The Supposed Virtue of Romney’s Conceding

Over the radio, I heard a local bureaucrat pontificate over the supposed “virtue” of defeated US presidential candidate Mitt Romney on conceding the race to re-elected President Obama as worthy of emulation by local politicians.

From Breitbart.com (bold mine)

Speaking to a large but dispirited crowd at the Boston Convention and Exhibition Center, Romney began his speech on a gracious note:

 "Thank you, my friends. Thank you so very much."

"I have just called President Obama to congratulate him on his victory." 

With only the state of Florida's 29 electoral college votes undecided, President Obama held an insurmountable 303 to 200 electoral college lead over Governor Romney.

The act of conceding, could in the surface, seem as sportsmanship or as gentleman’s behavior.  Yes, political agents love to draw people's attention towards superficial abstractions by pinning the blame or conflicts on people's behavior rather than from systemic flaws.

But my point is that Mr. Romney’s loss has already been an established fact or a reality when he made the concession.

So being a politician, Mr. Romney opted to save face by being gracious in the face of defeat than become a sour grape—the latter would have put at risk his political career or future political actions.

In other words, US electoral conditions vary from Philippine elections such that the former’s electronic platform which produced immediate results,  supposedly removed the stigma of cheating or electoral fraud that has been the key source of acrimony in the local setting.

Of course, we can never really say how clean the US elections had been since any electoral cheating in the digital age would have meant largely untraceable systematic manipulation.

As former assistant secretary of US Treasury and former associate editor of Wall Street Journal Paul Craig Roberts duly noted

With electronic voting machines, which leave no paper trail and are programmed with proprietary software, the count can be decided before the vote. Those who control the electronics can simply program voting machines to elect the candidate they want to win. Electronic voting is not transparent. When you vote electronically, you do not know for whom you are voting. Only the machine knows.

According to most polls, the race for the White House is too-close-to-call. History has shown that when an election is close and there’s no expectation of a clear winner, these are the easiest ones to steal. Even more important, the divergence between exit polls, perhaps indicating the real winner, and the stolen result, if not overdone, can be very small. Those who stole the election can easily put enough experts on TV to explain that the divergence between the exit polls and the vote count is not statistically significant or is it because women or racial minorities or members of one party were disproportionately questioned in exit polls.

The world does not operate in a vacuum. People act based on incentives. Laws, regulations and social or political economic systems have material influences on people's behavior and actions.

Is Ron Paul Being Cheated out of the GOP Caucuses?

Electoral vote shaving isn’t just a common phenomenon in Philippine elections, indications are that such fraud may be happening in the US despite only the GOP caucuses (not general elections yet).

From the Business Insider,

By now, it is clear that the Maine caucuses were a complete mess.

Evidence is mounting that Mitt Romney's 194-vote victory over Ron Paul was prematurely announced, if not totally wrong. Washington County canceled their caucus on Saturday on account of three inches of snow (hardly a blizzard by Maine standards), and other towns that scheduled their caucuses for this week have been left out of the vote count. Now, it looks like caucuses that did take place before Feb. 11 have also been left out of final tally.

As the full extent of the chaos unfolds, sources close to the Paul campaign tell Business Insider that it is looking increasingly like Romney's team might have a hand in denying Paul votes, noting that Romney has some admirably ruthless operatives on his side and a powerful incentive to avoid a fifth caucus loss this month.

According to the Paul campaign, the Maine Republican Party is severely under-reporting Paul's results — and Romney isn't getting the same treatment. For example, nearly all the towns in Waldo County — a Ron Paul stronghold – held their caucuses on Feb. 4, but the state GOP reported no results for those towns. In Waterville, a college town in Central Maine, results were reported but not included in the party vote count. Paul beat Romney 21-5 there, according to the Kennebec County GOP.

Here is a video of the alleged fraud, (hat tip Professor Robert Murphy)

The Ron Paul revolution seems emblematic of the zeitgeist signifying the structural challenge posed by the forces of decentralization against the established forces of the industrial age top-down welfare-warfare based political institutions.

As one would observe, the substantial growth in Ron Paul’s following has been defying the establishment’s implicit campaign to repress his presence (such as media blackout), the exclusion from Jewish forum debate and etc...

I would even posit that some of the GOP candidates have been fielded (by vested interest groups) to erode on Ron Paul’s growing influence over the voting population.

The Ron Paul phenomenon has clearly been bolstered by the internet where the latter as a medium of communication and connectivity has apparently been taking over the lead from mainstream media.

The US may not be the world’s biggest user but has been the largest in terms of penetration level (chart from internetworldstats.com)

And the supposed fraud seems likely as more evidence of fear by the entrenched establishment of an anti-establishment candidate commanding clout from the voters. So the continued task to suppress candidate Paul’s rise.

Ron Paul may not win (which the insiders will make sure of) but his ascendance clearly marks the sign of the times.