monitoring Trump and relevant contemporary events

oralloy wrote:

snood wrote:

There is such a thing as a link to a respected source but CJ doesn't provide such links. He is deep into the crazy pants, batpoop nutbag fringe wackos stuff. It's hard to take someone seriously when they offer evidence written in crayon.

And most of his links lead to monkeys in bras dot com.

Even before Election Day, Donald Trump cast doubts on Pennsylvania’s mail-in ballots. The Supreme Court’s decision permitting the state to accept absentee ballots for several days after the election, he tweeted, “is a VERY dangerous one. It will allow rampant and unchecked cheating.” As soon as the election is over, he told reporters on Sunday, “we’re going in with our lawyers.” Republicans are already in court, challenging the count of some mail-in ballots in Pennsylvania.

But there is no rampant fraud going on in Pennsylvania, and any judge with integrity and intellectual honesty should recognize the claim for what it is: specious. Fraud on a scale to affect a presidential election, or even to tip one state, would require planning, coordination, good luck and a high tolerance for risk. The chances of pulling it off are extremely slim.

Such a nefarious plot would require the foresight, many weeks or even months in advance, to know to focus the effort on Pennsylvania. The plotters might hedge their bets by targeting multiple states, but that just makes the effort more expensive, risky and difficult.

A conspiracy to fix the 2020 election in Pennsylvania would also need to muster tens of thousands of votes. In 2016, almost 6.2 million Pennsylvanians cast ballots for the presidency. Donald Trump won by 44,292 votes, 0.7 percent of the total.

Suppose the conspirators somehow knew this year that Pennsylvania would be tied but for their efforts. For the sake of argument, let’s say they decided to marshal 62,000 fraudulent votes, roughly 1 percent of the 2016 total and twice the 0.5 percent margin that sets off an automatic recount. (Even that seems to cut things a little close.)

How hard could it be to order up 62,000 illegal ballots?

The chance that 62,000 Biden supporters in Pennsylvania would spontaneously vote with a second, illegal ballot, either in person or by mail, is effectively zero. It’s hard to believe any voters would expose themselves to the risk of felony prosecution, fines and imprisonment, with no knowledge of whether anybody else was doing so too, in order to bring the Democrats one vote closer to victory in Pennsylvania. A fraud of the necessary size would have to be organized.

And how might that work?

Maybe a fraud mastermind would recruit a thousand accomplices, each of whom would generate 62 illegal ballots. All thousand of them would have to risk their reputation, resources and freedom to beat Donald Trump in Pennsylvania. They would have to be able to keep their work secret then and for all time — and trust their thousand co-conspirators to do the same.

The work of the thousand fraud wranglers would itself require a lot of ingenuity and a big dollop of luck. They might each try to persuade 62 people to vote a second time, but it would be a hard sell.

The recruits wouldn’t want to vote both in person and by mail, given how easy it is for election authorities to detect it. And unless they happen to be registered in two jurisdictions, they can’t vote in more than one — and they risk prosecution if they do. The conspirators would also have to gamble that none of the 62 (or more) people they contact is a secret Trump supporter or a Biden supporter with a healthy conscience.

Alternatively, the conspirators might each impersonate 62 legal voters, perhaps by requesting and returning mail-in ballots. This is also no easy task.

As a safeguard against fraud, Pennsylvania requires most people applying for a mail-in ballot to provide identification — either a state driver’s license or ID card number, or the last four digits of a Social Security number. So the fraud managers would somehow have to discover the correct ID numbers for all 62 voters.

Should even one actual voter turn out to vote or request a mail ballot too, their efforts might be undone, and they’d be exposed to legal jeopardy.

Now multiply all these difficulties by a thousand, because each of the thousand accomplices would face the same problems.

Finally, what if the fraud mastermind is a county election official and just adds 62,000 Biden votes to the tally (or omits 62,000 Trump votes)? Election officials are partisans, of course, and they oversee the vote count.

But most states allow partisan observers to monitor vote counting. Moreover, it might look a little suspicious if a county’s normal vote count is suddenly 62,000 larger or smaller. Tipping a presidential election at the counting stage would also require a lot of people acting in concert, organized a long time in advance.

The challenges to vote fraud on a scale sufficient to change the outcome of a presidential election are daunting, to say the least. To steal a presidential election would require, at a minimum, tens of thousands of votes (or even millions, if anybody really thinks the president was cheated out of a popular-vote victory in 2016).

The costs of committing vote fraud go up with the number of votes, and so does the likelihood of detection, prosecution and penalty.

This year, by the looks of it, many Pennsylvanians voted for the first time or for the first time in a long time, some of whom were perhaps motivated by animus toward President Trump.

But that’s not fraud. That’s democracy.

snood wrote:

Didn’t you say there were 100,000 votes found in Michigan, all for Joe Biden?

We’re you mistaken, or lying?

Not mistaken, in fact it was over 100,000. And I am not lying. Democrats are doing it because they will not be held accountable when Biden wins, if he wins.

From twitter:
The only way Trump gets to 270 now is if he loses 50 pounds.

Of course, it doesn’t feel that way, with the former vice president not yet certain to secure 270 electoral votes as of Wednesday evening. Of course, preventing President Trump from inflicting the damage of a second term on the country is the most important thing, by far.

But assuming that Biden manages to eke out an electoral college victory, the path ahead of him is daunting: an electorate divided; a likely Republican Senate disinclined to compromise; and a Trump-enhanced Supreme Court poised to frustrate him at every turn.

The closeness of the results underscores the alarming reality that a significant plurality of Americans supports the most disastrous, most dangerous president in our history. Biden has, wisely and appropriately, promised to govern as president for all Americans — that is, the opposite of Trump’s divisive approach. But even winning the popular vote does not erase the fact that Biden would inherit a country whose citizens are as angry and polarized as at any moment in a century and a half.

Biden ran pledging to restore the soul of America, but Americans do not agree about the nature of that soul. To be specific, too many do not accept the danger that Trump poses. Even if Trump turns out to have lost, there has been no resounding repudiation of Trumpism to accompany that defeat.

That has implications for the road ahead. Democrats have apparently fallen short in their bid to win a Senate majority. Having installed three new conservative Supreme Court justices, having stacked the rest of the judiciary with conservatives, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), newly reelected, may be quietly relieved not to have to deal with the craziness of a Trump presidency.

He may be perfectly content to spend the next four years doing what he does best: obstructing. Without an electorate clearly clamoring for change and accommodation, what incentive do McConnell and other Republicans have to work with Biden and help his presidency succeed? Perhaps with Trump gone, supposed moderate Republicans may discover the spines they put in storage for the past four years. Color me skeptical.

In less poisonous times, the conventional wisdom would be that divided government offers an opportunity for forging the kind of bipartisan compromise necessary to build an enduring consensus on difficult issues. I’ve made those arguments myself. But this approach is a naive artifact of a gentler era. It’s easier to imagine McConnell and other Republicans blockading Democratic nominees, including to the Supreme Court, than to see them finding ways to work together.

In less poisonous times, you might argue, divided government would give Biden a convenient excuse for standing up to some of the excesses of their party’s left wing. Certainly, McConnell in charge means no push to do away with the filibuster or pack the court; it reduces the left’s ability to insist on Cabinet nominees who would never be confirmed in McConnell’s Senate.

Still, the Democratic left seems in little mood to stand down. Those forces are as likely to take the close results of the race as confirmation that what they see as Biden’s milquetoast centrism was uninspiring and nearly fatal. That Biden will be less able to deliver on their demands does not make it more likely those demands will fade.

Biden will also have to deal with the most conservative Supreme Court since the New Deal. If Biden, limited in what he can accomplish legislatively, turns to regulation, he will confront a court that is reflexively hostile to the administrative state, and willing to consider extraordinary changes in law to limit its reach. Meanwhile, the conservative justices’ faith in an all-powerful chief executive may recede with the reality of a Democratic president.

The threat posed by the court to a Biden agenda is as important as it is obscure. One possibility is that the court will do away with or significantly limit what is known as Chevron deference, which essentially presumes that regulatory agencies have correctly interpreted the laws they enforce. Imagine a newly aggressive Biden Environmental Protection Agency or Labor Department. Now imagine how the justices might slap them down.

Likewise, the conservative justices could rule that independent regulatory agencies are unconstitutional. And they have been toying — even before the arrival of Justice Amy Coney Barrett — with resurrecting what’s called the non-delegation doctrine, a pre-New Deal approach that limits how much power lawmakers can transfer to administrative agencies or departments. That approach, as Justice Elena Kagan has warned, could mean that “most of government is unconstitutional.”

Add to all that the even more gloomy earthly challenges Biden confronts: assuming office in the midst of a pandemic that has killed nearly 235,000 Americans and is now poised to rage out of control; dealing with the accompanying economic dislocations; taking on the longer-term challenges of climate change, income inequality and systemic racism; making a start at healing a deeply scarred nation.

Winning was hard enough. Governing effectively in this environment may be mission impossible.

What do you actually call a form of government in which the country's president doesn't want every vote to count towards the election?

Walter Hinteler wrote:

What do you actually call a form of government in which the country's president doesn't want every vote to count towards the election?

A third world puppet government!

Russian lawmakers have introduced a bill into parliament that would give Vladimir Putin lifetime immunity from prosecution if and when he decides to leave office.

Now, that's an idea, isn't it Mr. President?

Oh hey, Biden has somehow secured more votes than Obama in his landslide 2008 win

Couldn't you just feel the national enthusiasm for Biden???

I wouldn't DARE suggest that there's something out of place here, or that the Left is so deranged in their abject hatred of Trump and his supporters that they would consider it morally right to lie and steal and cheat to have power in their hands.

I mean, it's not like there are rampant, wide-spread reports coming in every minute about Republicans being blocked from ballot counting centers, massive shady upticks in Biden votes, Dems bringing in suspicious crates in the dead of night, USPS corruption, lots of dead people voting for Biden, the purposeful delay of counts, or anything of the sort.

What a clown show, folks.

A lawyer working with the group Lawyers for Trump captured video of some highly suspicious activity at one Detroit vote-counting center. Under the cover of darkness, vans and cars delivered unidentified boxes into the secured vote-counting rooms.