Fellow Citizen Journalists, for this investigation I have a crafted a story without an ending. It is up to us to finish it properly. What we need is information about what moral and ethical principles apply to the situation I describe below. They should guide us to the right solution to our politician’s dilemma. 

One Politician’s Dilemma

Let’s say you were elected to a Congressional seat in the last election and your wife has found out that an election fraud investigation in a neighboring state is being conducted involving other successful candidates from your party. The investigators have discovered evidence that some of the party officials there had found a way to change the vote totals logged into the computerized voting machines and may have changed the outcome of some elections from losses to wins. 

You’re on some of the same committees with one of those successful candidates (a likable colleague you’ve come to consider a friend) and your certain that there’s been a mistake or that some kind of chicanery from the other party must be going on. However, because you don’t want your number one supporter, your wife, to worry any further, you decide to do your due diligence and go to a party higher-up for reassurance. 

You ask your higher-up if there is anything to the allegations. He says, “No,” and you’re about to thank him and head back to your office, but  something still bothers and you press further. You ask if any of the computerized voting machines used in your own state could have been used to illegally change votes and he answers, “Well…, yes”. So you ask if it is possible the votes in your own election could have been added to or subtracted from and he says, “Yah, it is possible, but only if, at the time, the computers were somehow connected to the internet.” 

Before you can speak again, he assures you that this was not the case and that he has it on the best authority that your election was on the up and up, that you have nothing to worry about. He says, jokingly, that, “The only thing you need to worry about is … getting elected next time!” That seems reasonable, so you thank him and walk back to your office. 

At home that night you reassure your wife that there’s nothing to be concerned about. 

Now, your wife, a computer specialist, and you, an attorney, have children and you’re trying to be good role models for them while they’re growing up. The most important challenges in raising children always seems to come back to teaching morals and ethics. Knowing right from wrong. You’re always trying to teach them what that is. After all, someday your wife and you might be asked by them what you did in any particular situation and why you did it, and you, of course, want to be able to tell them that, after you decided what the honorable thing to do was, that was what you did. 

A few days later indictments are announced and your colleague/friend’s name is among them. This time you go straight to your colleague and ask him outright, “I read about the indictment. What’s going on?” He tells you that, on the advice of counsel, he can’t comment on the case. However, he then pulls you aside and says, in a low voice, that because you two are friends, he’ll tell you as much as he legally can. 

He says that without his knowledge, his vote totals may have been tampered with to help get him elected. He believes he won honestly and really didn’t need the extra votes, so he’s puzzled. 

He was told by his party leadership that some party zealots, without any leadership authorization or knowledge, may have illegally added extra votes to his total to make him look better than he would have otherwise.

He says he then asked his leadership about where the extra votes could have come from. They said, “The rascals could have shifted votes from an opposition candidate to you in the computer tabulator. Maybe they counted some ballots more than once. Maybe some fake ballots found their way into the ballot stacks before counting. There are more ways than that of changing the vote totals, but we can assure you that if any of this was done, it was done without our knowledge, let alone our permission.”

My colleague says he then went to his attorney for advice. He was advised that, “Since you didn’t know at the time what these party rowdies were doing, you have no culpability, will never be convicted of a crime, nor ever do jail time. Neither will any of the party leadership since they didn’t know either.” An audit would show he had won honestly and that he would, of course, keep his seat in Congress.

Satisfied with your colleague’s explanation, you turn to leave when your friend says something a bit startling. ”I should tell you one more thing, though. Be wary of the party bosses. I’ve found that they don’t always tell us candidates or legislators the truth. You need to watch out for their shenanigans. They’re capable of lying to the authorities about any innocent candidate’s participation in fraud. Some might do so in order to lessen any possible punishment on themselves.” 

You thank him for the insight and heads-up and go home. Your wife knows about the indictments and asks how your colleague/friend is taking it. “Better than I expected.” You tell her that your friend says he is innocent, didn’t know about any fraud taking place and still believes he won the election fair and square. He believes that a truly thorough investigation will show that. 

A week later news breaks about an election fraud investigation going on in your state. Your name is on the list of those being investigated as is the party higher-up you had consulted when the neighboring state investigation had been announced. 

You go to his office, but you’re informed he’s unavailable. You can see why. His front office, where the receptionist and clerks work, is crowded with staffers and the phones are ringing off-the-hook, probably reporters seeking interviews about the investigation. 

Just as you turn to leave he enters the front office from his personal office in the back. He signals you over and you go into his office. You ask, “Was my vote total changed?” He says, “Well, probably, … yes.” You ask why. He says, “Some votes may have been deliberately added to your total by some overenthusiastic party loyalists. This was done without my knowledge or permission of course, but you can see how it looks.” 

He says that he can assure you that, in the end, these insubordinates will be held accountable and that we, the innocent ones, will go scot-free. 

You ask, “But, why change my totals?” 

He says, “They probably enhanced your totals to make sure you won. You’re very popular among the rank and file, you know.” 

You remember then that what he said was similar to what your colleague/friend’s party leadership had told him. 

You then ask a question you really don’t want to ask because you’re a little afraid of what the answer might be, but you ask it anyway, “Did I actually win?” 

He said, “I theorize that, uh… this is all speculation of course … that the misguided ones who changed the totals had discovered that you were slightly behind your opponent in the count and that an automatic recount would probably be triggered. And, you know, if you were trailing behind, the odds are less than 50-50 that you can win in a recount. But since they had the power to make sure you won, they decided to use it.” 

You ask him, “What should I do?” He says, “There’s nothing to do, but wait and see.” You left and went home. 

Back home you again counsel with your wife. She says, “You can’t trust what your higher-up says. He’s lied to you twice, once when you spoke with him the first time and he said that the election was honest. And now for a second time by saying to you, you probably didn’t win.” 

What she says echoes what my colleague/friend had been told by his party leadership the week before. Except your colleague had been told he had won. His slightly won compared to your own slightly lost. Apparently the factual difference doesn’t matter. Same result. If someone betrayed the voters, the guilty party needs to be held accountable.  

“And this idea of ‘do nothing, wait and see,’ isn’t good,” she says. “That has never been you. You’re a doer, not a thumb-twiddler.”

You then have a glum thought and say, “It could be worse.”

She says, “I suppose it could be. What if the party leadership has more knowledge about the frauds popping up around the country than they’ve been letting on and that the stories about ‘over enthusiastic party loyalists’ is just a diversion to cover up the truth?” 

Her words trigger another scary thought in your mind.

You say, “Let’s assume for a moment that the fraud perpetrators are not limited to just a few lower level miscreants located willy-nilly about the landscape.  That, in truth, the party leadership has been directing a criminal effort from the start.”

“Whoa! That’s quite a leap! Well, OK, please continue,” she responds. 

 “What if some of our primary elections were fixed as well? That some of our rank and file voters have been cheated out of the nominees they truly wanted to run for them in the general election?” you venture. 

“Wow!” she exclaims. “Let’s be clear. You’re saying that our suspect party bosses could be rigging our primaries?”

“Maybe, yes, I am?” you weakly  affirm.  

“And, they’re stealing elections for the purpose of…what?”  

“Stealing tax dollars, I suppose?” you feebly remark.

“That would be even more than outrageous, that would be criminal!” she exclaims. 

She pauses, and then says, “Come to think of it, it does seem our party has way more Classic Liberal Constitutionalists in it, like ourselves, than Progressives, who sometimes seem to be nothing more than Marxists, but the Progressives do seem to be winning our primaries far more often than they should considering how much smaller their numbers are in our party.” 

You then offer, “What if I hadn’t won the primary even though I ran and won in the election?” 

“That would make you, at the very least, a one-half fraud,” she giggles. 

You ignore her giggle. “What if I had actually won neither the primary nor the election?” You declare. 

“That would make you one-whole fraud,” she giggles again. 

“Ha, Ha” you scold, sarcastically responding to her giggle. “And how about the scale of the crime? It’s already in two states we know of.”

“Oh…, that’s right,” she responds. “Are you talking about how far and wide a cheat could have gone? Like, to all… fifty… states?” 

“Yes,” you respond. 

“That’s a lot of data to manage,“ says my computer science wife. “And, you know, just keeping track of all that info, for that many elections, in that small of a time space, would take a whole lot of computing power.”

“A supercomputer?” you ask. 

“Yes,” she responds. 

You offer, “I suppose it’s a question of where one could find one.” 

“Oh, there are several located around the country,” she says.

“Another thing that could be worse is if the whole fraudulent organization, if it exists, is still in place and is now gearing up for the next election,” you declare. 

She remarks, “If we knew this and did nothing to stop it, that would make us accomplices. That’s not something we want to be. And even if nobody else knew that we knew, we would still know and, if we did nothing, we would probably come to hate ourselves for that, eventually.”

“Yes, we would, but so far, it’s all just speculation on our part,” you comment. “We need to disprove our suspicion.”

“Or confirm it,” she declares. “If we’re going to look into this, we’re going to have to do so very carefully, quietly. We’ve got to confirm or disprove our suspicions beyond a reasonable doubt before going public with any findings.”

“I agree,” you confirm, and as you respond to her concern another thought strikes you. “There is another place that time on a supercomputer might be had.” 

“Where’s that?”

“A foreign country,” you whisper half-heartedly. 

“You’re saying that our party leadership could have had help from a foreign government in corrupting our elections?” She gasps. “Oh My God! That’s very scary! That would be…,” she hesitates to say the last word. 

You finish her sentence for her, “Treason.”

“That possibility sounds even less likely than our first speculation, that our party leadership has been directing this criminal effort from the start,” she says doubtfully. “I can’t imagine any American, no matter how rich or powerful, wanting to overturn the freedom we all have as Americans and return us to ‘freedom for the few and slavery for the rest,’ a system that has crippled human existence throughout most of human history.” 

“I know,” you acknowledge. “It took hundreds of generations thousands of years of trial and error to develop the system of government we have, one that all people can participate in.” 

“Preaching to the choir, are we?” she smiles. “My turn to preach a little.” 

She resumes her line of thought. “I think the best part of our political system is that we can pursue our individual lives as free contributors to our society and not be enslaved to goals of others. I can’t say it has worked perfectly, but it sure beats the heck out of slavery!”

“And should we mention our economic system?” you chime in. “When we go shopping at a market, store, or online, we have more to choose from than anyone living in a socialist or communist system of deliberately induced scarcity. That comes from having goods and services produced competitively, the economic system called Capitalism.”

“I believe the purpose of ‘deliberately induced scarcity’ is to keep people crawling to the slavers for handouts …and that’s just to get back some of our own money, no less!” she opines. “With mutual freedom for all, our nation has become the most successful nation in history. I would think we are so far beyond wanting to go back to that failed past that no American in their right mind would want to go there ever again.”

“Your probably right, yet…, we both know that there are a lot of people out there that don’t think the way we think,” you respond. 

“At any rate I think it’s about time we got some sleep. Maybe we’ll wake up in the morning with an even better idea of what we’re facing,” you tiredly sigh.

With that, you both retire for the evening. In the morning you ready for the new day and at the breakfast table you talk again. 

She begins, “I had another thought about what we discussed last night. What if our worst case scenario, that a nationwide election fraud has taken place, could not really have happened.” 

“Okay. And why not?” you inquire. 

“Simply, the scale of concealment necessary to accomplish such a crime would be far too great,” she proclaims. “It would involve way too many people for such a plan to ever be kept secret.”

Continuing with her thought you say, “And that merely the attempt at such a scam would have been discovered and exposed by the authorities long before it could have been activated?”

 “Yes, exactly,” she says. 

“Well, that’s a good argument,” you say. “How…ever, for what you say to be true there’s only one thing left to account for.” 

“The most powerful element not on the periodic table?” she blurts. 

“Yes, and that involves knowing how secure the secret was before their plan became operational. Would it be possible to deliberately place internet vulnerable computers in polling places and/or counting rooms throughout the United State?” you ask.

“Yes, but it would take time to do, maybe a year or two or three. And the true purpose of those computers would have to be kept secret all that time, probably by using misleading purposes to alleviate suspicion,” she responds.  

“Still, it could be done,” you ventured. “When I think about it, the 9/11 and Pearl Harbor attack plans were drawn up well before they were enacted. The secrecy maintained for these plans’ existence was excellent. For the perpetrators it was a matter of waiting for the right opportunity for implementation.”

“I can see how that if nobody in any of our intelligence agencies had any inkling of a secret strategy to corrupt the elections of our entire nation, then such a thing could be possible,” she commented. “Has anything like this ever been tried before?” 

“There is a distant similarity to the 1878 mid-term elections,” you, the history buff, note. “It was revealed at that time that two years before, in the 1876 presidential election, Tilden had tried to bribe Haye’s electors to vote for him in the Electoral College. The crime was discovered two years later when the secret code of the bribe offer, transmitted over telegraph wires, was broken. Interestingly, it might have been the first attempted election crime involving electricity, what our modern day computer tabulators and routers run on.” 

“Is anything new under the sun?” she laughs. “I guess it’s true, nobody owns the ‘Element of Surprise.’”

“So right, but now we are back to our original dilemma,” you conclude.

You summarize, “What are we going to do about all this? We’ve been lied to twice and I no longer trust our party officials. If my election was compromised, and we’re not able to disprove these allegations before the next election, we’ll lose, courtesy of the creeps who actually did the cheating. Our family will have become just another sacrifice for the ‘greater good’ of the socialist or communist versions of slavery along with the liberty it took thousands of years for our forefathers to create and hundreds of years for us American’s to maintain.”

She says, “We’re not going to let this happen to us nor to our country. We’ve got to find a way to get out in front of this.” 

“I agree, but if we are going to launch our own investigation, where do we start?” you ask. 

“We will probably need to take some kind of immediate action,” she suggests. “We don’t want to continue contributing to this deception in any way.”  

“You’re right. Okay, let’s make a list of possibilities,” you remark.

Possible Actions – to be taken before investigating the veracity of suspicions.

1. Do nothing, wait and see.
2. Remain a member of the party, but begin a private investigation.
3. Resign from party, become an Independent, but continue to caucus with them and begin an investigation. 
4. Resign from party, become an Independent, caucus with the other party and begin an investigation.
5. Resign from party, become an Independent, caucus with no party and begin an investigation.
6. Resign from party, become an Independent, announce you’re running for reelection, caucus with no party and begin an investigation.
7. Resign from party, join the other party and begin an investigation.
8. Resign seat, move back home, find a new job, not run for reelection and begin an investigation.
9. Resign seat, move back home, find new job, announce a run for reelection as an Independent and begin an investigation.
10. Do something else, but what?

Such is our politician’s dilemma. What should we advise our politician to do? We can also look at it this way: what if it was one of us in this situation? Or a friend? Or loved one?

Friends, we live in interesting times. To survive, we have to continually investigate to discover new truths, old truths, big truths, little truths,  any and all truths. These truths are the conditions of our existence. And that requires the freedom of inquiry and reporting be spread as widely as possible throughout our population the world over.  

That way we can be certain that we have as many of the facts that are out there to base our life sustaining decisions on. Freedom of thought and speech, it seems, has become a necessary component to the survival of us all. 

There are many out there that wish to enslave us, saying they must do this to save us from the folly of our own decisions. That seems to be a scheme for them to enrich themselves at our expense. And by ‘expense’ I mean they take our freedom, our money and shorten our life spans. I prefer to make my own decisions, thank you. 

In the long run, our enslavers will be shortening their own lives by limiting the volume of information created by free inquiry. The more information acquired, the more truth can be mined from it. Information is the key to sustaining any life form. And human life requires more information to sustain itself than any other form of life on earth. 

Returning our world to the evil past of slavery will not expand the scope of information, but reduce it back to a new dark age. In a world where threats range from diseases, droughts, and wars to natural disasters like earthquakes, hurricanes, tornados, and giant asteroids from outer space, we need all the facts and opinions we can get. We need freedom of speech for all, not just the few. 

Edward Everett Hale wrote in The Man Without a Country, 

“And if you are ever tempted to say a word or to do a thing that shall put a bar between you and you family, your home, and your country, pray God in his mercy to take you that instant home to his own heaven.”

And elsewhere, “I know of one fate more dreadful; it is the fate reserved for those men who shall have one day to exile themselves from their country because they have attempted her ruin, and shall have at the same time to see the prosperity and honor to which she rises when she has rid herself of them and their iniquities.”

It’s been said that often ‘art imitates life.’ On rare occasion, ‘life imitates art.’ My short story above has elements of both. I don’t know, nor does anybody, if anyone has or will ever find themselves in the dilemma I’ve just described. But, if one does, our solution could provide a guide to get them through the predicament safely and with their honor intact.  

Fellow citizen journalists, what moral and ethical principles can be applied to solve our politician’s dilemma? It is time to light up our computer keyboards. Let’s investigate!