Of course this should normally be a domestic affair for the people of the United States of America. But this year seems so extraordinary in many ways. I’m following events with interest, hope and alarm (not necessarily in that order). In 2016, I posted my thoughts on the imminent election, never for one moment thinking that the US would elect Donald Trump as president. Boy, was I wrong. Can I be wrong again? What do others think? Not that we have long to wait.
Vote early and vote often!
Kantian Naturalist,
Yes, I think there is truth to this. The only possible reason NOT to make it a holiday is because that would allow a greater spectrum of the population able to vote, instead of say, working at a construction site and not being able to afford to take half a day off to vote.
Its obviously why the republican party hates mail in voting.
Where I live, EVERYTHING, and I do mean everything is now paid for with your phone. Cash is almost unusable. I never even see it anymore. If it is possible to make this kind of system, and it is safe and the entire population trusts it, then it it is obviously trivial to simply make voting electronic just like you pay for things. Everyone can then vote, it would take no time at all, and there would be no delays in counting. However they make sure that no one is able to hack the money system and steal all of your money from your phone, could do the same thing for protecting the vote.
Eventually it has to come to that.
Here, even if you want to give money to a beggar, it is done by scanning their QR code.
My phone was broken recently, it wasn’t possible to park my car. I had to get a stranger to lend me their phone to get my car out of the lot.
I’m sure you’re right that the election won’t flip, even if Trump ends up with a few hundred or thousand more votes once the recounts are done.
But all of that is irrelevant.
The reason why Trump and the GOP are talking about election fraud is because this will be the new birtherism. There was never any evidence that Obama wasn’t born in the US, but birtherism was kept alive by conspiracy nuts on right-wing blogs and propaganda machines long enough for Trump to become its most public mouth-piece. It must not be forgotten that that’s how he leveraged his “fame” from The Apprentice into politics.
Election fraud will do the same thing: no evidence will ever come to light, but it will be kept alive by right-wing hucksters (including Trump). It’ll be 24/7 on Trump TV, with Hannity and Pompeo and Barr as special guests, interviews with Proud Boys, and the GOP-controlled Senate will use it to justify obstruction and inaction from Day 1 on the grounds that the Biden presidency is illegitimate.
I don’t know if anyone is hoping that the Trump horror show is over, but I assure you: it has only evolved, and the next version may be even destructive.
Can’t Trump, Barr, Giuliani and the rest of the conspiracy theorists be prosecuted for this? To make up stories about electoral fraud should be treason.
What they are doing is perfectly legal, albeit destructive. By the end of November, states will have certified their results, and the election will be fully over. I don’t think the Trumpies can stop Biden’s inauguration, but they can make life miserable in the meantime. I note they are refusing to cooperate with the transition, printing faked newspapers, producing videos purporting to show democrats burning Trump ballots, and many other similar cons.
Also, I note that 70% of Trump voters now say they believe the election was rigged, just as Trump tells them. That won’t change the results, but it might well provoke violence the Republicans can blame on the villain du jure. We have over 70 million angry voters, who had been assured Trump would win any fair election in a landslide.
With that kind of voting power, and Trump still at large, and Republicans fearing primaries in 2 years, and McConnell still running the Senate, I don’t see how Biden can do much more than weed the poison out of the bureaucracy and make optimistic speeches. Neither Democrats nor Republicans can fathom how any intelligent, informed, right-minded person could possibly have voted against their candidate.
As Wiley Miller wrote, it is far easier to fool people, than to convince them they have been fooled.
Flint,
Yeah. Trump is probably campaigning already with the 2024 election in mind. He knows the lawsuits are not going anywhere, but won’t let his propaganda apparatus slow down one iota.
They’re saying now they’ve gotten affidavits from observers who will testify there was fraud in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Arizona, Nevada.. well, pretty much every single swing state where they lost. If they have persuaded those poor idiots of committing perjury and they end up ruining their lives, then what?
The de jure villain du jour? 😉
As I understand it, they have claims from various observers of irregularities, not fraud. There were in fact a few clerical errors, a few poorly trained vote counters, some not-entirely-clear directions and procedures. Beyond that, there are claims that “curing” ballots was partisan, which is a hoot. Counties run by Democrats allowed such curing (i.e. correcting minor errors on ballots); those run by Republicans generally disallowed curing, and NOW they claim curing was partisan, so all curing should be disallowed. I notice that one postal worker who claimed fraud decided to confess that there wasn’t any when he was asked to provide his evidence.
So all in all, I doubt there’s much perjury here, but a few dozen cases of clerical error. Even the Republicans admit that there’s no indication of anything that would remotely threaten any state result. The goal, rather, is to undermine public confidence in the election, and that’s working among most of those who voted for losing candidates. And of course monkey wrench the transition, in the hopes of blaming the resulting delays and confusion on the Democrats.
Yeah, that.
Everyone in the USA is racist, and proud of it, and loudly proclaim it.
If you were here in the U.S. and not there in your own racist conclave you could loudly proclaim it with the rest of us.
You are so utterly clueless phoodoo.
Given that the U.S. is so “inherently racist” why do those who proclaim it is so not admit that it’s because of them?
Says the indoctrinated and oblivious KN.
How do you explain then what goes in in predominately black, latin, or asian cultures? It’s all WHITE SUPREMACIST!
Give us a break. Why not admit it’s all class warfare, regardless of color?
Biden was, and still is, a Democrat. Why not get your facts straight? Unless facts simply no longer matter.
Uncle Tom was supposed to apply only to blacks. 🙂
Coincidentally that is the most recent motto of the Republican Party “ Facts simply no longer matter since 2016”
Then poor rednecks are on the same side as poor black folks? Must be a bitch when reality refuses to cooperate with your faux outrage.
One postal worker has recanted his claims of hanky-panky. Interesting that Trump fired the Secretary of Defense, the civilian head of the military. Wonder who is on Trump’s speed dial?
Trump is willing to undermine the bedrock of the US , the peaceful transition of power if he can make money off of it.
Putin must be licking his chops. Trump losing re-election is even more disruptive than him winning the Presidency.
The shitshow rolls on. After the cosmic ineptitude of #FourSeasonsgate, he’s now aggressively importuning supporters to crowdfund his campaign. Spent $1.6bn he didn’t have, apparently. No wonder he’s crapping it.
Eta – that’s funny; I’d misspelled ‘ineptitude’!
Allan Miller,
All in the face of Biden having so far received 5 million more votes.
Inconceivable!
That was fucking hilarious.
dazz,
Giuliani almost* at his best.
*Trumped by his Borat cameo. 😳😁
I was wondering why we hadn’t heard much from Mike Pence
Some officials’ actions, allies said, made it clear how little confidence there is that Trump’s legal strategy will prevail. Vice President Mike Pence, for example, is scheduled to leave Tuesday for vacation in Florida through the weekend.
“All you need to know is that Pence is going on vacation,” a person close to Trump said when asked about the prospects for his legal fight.
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2020-election/trump-aides-fret-about-damage-refusal-accept-loss-n1247173
ETA oops spelling
For those who can stomach reading a left-wing perspective on history without going into hysterics about “indoctrination” or “ideology”:
From The U.S. is Not a Democracy, It Never Was
Kantian Naturalist,
I suppose the article has some very good points, but I couldn’t get much past this, especially as the article author has written a book on the subject:
Columbus never set foot in North America, so I don’t know what he is talking about.
phoodoo,
Many of the Indigenous people of the Caribbean were eradicated by disease, starvation, and the hardships of the work they were made to do in the mines, as divers, and on plantations. By the middle of the 16th-century, their numbers were so low that the import of Africans as slaves was necessary to continue to colonial conquest.
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/anthropology-in-practice/who-are-the-indigenous-people-that-columbus-met/
Alan Fox,
What is your point? The article, and Tom’s post were talking about United States democracy. Not about the entire geo-political history of South America.
I believe Rockhill’s point was that the colonization of North America, and the subsequent rejection of British rule by those colonies, is part of the much larger story of European conquest of the Americas that began with Columbus’s arrival in the Caribbean.
Roots! See KN’s post before mine.
Quell ironie!
Quelle ironie, cette erreur d’orthographe! 🙂
ETA to correct un erreur to une erreur! 🙁
Alan Fox,
No, it’s a misplaced tag. What Allan did was to quell irony. Quell ironie!
By the way, I was quite surprised to see, when I was writing the comment, that the Chrome browser is smart enough to flag quell when it is followed by ironie (at least when you have it set up to flag questionable usage, as I do).
What first came to mind was Kay ironie! But that’s not as good.
Wut? “Central America” is a continent now? I think not.
If you’re going to be a pedant, at least get it right: “Columbus never set foot in
North Americathe land mass currently called the U.S.A.”And this factoid really does not counter the accuracy of the statement that “As soon as Columbus set foot, Europeans began robbing, enslaving and killing the native inhabitants.” whether the genocide was occurring on Hispaniola, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, or in South America.
Tom English,
I was just amused and embarrassed that I was hoist with my own pedantry! 😉
Alan Fox,
Wait a sec?
Did you actually correct Tom thus:
“Quelle ironie, cet erreur d’orthographe! ”
That’s a whole new level of Alanis.
DNA_Jock,
I only mentioned it once and I thought I got away with it! 🤭
Great read. Funny how Andrew Jackson’s move seems to come straight from Trump’s bag of tricks:
Torley-esque rhetoric fares poorly in courts of law:
“Trump lawyers suffer embarrassing rebukes from judges over voter fraud claims“
Central America, what’s that? Never heard of it. It doesn’t exist does it? Why would you use a term that you claim doesn’t exist?
And that’s why the US was never started as a democracy? Because of the genocide in South America you mean?
Don’t write a book, your idea of accuracy won’t be pleasing to many.
phoodoo,
Sorry, my mistake, I did not realize your geography was so lacking. Hispaniola, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, and Puerto Rico [!] are NOT in South America. They all had native inhabitants that were robbed, enslaved, and killed by the arriving Europeans, in a pattern was repeated all across the Americas, North and South. Columbus started the colonization of the Americas, and that colonial history explains why the US Constitution is so undemocratic: the Founding Fathers did not trust the plebes.
Where did you learn your history?
You are the one (along with the author) speciously conflating the geo-politics of South and Central America with the history of the United States.
If the author begins his argument about America never starting off as a democracy because Europeans were killings indigenous people in Puerto Rico or Nicaragua, then the precision and fairness of his argument is rightly questionable.
It got even worse when the Brits arrived in north America, so I’m not sure what you’re talking about.
dazz,
But what about the Reconquista?
Love it! 🙂
You opine about the the U.S. elections without having a clue about how they actually work.
Any halfway educated person knows that the U.S. was founded as a Republic.
Leftist indoctrination notwithstanding. 🙂
LMAO. If you’re the first one to say this then you deserve full credit. Love it!
What about it? What does that have to do with anything?
When will you European racists begin paying reparations?
Exactly.