Gunshots, sirens, and more police than March in the St. Patrick’s Day parade. In the wee hours, folks in a village I knew woke years ago to several shotgun blasts. Next, 20 police cars wailed down their streets. Villagers stumbled onto their lawns in bathrobes and confusion.

They learned that a guy from a neighboring village had blown away three men. He had been drinking with them in the village tavern.

It was a no-brainer for the jury. He and the men had argued. The suspect stomped out, got into his car, and roared home. He grabbed his shotgun, roared back, found the guys in their car in the hotel parking lot, and blew their heads off.

And yet, this man’s mom declared he was innocent. The victims had provoked him, she insisted. They taunted him and asked for the ultimate punishment.

She comes to mind these days as people gird up to defend their favorite political candidates. As they activate their inner spin machines to defend their candidates against the indefensible.

I think too of my brother and the German Shepherd he loved. The dog bit 20 people in a year. “Aw, she’s the sweetest dog. She wouldn’t hurt anybody. People are always taunting her. They ought to know better.”

I think of the days of Nixon. His fans heard him break the law. Heard him on his own tapes, or read transcripts from the recordings. These defenders would say, “Other politicians have done a lot worse. Just because he said those things doesn’t mean …”

I think of the days of Bill Clinton. He flat out lied to a grand jury. His defenders read the transcript and declared “Well, he didn’t really lie. He was just trying to say …”

And so we do when we learn something bad about our candidate. We leap into defense mode. Our guy or gal can do no wrong. It is just the nature of things or people. Once we commit to a candidate we can see no wrong in him or her. Just like the shotgun killer’s mom saw a halo hovering above her boy.

This is all filed in the vault of human behavior, under the title, “Don’t confuse me with facts. My mind is made up.”

Eighty years ago, Dale Carnegie dramatized this phenomenon — in his famous book: “How to Win Friends and Influence People.”

Al Capone, he wrote, was the most sinister gang leader who ever shot up Chicago. Yet Capone thought of himself as a public benefactor. He said the public just didn’t appreciate his virtues. I’m sure his fellow gangsters felt the same about him.

Hey, OJ Simpson still has an army of fans. True believers. Attilla had a fan club. A lot of folks revered Hitler.

We know there are swing voters — independents who have not yet decided for whom to vote. We also know there are true believers who will vote for Hillary or The Donald — no matter what.

The FBI could find she slept with Putin, handed him secret documents. They could clap Hillary in leg irons, send her to prison in an orange pantsuit. And yet, her followers would still vote for her. As others have voted for candidates living in jails.

The Donald could be found guilty of downing the World Trade Center towers and his supporters would vote for him anyway.

When I was a kid, Jimmy Hoffa was in the news a lot. He ran the corrupt Teamsters Union. He had committed any number of crimes.

A TV newsman challenged a trucker. “How can you support Jimmy Hoffa when you know he is a crook?”

He replied that Hoffa was his kind of crook. “I make more money drivin’ my rig than I ever made before. So leave da guy alone.”

So … you want to change a true believer’s mind about Clinton or Trump? Good luck with that.

From Tom…as in Morgan.

Tom Morgan writes about political, financial, and other subjects from his home near Oneonta. Several upstate radio stations carry his daily commentary, Tom Morgan’s Money Talk. Contact him at tomasinmorgan.com

The elections process is not usually grist for inflammatory rhetoric. But this year has been different. Republican Donald Trump labeled the GOP primary process “crooked.” Democrat Bernie Sanders suggested his party’s use of super delegates made its nominating process a “rigged system.” For many voters, the intricacies of voting rules quickly became a topic of overriding interest.

Now that the primaries are over, I hope Americans remain just as intrigued by the laws governing general-election voting in their states. Because at the moment, this country is engaged in an experiment with the democratic process that should rivet everyone who cares about representative government.

We’ve seen two diverging trends in the states in recent years. One approach has sought to make voting more difficult, with a variety of laws requiring IDs and limiting the ways in which people can vote. The other has sought to make the process of voting simple and convenient.

On the whole, Republicans at the state level have favored greater restrictiveness and Democrats greater ease, but you don’t have to be a partisan of one side or the other to recognize that politicians believe a great deal is at stake. Which is why the question of how to approach the right to vote isn’t going to be settled any time soon. There are a lot of court cases pending in the various states, and it’s likely there will be conflicting judicial opinions.

If we’re going to debate the electoral process as a nation, let’s keep in mind the core issue: it should be easy to vote — and hard to cheat. Every American should be able to exercise his or her right to vote without feeling cowed — which is why I worry that efforts to limit voting will have a pernicious effect on our system of representative government.

One certainty in all this is that our entire voting system needs attention. All too many jurisdictions try to run elections on the cheap, with machinery and processes that are inadequate to the task. Even now, 16 years after the 2000 presidential election revealed deep flaws in the patchwork of ways we record and tally votes, the system remains rickety.

“The vigor of American democracy rests on the vote of each citizen,” a national commission on voting once wrote. Keep that in mind this election year — and pay attention to how your state approaches its obligation to safeguard that vigor.

Lee Hamilton is a senior advisor for the Indiana University (IU) Center on Representative Government, distinguished scholar at the IU School of Global and International Studies, and professor of practice at the IU School of Public and Environmental Affairs. Hamilton, a Democrat, was a member of the U.S. House of Representatives for 34 years, representing a district in south central Indiana.