Politics & Power Quote by Kenneth Blackwell

The line is built like a bureaucratic lullaby: slow, procedural, soothing. Blackwell isn’t just defending a timeline; he’s selling legitimacy through tedium. By stretching the sentence with “very tedious, very comprehensive,” he turns delay into virtue. The subtext is clear: if the process feels long and exhausting, it must be thorough enough to be trusted.

Notice the rhetorical pivot from calendar dates to moral reassurance. “November the second to December the sixth” plants a concrete frustration in the listener’s mind, then immediately reframes that frustration as the cost of integrity. The phrase “audit by precinct, across the state” isn’t there to inform most voters; it’s there to signal granular control, an almost forensic seriousness. He’s invoking the imagery of officials hunched over ledgers, not partisans gaming outcomes.

The real pressure point is the final clause: “every vote that was legally cast is counted.” That word “legally” does heavy political work. It positions the speaker as the guardian of democracy while quietly implying a threat of illegitimate ballots that must be filtered out. In contested election climates, that framing can read as reassurance to one audience and as a warning to another: yes, we’ll count every vote - but only the ones we deem valid.

As a politician, Blackwell’s intent is protective and preemptive: to inoculate the certification process against accusations of delay, incompetence, or manipulation by redefining time itself as evidence of care. The sentence’s length mirrors its message: trust us, it takes a while.