"Vote counting and ballot collecting does not occur in the light of day. There are too many occasions when observers and opposing parties lose contact with the ballots"
About this Quote
The line is built like a warning label: calm on the surface, volatile in implication. Schaffer doesn’t allege a specific crime; he stages a scene. “Does not occur in the light of day” evokes back rooms, shadows, and the old American suspicion that power prefers dim lighting. It’s less a description of election administration than a cinematic cue, designed to make ordinary procedures feel clandestine.
The mechanics of the sentence matter. “Vote counting and ballot collecting” lumps together multiple stages and jurisdictions, flattening a messy, decentralized process into a single vulnerable pipeline. Then comes the carefully chosen vagueness: “too many occasions,” “observers,” “opposing parties,” “lose contact.” No numbers, no locations, no named actors - just the insinuation that oversight fails as a matter of course. That ambiguity is the point. It allows the claim to travel: listeners can map it onto whatever contest, county, or rumor they already distrust.
Subtextually, it’s an argument for permission. If the public accepts that ballots routinely slip out of view, stricter controls, aggressive challenges, or partisan “monitoring” start to sound like common sense rather than escalation. The phrase “lose contact” is especially telling: ballots are treated like contraband that must be constantly surveilled, not civic instruments moving through chain-of-custody rules and redundancies.
Context is the modern politics of electoral legitimacy, where confidence is a resource to be managed - or weaponized. The quote functions less as evidence than as atmosphere, shifting the burden onto the system to prove it isn’t hiding something.
The mechanics of the sentence matter. “Vote counting and ballot collecting” lumps together multiple stages and jurisdictions, flattening a messy, decentralized process into a single vulnerable pipeline. Then comes the carefully chosen vagueness: “too many occasions,” “observers,” “opposing parties,” “lose contact.” No numbers, no locations, no named actors - just the insinuation that oversight fails as a matter of course. That ambiguity is the point. It allows the claim to travel: listeners can map it onto whatever contest, county, or rumor they already distrust.
Subtextually, it’s an argument for permission. If the public accepts that ballots routinely slip out of view, stricter controls, aggressive challenges, or partisan “monitoring” start to sound like common sense rather than escalation. The phrase “lose contact” is especially telling: ballots are treated like contraband that must be constantly surveilled, not civic instruments moving through chain-of-custody rules and redundancies.
Context is the modern politics of electoral legitimacy, where confidence is a resource to be managed - or weaponized. The quote functions less as evidence than as atmosphere, shifting the burden onto the system to prove it isn’t hiding something.
Quote Details
| Topic | Justice |
|---|
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