During the campaign, many political observers were dismissing Donald Trump as a joke. Hillary Clinton, on the other hand, being the seemingly unbeatable Democratic presidential contender, with her long history of government service, was the only candidate who is taken seriously then. Her fierce and fighting personality also helps pull off that serious demeanor.
But after Trump's upset victory, Hillary has allowed herself to denigrate into a joke. She almost saved herself from further embarrassment brought by her crushing loss with that immediate congratulatory call to Trump, and that gracious concession speech. Then everyone discovered that President Obama merely forced her to call her foe and conqueror, Donald Trump. Succeeding events and pronouncements would also later reveal how Hillary and her followers were still in denial of their election fate. The ultimate " punchline" of sort, of course, came when the clown Green Party's losing candidate Jill Stein initiated a massive fund raising effort to file election recount in several key states - and then Hillary decided to join the clown in the recount efforts in the pretext of upholding lofty electoral integrity objectives.
And so when we combine a joke and a clown, we get some big comedy around. And why not? After all those huge publicity stunts and huge calls for more donations, recount efforts in Philadelphia in particular involving 75 precincts gave Hillary additional votes, alright. The total? An astounding five votes!
The votes of Trump, Stein and Libertarian Gerry Johnson remain unchanged in the same precincts. Stein, the clown, was hoping whatever fraud they can unearth in those district-level recounts can convince the courts that there was evidence of hacking or voter fraud to fuel statewide recount efforts. But five votes hardly make for a massive fraud, and certainly far off from BFFs Stein and Hillary's very creative storyline of a grand election conspiracy between Trump and Russian hackers.
Al Schmidt, the City Commissioner himself, admitted that they have very primitive voting machines. Their system is only vulnerable to individual cases of voting fraud- of the traditional, even ancient type like someone going in the voting poll and voting for somebody else. Or an election board manually adding votes, a case which watchers and inspectors can easily spot. In other words, only random, individual voters efforts at cheating, that are easy to detect and not capable of changing the entire election result. Such traditional ways certainly don't fall within the sophisticated range or depth of hacking.
In fact, the five extra votes that Hillary got came from "paper provisional or absentee ballots that were undetected by the optical scanner that counted votes in the days following the election". Schmidt explained that such can happen when " people do ridiculous things" like when they don't mark their choices clearly as they were instructed to, or when they use a green highlighter instead of a pen or pencil.
Philadelphia is officially done totaling ballots for the 2016 presidential election, unless Stein manages to miraculously prevail at the federal level on the imagined strength of her ' funny', incredible hacking storyline.
Of course, in principle every vote counts. But reality dictates that a recount is undertaken only when there's reasonable doubt that the election may have been compromised. But all those costs, time and efforts, not to mention bothering so many people, all for inconsequential outcome as five votes? It's so funny it hurts to laugh already.
Ultimately, it's just sad that instead of just fading away with dignity, or healing gracefully from her devastating loss, Hillary chose to be a party to this inability to accept the genuine victory of President-elect Donald Trump. After all that campaign big lecture to Trump on accepting election result, peaceful transition of power and democracy when she thought that the road to the White House for her is just a walk in the park, she finds herself now as the butt of jokes, and unfortunately she only has herself to blame for refusing to move on.
