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To the editor:
There are numerous ways a person can win an election. I suppose the most popular way is to make promises that you know you can’t or won’t keep.
Some of the examples we have seen are promising another country will pay for a wall on your border, promising you will stop a war on your first day in office, promising not to get your country into future wars, promising to lower prices, promising to provide a better health plan and the list could go on and on. To my knowledge no other country has paid for our border wall, the war that was going to stop on day one is still going two years later, this country is now in a new war with no plan to end it, only 17 percent of Americans say their lives are better than two years ago because of higher prices and the better health plan that has been promised for the last 10 years is like the song "Tomorrow" from the musical "Annie", it’s always a day away or two weeks as we have heard so often.
Another way is to run smear campaigns like telling people that your opposition wants to change your son to your daughter while they are at school. It’s been 53 years since I’ve been in school, but I’m pretty sure schools haven’t installed operating rooms and replaced school nurses with surgeons. Evidently people that believe that could happen have never done any research because the process can take up to a year.
Another popular smear is calling your opponent woke or being members of antifa. I did the research and being woke means being aware of social injustices and being a member of antifa means that you are against fascism, I can’t see how either of those are a bad thing.
Another way is to make people afraid. You tell people that undocumented immigrants are stealing your jobs, voting, drawing government benefits and being dangerous. In reality undocumented immigrants can’t vote, they can’t draw government benefits even though they are estimated to be paying $100 billion in taxes, they are doing jobs Americans won’t do and aren’t any more dangerous than American citizens. Unless you happen to be fortunate enough to marry a rich American citizen where you and your family become citizens, the road to becoming a citizen is a long and drawn-out process that can take up to 20 years or more.
Another way to win an election is to flat out cheat. You could break into your opposition's campaign offices; you could call a state’s election official and ask them to find more votes; you could have another country interfere for you; you could offer all the adults in the country $5,000 if they vote for your party; you could ask states to redistrict to help your party; you could ask the postmaster general to ban mail in voting; you could spread lies about widespread voting fraud even though there are less than 2,000 known cases out of over a billion votes cast; or you can do the latest scheme, having your DOJ sue a state if your opponent wins by a narrow margin.
I guess the easiest way to win an election would be to be an honest person that actually wants to help this country instead of just helping themselves.
Doug Brand
Fort Dodge