US Election 2020

[Seabass]

The common refrain from all of these foreign correspondents is that covering politics in the US is now more reminiscent of covering politics in failed states and autocratic regimes than what they see in developed countries.

What Do Foreign Correspondents Think of the U.S.? | The New Yorker Documentary

[Tero]

First time PA voters thrown out by PA court (not feds)

The Trump campaign on Thursday won a case attempting to disqualify a small number of mail-in ballots for first-time Pennsylvania voters who were unable to confirm their identification by Nov. 9.

These ballots had been segregated pending the judge’s decision and have not yet been counted, so their disqualification will not affect the current vote count in Pennsylvania. Joe Biden won the state, and subsequently the election, on Saturday and currently leads President Trump by more than 53,000 votes.

Commonwealth Court President Judge Mary Hannah Leavitt ruled that Pennsylvania Secretary of State Kathy Boockvar lacked authority when she issued guidance to county boards of election to count mail ballots so long as voters’ IDs were confirmed by Nov. 12.

Ms. Boockvar argued to the court that the guidance came from a provision in the commonwealth’s election code that allows voters to prove their identities “within six calendar days following the election.” Because the Pennsylvania Supreme Court extended the ballot deadline to Nov. 6, then the deadline for voters to confirm their ID would also be extended.

But the Trump campaign disagreed. “If the deadline is calculated as the statute is written, then as it pertains to the November 3, 2020 General Election, this deadline for voters to resolve proof of identification issues is Monday, November 9, 2020, not November 12, 2020,” the campaign wrote in a filing. They also said Ms. Boockvar lacked the authority to give such guidance.

https://www.post-gazette.com/news/crime ... 2011120132

[L'Emmerdeur]

The true Trumpists are certain that he won the election. Being who they are, they have a ready-made zoo of nefarious entities that have perpetrated the supposed fraud. The right wing site I'm a member of is full of outraged yammering about the horrible injustice being foisted upon the US.

If anybody cares to sample the waters, I offer the post below. It's an archive site version.

'U.S. Color Revolution: The Not So Phantom Menace'

The Black Revolution in the U.S. is proceeding according to script. We are into the 3rd act of it.

Act I was the Coronapocalypse setting the stage for vastly expanded government powers and the systemic undermining of the sitting President.

Act II was the summer of violence and fake polling data which created the illusion of a society at war with that same President for not addressing the needs of the people.

Underneath the headlines the forces arrayed against Trump were building the infrastructure to ensure that however the people voted on November 3rd, the outcome was pre-determined in their favor against him.

Act III is the election itself and the aftermath. The coup has begun. The pressure campaign to force the incumbent Trump, hated by the establishment, to concede has ratcheted up to eleven.

This is all very normal for color revolutions, just ask Alexander Lukashenko in Belarus or Viktor Yanukovich formerly of the Ukraine. We can’t ask Slobodon Milosovic. He dead.

But one thing happened they didn’t count on, Trump actually winning the election by margins in swing states that couldn’t be overcome without overt and blatant fraud.

[Tero]

That's what you get for bringing people from Africa 500 years ago here, to use as tractors and other farm machinery. It's not their fault. Bring Washington and Jefferson.

[L'Emmerdeur]

As I parse the ravings of that particular loon, though he names black people in the US (specifically the Black Lives Matter movement) as part of the nefarious 'they' who are stealing the election from Trump, the 'Black' in the title is him assigning black as the color of the 'revolution' that 'they' are carrying out covertly in plain sight, referencing previous color revolutions.

[Brian Peacock]

Republicans aren't conceding – and Democrats are bringing a knife to a gun fight

The recent HBO film 537 Votes, about the Florida 2000 election mess, offers one overarching message: Democrats’ refusal to sound a clear alarm about the slow-motion heist in process ultimately let the election be stolen.

In that debacle, Democrats seemed to think things would break their way with well-honed arguments inside the cloistered confines of the legal system – they never understood how public-facing politics can play a role in what ended up being a pivotal political brawl outside the courtroom.

Now, 20 years later, the lesson of that debacle isn’t being heeded. Donald Trump and his cronies are quite clearly waging a public-facing campaign designed to create the conditions to pull off a coup in the electoral college process.

This is a full-scale emergency – and yet the Democratic strategy seems to be to try to pretend it isn’t happening, in hopes that norms win out, even though nothing at all is normal.

In the week since the election, Donald Trump and his Republican allies have waged a public campaign to call the election results into question – not just in the courtroom, but in the public’s mind. Their lawsuits and Attorney General William Barr’s recent memo are designed as much to to generate headlines as they are to win rulings and initiate prosecutions. Their tweets asserting fraud, and their high-profile promises of financial reward for evidence of fraud, are all designed to do the same thing.

Most ominously of all, Republican lawmakers in Pennsylvania, Georgia, Wisconsin, Michigan and Arizona are already insinuating the results may be fraudulent, even though they haven’t produced any evidence of widespread fraud.

Why is public perception so important? Because as the Ohio State University law professor Edward Foley shows in a frighteningly prescient 2019 article, legislatures could use the public perception of fraud to try to invoke their constitutional power to ignore their states’ popular votes, reject certified election results and appoint slates of Trump electors...

[L'Emmerdeur]

Not to say that they won't try to go through with the plan, but there are impediments.

'No, State Legislatures Cannot Overrule the Popular Vote'

The Constitution has two main provisions that govern the selection of presidential electors. First, the Constitution says that each state’s legislature has the authority to determine that state’s manner of choosing its electors. Second, the Constitution gives Congress the power to decide when the electors are chosen, which Congress has done by enacting a federal law designating the Tuesday after the first Monday in November — Election Day.

Proponents of the legislative-appointment theory read too much into the first constitutional provision and forget about the second. Although every state has chosen its electors by popular vote for more than a century, most constitutional experts agree that, under the legislature’s authority to choose the “manner” of appointing electors, a legislature could theoretically decide before Election Day to cancel the popular vote for presidential electors and instead appoint them directly. But Congress’s enactment of a uniform national Election Day under its own constitutional authority — which supersedes any contrary state actions — prohibits the choice of electors from being made based on elections held or laws passed after Election Day.

In other words, under the constitutional timing provision as implemented by federal law, the absolute last day a state legislature could have decided to appoint the state’s presidential electors for this election was November 3, 2020. Once that date passed, the determinative popular votes had all been cast, and therefore the legislature’s authority to change the state’s manner of appointing electors in 2020 passed as well.

[Tero]

https://mobile.twitter.com/TheDailyShow ... 3065103362

On conceding an election.

[L'Emmerdeur]

The Deep State (US Cyber & Infrastructure Security Agency) weighs in on the 'they fiddled the machines!' narrative.

'Joint Statement From Elections Infrastructure Government Coordinating Council & the Election Infrastructure Sector Coordinating Executive Committees'

When states have close elections, many will recount ballots. All of the states with close results in the 2020 presidential race have paper records of each vote, allowing the ability to go back and count each ballot if necessary. This is an added benefit for security and resilience. This process allows for the identification and correction of any mistakes or errors. There is no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was in any way compromised.

[Bold in original.]

[laklak]

Talked to a mate from Atlanta today, he calls the manual recount a "Georgia Handjob".

[JimC]

As long as there's a happy ending...

[L'Emmerdeur]

[Seabass]

Masha Gessen is a Russian-American journalist who has written extensively about the fall of the Soviet Union, Russia's brief experiment with democracy, and its eventual slide into autocracy.

By Declaring Victory, Donald Trump Is Attempting an Autocratic Breakthrough


The President of the United States has called the election a fraud. He has declared victory without basis, tweeting on Wednesday, “We have claimed” Pennsylvania, Georgia, North Carolina, and perhaps Michigan—all states that were still counting votes. Donald Trump, who has been engaged in an autocratic attempt for the last four years, is now trying to stage an autocratic breakthrough.

I have borrowed the term “autocratic attempt” from the work of Bálint Magyar, a Hungarian sociologist who set out to develop analytical tools for understanding the turn away from democracy in many Eastern and Central European countries. I have found Magyar’s ideas surprisingly illuminating when applied to the United States.

Magyar divides the autocrat’s journey into three stages: autocratic attempt, autocratic breakthrough, and autocratic consolidation. The attempt is a period when autocracy is still preventable, or reversible, by electoral means. When it is no longer possible to reverse autocracy peacefully, the autocratic breakthrough has occurred, because the very structures of government have been transformed and can no longer protect themselves. These changes usually include packing the constitutional court (the Supreme Court, in the case of the U.S.) with judges loyal to the autocrat; packing and weakening the courts in general; appointing a chief prosecutor (the Attorney General) who is loyal to the autocrat and will enforce the law selectively on his behalf; changing the rules on the appointment of civil servants; weakening local governments; unilaterally changing electoral rules (to accommodate gerrymandering, for instance); and changing the Constitution to expand the powers of the executive.

For all the apparent flailing and incompetence of the Trump Administration, his autocratic attempt checks most of the boxes. He has appointed three Supreme Court Justices and a record number of federal judges. The Justice Department, under William Barr, acts like Trump’s pocket law-enforcement agency and personal law firm. Trump’s army of “acting” officials, some of them carrying out their duties in violation of relevant federal regulations, have made mincemeat of the rules and norms of federal appointments. Trump has preëmptively declared the election rigged; has incited voter intimidation and encouraged voter suppression; has mobilized his armed supporters to prevent votes from being counted; and has explicitly stated that he is changing the rules of the election. “We want all voting to stop,” he said on Wednesday morning, and vowed to take his case to the Supreme Court.

“The populist does not de jure eliminate the separation of powers,” Magyar writes, “but he connects the branches through his competences of appointment in a single vertical of vassalage.” The Russian President, Vladimir Putin, calls it the “vertical of power.” What allows the aspiring autocrat to transform the institutions of government is either a supermajority in parliament or, in a presidential system, a monopoly on political power—a situation in which the Presidency and Congress are held by the same political parties. Americans aren’t used to thinking of a monopoly on political power as a problem; on the contrary, we think that these are the conditions necessary for a President to be able to carry out his political agenda. In fact, with the power to confirm Presidential appointments concentrated in the Senate, Trump didn’t even need the House. In four years, Trump has created a “vertical of vassalage” that runs from him to Barr to the Senate Majority Leader, Mitch McConnell, and to the courts. Its extension is Fox News, which has served as the fourth branch of Trump’s government. (Fox News has been notably noncompliant with Trump’s election narrative, starting with its early call of Arizona for Joe Biden, which incited the President’s rage.)

Trump is trying to use his vertical of vassalage to thwart the electoral system. If he succeeds, his autocratic breakthrough will be complete. If he fails, Trump will leave—reluctantly, petulantly, perhaps after a litigious delay—but much of the vertical that he has put in place will remain.

Autocratic structural changes are invariably harder to reverse than they are to institute. If the Senate remains in Republican hands, reversal—at least in the short term—is virtually impossible. If Biden wanted to expand the number of Justices on the Supreme Court, for example, he would be unable to get this through the Senate; even regular district-level judgeships may prove difficult to fill. All this increases the likelihood that, if he is elected, Biden will likely proceed as if politics as normal has been restored, because he and the Democratic Party treat Trump as an aberration—cured simply by being voted out of office.

The last two days have, once again, shown that Trump is neither an aberration nor the product of Russian interference, but rather the conscious choice of roughly half of the voters, or some sixty-five million Americans. This is a giant and, now, aggrieved movement, capable of carrying Trump or, more likely, one of his children, back into office in 2024 or 2028. (Incidentally, Viktor Orbán, following his first term as Prime Minister of Hungary, spent two electoral cycles as the leader of the political opposition, before sweeping back into office on a supermajority vote and immediately engineering an autocratic breakthrough.) If, upon his Inauguration, a President Biden acts as though our national nightmare is over—if he attempts to build bridges and fetishizes bipartisanship in order to pass some watered-down legislation, rather than, say, even acknowledging the necessary and probably impossible task of unpacking the federal judiciary—then the autocratic attempt can return, and it will be stronger.

Biden will need to work to dismantle the Trumpian vertical and address the conditions that made it possible: the role of money in politics; the Electoral College and all the active and passive ways in which the voting system discourages and prevents participation; the unregulated profit-driven media, both traditional and new, and the underfunded public media; the concentration of power in the executive branch; and the gerontocratic political duopoly. Nothing short of reinventing American democracy, spiritually and institutionally, can protect us.

https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-colu ... eakthrough

[Brian Peacock]

Not to say that they won't try to go through with the plan, but there are impediments.

'No, State Legislatures Cannot Overrule the Popular Vote'

The Constitution has two main provisions that govern the selection of presidential electors. First, the Constitution says that each state’s legislature has the authority to determine that state’s manner of choosing its electors. Second, the Constitution gives Congress the power to decide when the electors are chosen, which Congress has done by enacting a federal law designating the Tuesday after the first Monday in November — Election Day.

Proponents of the legislative-appointment theory read too much into the first constitutional provision and forget about the second. Although every state has chosen its electors by popular vote for more than a century, most constitutional experts agree that, under the legislature’s authority to choose the “manner” of appointing electors, a legislature could theoretically decide before Election Day to cancel the popular vote for presidential electors and instead appoint them directly. But Congress’s enactment of a uniform national Election Day under its own constitutional authority — which supersedes any contrary state actions — prohibits the choice of electors from being made based on elections held or laws passed after Election Day.

In other words, under the constitutional timing provision as implemented by federal law, the absolute last day a state legislature could have decided to appoint the state’s presidential electors for this election was November 3, 2020. Once that date passed, the determinative popular votes had all been cast, and therefore the legislature’s authority to change the state’s manner of appointing electors in 2020 passed as well.

As I understand it Foley's argument comes down to whether the political narrative of fraud and inconsistency in the casting and canvassing process is strong enough to embolden Repuglican state legislators to bypass the state governor's certification of college electors to Congress and instead legislating to send their own certification to Congress to reflect the 'real' popular vote as suggested by the said political narrative. Thus when Congress addresses the issue of the electoral college votes on 6 Jan there may be two conflicting certificates from certain contested states. Congress deciding to accept one over another will be controversial and contested, and it's at this point that the Supreme Court is then asked to settle the question of whether a state's legislature or governor is the proper validator of the a state's certified electors. Fraud or other illegalities may not have to be proven if the political narrative that there are enough inconsistencies to cast the result into doubt has enough political and public traction/momentum. The Supreme Court would probably not make a decisive decision on that matter but instead return the question to the state legislature to determine - where they would be able to empower themselves to effectively override the governor's certification of electors according to the popular vote.

It's certainly doable in the way Foley imagines. It's just a matter of whether Repuglicans would go that far and be that brazen.

[Tero]

4 dead people may or may not have voted in Georgia! Entire vote in state must be scrapped and Trump electors appointed!

https://www.cnn.com/2020/11/12/politics ... index.html