Extraordinary. Fraught. Chaotic. Nail-biting. Volatile. Trump’s astonishing premature announcement of his win. His declaration that he would stop the counting. What a show. Barnum and Bailey could not have done it better.
NeoCon John Bolton, Trump’s former National Security Advisor, was astounded by what he called the irresponsibility of a sitting US president calling the integrity of the election into question even while votes were still being counted. The Telegraph’s Ambrose-Evans Pritchard called it ‘sacrilege’.
I doubt if we South Africans found it as alarming a spectacle as it was for the divided and stressed-out Americans.
Our ANC municipal election losers have shown how petulant – and in some cases even violent – they can be when a vote drops them from power.
Our national elections have also always had an edge to them – the aura of everyone and everything being just a fixed grin away from spiralling into dangerous territory. Some questions over the behaviour of election officials, tension in the counting room, irregularities that could be petty frauds or just ineptness, ballot boxes that go awol. Maybe more we’ve never heard about.
On Wednesday, after EWN insightfully informed me that Trump was wearing a blue tie, not the blue of the Dems however but a different, lighter shade of blue, and trendoid Newzroom Afrika put up two incorrect voting tallies without noticing, local credibility seemed weak and I opted to watch only international network television coverage from the family couch command post .
Dollops of Trump bashing
However, agility with the remote programme button is imperative when using TV news as your preferred medium. You must be able to move to a competitor in nanoseconds if you are to catch actual numbers and developments from as many sources as possible while avoiding dollops of Trump-bashing or the inevitable ‘progressive’ pundits waiting in the wings at the BBC.
Luckily digitisation has put a whole slew of diverse sources at our fingertips and there‘s no need to be trapped in any single thought bubble, so I also trawled through several alternative offshore magazine and podcast sites.
As the hours, then days flickered by, I suggested gatvol South Africans had perhaps missed an opportunity to donate a few helpful ‘what’s a zero or two or three between friends’ Chartered Accountants from our SOE skills pool to add to the chaos around the counting. I wondered if the race of the lawyers Trump chooses to take his allegations to court would cause a twitter stir. Would Joe Biden even be alive by the time the smoke issues from the chimney? Why were the libertarian-leaning denizens of Nevada so damn agonizingly slow with their count?
But now it seems certain I can say goodbye to the bevy of Trump Derangement Syndrome sufferers who have ranted their way in and out of my timeline for the past four years, as well as those weird, unfiltered, blurting tweets from the 45th President himself. I hope they all will have happier lives going forward and that the Trump-bashers will not simply morph into strident imbongis for Biden. He appears to offer little to justify enthusiasm and I am depending heavily on a Republican Senate to neuter any plans foisted on him by the woke authoritarian Left of his party.
Unlikely he’ll be back
The Don or The Donald – you can also use any of the newer, ruder nicknames the TDS sufferers have slung at him over the past four years, but I’ll go for the old moniker Ivana gave him in her broken English – is going, and it is unlikely he’ll be back if most of the Republican Party has its way. But never say never with this man.
I first heard of Trump in 1983 when he moved into his newly built Trump Tower a block from where I was staying in New York, in The Plaza hotel he would buy just five years later. He was all over television and the news magazines. The media was fascinated by this slick developer’s reworking of the grimy city. He was more golden than orange in those days and his speech was certainly more precise and coherent. In a 1980 interview with Trump, archived on YouTube, you can even detect a touch of charisma in the 33-year old.
When I heard of The Apprentice TV debut in 2004, I dismissed Trump as a has-been braggart turning to reality TV to vainly retain a public profile. You could have knocked me over with a feather when he began his final ascent to the White House. I wasn’t so surprised, however, when he notched up victory in 2016 on the backs of what some have called the ‘hidden’ Trump voters.
Most fraught national election
This week in South Africa, we have 95 municipal ward by-elections across the country, so we should get a fair indication of the direction we’re heading in. Next year a whole countrywide municipal election. And just before the Americans hold their presidential shindig all over again in 2024, we’ll be facing what could be our most fraught national election in decades.
There’s also a rather worrying chance, according to the IRR’s Anthea Jeffery, that we could be casting our votes through a new electronic system, not the manual system we’ve used through the decades.
Two days ago, on 6 November, the window of opportunity to comment on some pretty worrying ANC technical adjustments contained in the Election Laws Amendment Bill closed.
As Jeffery revealed in the Daily Friend this week, the Bill was introduced in September and made its way quickly, quietly and largely unnoticed by media or opposition parties to the public comment stage.
Jeffery says the technical adjustments in the Bill open the way to the introduction of a less transparent and more vulnerable electronic voting system – something the IEC has been exploring for some time – and that is not going to be an improvement but a very real danger to our democracy.
Digital bunnies
It’s also going to be hard for millennials, digital bunnies and journalists to recognize that not all things electronic and digital are necessarily good for us.
I’m a person with low trust levels when it comes to our government. It is possibly the result of my ‘lived experience’. Cadre deployment is a reality. It has rotted government. The Independent Electoral Commission is not immune.
You don’t have to be the cynic that Max du Preez once (correctly) labelled me to see that it is more than likely that a long-time ruling party on the back foot, with a fiscal mess on its hands and a majority dropping below 50%, in a country that doesn’t have much regard for morality and ethics, will be tempted by the many more opportunities for vote-rigging offered by an electronic system. Never mind the installation and implementation tenders.
Vigilance is required. I have no doubt the IRR will continue watching this Bill and the IEC’s moves. So will I. But opposition parties, the media and civil society also need to catch a wake-up. We must be able to count all the votes in our future accurately and with confidence. And know and accept that the result is a fair and just outcome
NeoCon John Bolton, Trump’s former National Security Advisor, was astounded by what he called the irresponsibility of a sitting US president calling the integrity of the election into question even while votes were still being counted. The Telegraph’s Ambrose-Evans Pritchard called it ‘sacrilege’.
I doubt if we South Africans found it as alarming a spectacle as it was for the divided and stressed-out Americans.
Our ANC municipal election losers have shown how petulant – and in some cases even violent – they can be when a vote drops them from power.
Our national elections have also always had an edge to them – the aura of everyone and everything being just a fixed grin away from spiralling into dangerous territory. Some questions over the behaviour of election officials, tension in the counting room, irregularities that could be petty frauds or just ineptness, ballot boxes that go awol. Maybe more we’ve never heard about.
On Wednesday, after EWN insightfully informed me that Trump was wearing a blue tie, not the blue of the Dems however but a different, lighter shade of blue, and trendoid Newzroom Afrika put up two incorrect voting tallies without noticing, local credibility seemed weak and I opted to watch only international network television coverage from the family couch command post .
Dollops of Trump bashing
However, agility with the remote programme button is imperative when using TV news as your preferred medium. You must be able to move to a competitor in nanoseconds if you are to catch actual numbers and developments from as many sources as possible while avoiding dollops of Trump-bashing or the inevitable ‘progressive’ pundits waiting in the wings at the BBC.
Luckily digitisation has put a whole slew of diverse sources at our fingertips and there‘s no need to be trapped in any single thought bubble, so I also trawled through several alternative offshore magazine and podcast sites.
As the hours, then days flickered by, I suggested gatvol South Africans had perhaps missed an opportunity to donate a few helpful ‘what’s a zero or two or three between friends’ Chartered Accountants from our SOE skills pool to add to the chaos around the counting. I wondered if the race of the lawyers Trump chooses to take his allegations to court would cause a twitter stir. Would Joe Biden even be alive by the time the smoke issues from the chimney? Why were the libertarian-leaning denizens of Nevada so damn agonizingly slow with their count?
But now it seems certain I can say goodbye to the bevy of Trump Derangement Syndrome sufferers who have ranted their way in and out of my timeline for the past four years, as well as those weird, unfiltered, blurting tweets from the 45th President himself. I hope they all will have happier lives going forward and that the Trump-bashers will not simply morph into strident imbongis for Biden. He appears to offer little to justify enthusiasm and I am depending heavily on a Republican Senate to neuter any plans foisted on him by the woke authoritarian Left of his party.
Unlikely he’ll be back
The Don or The Donald – you can also use any of the newer, ruder nicknames the TDS sufferers have slung at him over the past four years, but I’ll go for the old moniker Ivana gave him in her broken English – is going, and it is unlikely he’ll be back if most of the Republican Party has its way. But never say never with this man.
I first heard of Trump in 1983 when he moved into his newly built Trump Tower a block from where I was staying in New York, in The Plaza hotel he would buy just five years later. He was all over television and the news magazines. The media was fascinated by this slick developer’s reworking of the grimy city. He was more golden than orange in those days and his speech was certainly more precise and coherent. In a 1980 interview with Trump, archived on YouTube, you can even detect a touch of charisma in the 33-year old.
When I heard of The Apprentice TV debut in 2004, I dismissed Trump as a has-been braggart turning to reality TV to vainly retain a public profile. You could have knocked me over with a feather when he began his final ascent to the White House. I wasn’t so surprised, however, when he notched up victory in 2016 on the backs of what some have called the ‘hidden’ Trump voters.
Most fraught national election
This week in South Africa, we have 95 municipal ward by-elections across the country, so we should get a fair indication of the direction we’re heading in. Next year a whole countrywide municipal election. And just before the Americans hold their presidential shindig all over again in 2024, we’ll be facing what could be our most fraught national election in decades.
There’s also a rather worrying chance, according to the IRR’s Anthea Jeffery, that we could be casting our votes through a new electronic system, not the manual system we’ve used through the decades.
Two days ago, on 6 November, the window of opportunity to comment on some pretty worrying ANC technical adjustments contained in the Election Laws Amendment Bill closed.
As Jeffery revealed in the Daily Friend this week, the Bill was introduced in September and made its way quickly, quietly and largely unnoticed by media or opposition parties to the public comment stage.
Jeffery says the technical adjustments in the Bill open the way to the introduction of a less transparent and more vulnerable electronic voting system – something the IEC has been exploring for some time – and that is not going to be an improvement but a very real danger to our democracy.
Digital bunnies
It’s also going to be hard for millennials, digital bunnies and journalists to recognize that not all things electronic and digital are necessarily good for us.
I’m a person with low trust levels when it comes to our government. It is possibly the result of my ‘lived experience’. Cadre deployment is a reality. It has rotted government. The Independent Electoral Commission is not immune.
You don’t have to be the cynic that Max du Preez once (correctly) labelled me to see that it is more than likely that a long-time ruling party on the back foot, with a fiscal mess on its hands and a majority dropping below 50%, in a country that doesn’t have much regard for morality and ethics, will be tempted by the many more opportunities for vote-rigging offered by an electronic system. Never mind the installation and implementation tenders.
Vigilance is required. I have no doubt the IRR will continue watching this Bill and the IEC’s moves. So will I. But opposition parties, the media and civil society also need to catch a wake-up. We must be able to count all the votes in our future accurately and with confidence. And know and accept that the result is a fair and just outcome
The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR
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