Under a newly invoked "harmony clause," every county in the United States has been instructed to pause tabulation until Lusaka resumes, and nobody in Washington will explain who signed us up.
A body called the Global Election Harmony Council has invoked a "synchronized tabulation clause," freezing every ballot count in the United States until Zambia resumes its suspended presidential count. Officials say American ballots are "simply resting." Tucker Blaze wants to know who signed the paperwork.
While you were asleep, a body called the Global Election Harmony Council invoked what it calls the "synchronized tabulation clause," and as of yesterday afternoon every ballot in the United States of America sits uncounted in a sealed box because a vote count in Zambia was suspended over violence and fraud allegations.
Read that again. A presiding officer in Lusaka holds up a marked ballot, the count stops there, and a school board runoff in Ohio grinds to a halt in the name of "global democratic empathy." Nobody voted for this. Nobody was asked.
"Counting is a shared human activity," said Bertrand Kessling, the Council's deputy coordinator for Multilateral Ballot Affairs, speaking from a conference room in Geneva that taxpayers are somehow renting. "When one member state pauses, all member states pause. Otherwise we are simply counting at each other, competitively, and that is where the resentment begins."
Competitively. He said the word competitively about arithmetic. The one thing this country used to be good at.
They call it harmony. I call it a filing cabinet in Switzerland.
Officials insist the pause is temporary, procedural, nothing to see here. Yet when reporters asked which American official signed the harmony clause, the State Department referred questions to the Council, and the Council referred questions to a "standing subcommittee of the signatories," whose membership is described in its own charter as "deliberately fluid."
"There is no reason for the American public to be alarmed. The ballots are safe. They are simply resting." — Marguerite Ollivant, Council spokeswoman
Resting. Our ballots are resting. In a Kenton County storage room, under a tarp, waiting on a jurisdiction eight thousand miles away to sort out its own paperwork before a single American vote is permitted to become a number.
Meanwhile the county clerks — the last honest people left in this arrangement — are being handed laminated instruction cards telling them to keep the seals intact and, and I want you to sit down for this one, to "reflect on the fragility of the count." Reflect. There are grown men in reflective vests standing guard over cardboard because a global secretariat wants them to feel something.
Kessling was asked what happens if Lusaka's count stays suspended for a month. He said the clause "contains no upper bound, by design, because deadlines create pressure and pressure creates disputes." A tabulation system engineered specifically to never finish. And they expect us to believe this was drafted by accident.
Zambia will resolve its election, because Zambians will resolve it. That is what a country is. The question is what we've become when a school gymnasium in Lusaka holds the master switch for a courthouse in Nebraska, and the people who handed over that switch won't even put their names on the document.
