2020 Election Results 3: The Longest Episode of Democracy Ever

[Cartmann99]

30 minutes ago, GreyhoundFan said:

This is a good point:

He's not going to pay those lawyers when he loses.

Bret better hire a bodyguard to protect him from Trump's fans.

[clueliss]

I’m going to leave this photo gem right here

 

[DaisyD]

5 minutes ago, AmazonGrace said:

 

Possibly because of all those super spreader "rallies"?

[TuringMachine]

If my math is right, if Biden gets Arizona Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Georgia, trump will get the same number of electoral votes as Hillary did (before the faithless electors).

[onekidanddone]

10 minutes ago, DaisyD said:

Nobody wants him there anyway. Just put his shit on the front lawn. 

Kushner owned properties are starting to evict people in the middle of a pandemic. Would love to see the golden toilet tossed in the middle of Pennsylvania AVE

[thoughtful]

 

[HerNameIsBuffy]

1 hour ago, Don'tlikekoolaid said:

OK Folks I pendulumed Biden and Trump and the pendulum says BIDEN is going to win!   Yes, I am that desperate!

I originally read the bolded as 'perineum' and thought that was a delightfully naughty way to thank Biden for sending Trump packing!

34 minutes ago, formergothardite said:

He seemed almost drugged. I didn't get the meltdown I feel like we deserve to see, but he does seem real, real down. Some part of him has to be realizing that the walls are closing in on him and he is fucked. 

I just watched the first part with one of my sons and we both thought the same thing, he seems heavily medicated.

[GreyhoundFan]

Pence is trying to ensure his lord and master doesn't turn against him:

[TuringMachine]

 

[JenniferJuniper]

17 minutes ago, thoughtful said:

I think I have the last 4 digits of those numbers memorized. When are you going to flip, GA? Will it help if I eat a peach?

 

A little T.S. Eliot?  Do I dare disturb the universe? Do I dare to eat a peach?  

[DaisyD]

8 minutes ago, HerNameIsBuffy said:

I originally read the bolded as 'perineum' and thought that was a delightfully naughty way to thank Biden for sending Trump packing!

I just watched the first part with one of my sons and we both thought the same thing, he seems heavily medicated.

Do you think it's possible they had to tranq him? ???

[Ozlsn]

1 hour ago, Destiny said:

Jesus. This speech is going to get people killed. 

Was listening to the radio, and that was my first thought too.

10 minutes ago, DaisyD said:

Possibly because of all those super spreader "rallies"?

More likely because they have been following Trump's "advice" on coronavirus, not wearing masks, going to church and continuing as if the pandemic weren't real. 

[AmazonGrace]

 

[HerNameIsBuffy]

39 minutes ago, Giraffe said:

I bet you’re right. At this point I’ll be shocked if he attends the inauguration.

He's not going to start acting like a grown up now.  I wonder if he will bother creating carnage or just take his injured feelings and skip out.  He doesn't strike me as the kind of guy who works his notice period when his job is ending.

32 minutes ago, GreyhoundFan said:

He has already said he won't attend if Biden wins.

Best parting gift ever.

[Ozlsn]

Just now, AmazonGrace said:

 

Mugabe must be rolling with laughter in his grave. He offered to send observers to Florida in 2000 - and let's face it, if anyone would recognise a fixed election it'd be Mugabe. 

[Coconut Flan]

4 minutes ago, Ozlsn said:

More likely because they have been following Trump's "advice" on coronavirus, not wearing masks, going to church and continuing as if the pandemic weren't real. 

Put in my daughter's terms, if you're stupid enough to believe Trump, then you are stupid enough not to follow basic health precautions. 

[Ozlsn]

1 minute ago, Coconut Flan said:

Put in my daughter's terms, if you're stupid enough to believe Trump, then you are stupid enough not to follow basic health precautions. 

On the positive side the pandemic should be done by the end of the week... right? /s

[GreyhoundFan]

USAToday cut away from the press conference too.

 

[Xan]

12 minutes ago, DaisyD said:

Do you think it's possible they had to tranq him? ???

I'm visualizing an elephant tranq blow dart...

10 minutes ago, HerNameIsBuffy said:

He's not going to start acting like a grown up now.  I wonder if he will bother creating carnage or just take his injured feelings and skip out.  He doesn't strike me as the kind of guy who works his notice period when his job is ending.

Best parting gift ever.

He won't stick around that long.  If he can't sue someone to let him win, he'll leave the country.  He's not sticking around to let the NY AG start questioning him.  My bet would be Saudi Arabia -- if they'll have him.

[GreyhoundFan]

If anyone knows about a lack of shame, it would be "the mooch".

[thoughtful]

3 minutes ago, Xan said:

I'm visualizing an elephant tranq blow dart...

I was picturing one of his sons with a tranq gun. Posing afterwards would have been a nice touch.

 

[NotQuiteMotY]

43 minutes ago, GreyhoundFan said:

From the WaPo: "I counted votes in Michigan. There’s no way to commit fraud."

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I spent Election Day in a high school cafeteria, helping to count absentee ballots in Ann Arbor, Mich. I started at 7 a.m. and didn’t leave or have contact with the outside world until my shift ended 13 hours later. All of us either left our phones in our vehicles or checked the devices in at the door. Especially during an election this stressful, it was a relief to feel busy and useful and disconnected from the news — rather than anxious and paralyzed, endlessly scrolling for an update.

The next day, I saw the theory proliferating online that several ballots had “magically” surfaced in Michigan. At a counting center in Detroit, Trump supporters showed up and pounded on the windows and doors, demanding that the count be stopped and that they be let in. Rumors spread about other states, too, as commentators seized on mundane parts of the process as a sign of fraud — even things like some counties pausing the count overnight, to give poll workers some rest.

Those claims are totally detached from reality — from the painstaking, multilayered, tedious process of accounting for and tabulating every ballot. The count involves so many steps, so many layers of double-checking and supervision, that it would be virtually impossible to fake even a single ballot. It’s dangerous to suggest that anyone could fake enough ballots to change the result. From my experience, it’s also totally absurd.

From the moment I walked into the building, I was sequestered for the day. We couldn’t leave, other than to step outside and eat. (Sandwiches were provided for lunch and dinner.) We weren’t even allowed to go out to our cars. We learned only after we’d shown up who else would be on our voting board and what task we’d get for the day. No one could coordinate anything beforehand. My board had about seven people. Each of us was identified by our political party, so that each board could include a mix of Democrats and Republicans.

When we arrived in the morning, there were sealed bags of ballots, one for each of the three precincts assigned to our center. The city clerk had already checked that each person casting a ballot was registered to vote and that the identification number on their ballot and signature on the outer envelope matched the ones on record on the voter rolls. The clerk had also determined a total vote count and drawn up a list of ballots in that batch, and local police had watched the bags until our arrival. Precinct by precinct, we counted the number of ballots in the bags, making sure that matched the totals on the clerk’s list. Then we divided the ballots into stacks and began.

My job was at the front of the line: I took the outer envelope, checked again that it was signed and that the number on the outside matched the one on the ballot stub. Then I checked to ensure that the ballot hadn’t been erroneously assigned to the wrong precinct. I took the ballot out of its outer envelope. I tore off the ballot’s stub, which stuck out at the very top of the privacy sleeve, and set that aside. Eventually, I brought the pile of sleeved ballots over to the next station. Occasionally, a voter didn’t quite close the sleeve correctly, but even so, the process prevented me from getting a sense of how people voted. Once the ballot was out of its envelope, but still in its sleeve, and the stub has been torn off, the link between the voter’s name and how they voted is broken. The work was repetitive, but not especially mentally taxing — it was almost meditative.

At the next station, another volunteer took the ballot out of the privacy seal and made sure it was filled in correctly, in black or blue ink. Then they brought it to a tabulator, a high-speed, automated machine that processed ballots in batches of 50, outputting results automatically. If a ballot wasn’t filled in correctly — if the marks were in highlighter or something — then the ballot went to the duplicator table, staffed by one Democrat and one Republican. According to very strict rules, they copied over that ballot’s markings onto a fresh ballot, even if it contained mistakes (like voting for two presidential candidates instead of one). The original was kept as a record, and the fixed copy went to the tabulator to be scanned.

It would take a level of effort I can’t even comprehend to circumvent that process. The sheer volume of ballots, their exact ID numbers, the number of people involved who have never met each other and don’t have much opportunity to talk and don’t have their cellphones — all those layers add up and keep the process fair and the count accurate. Michigan also allows all political parties, as well as some nonpartisan groups, to each have one election challenger at the count. They walked around, taking notes. They could stand behind us and watch us work, and they could ask questions at any time about what we were doing and how we were doing it. We had about a dozen people circulating around the space, watching us all day. It was odd to feel that supervised, but I was glad to have them in the room. They would interrupt to ask things like “What are you doing now?” or “Can you explain that to me?” but the tone wasn’t confrontational. Things proceeded smoothly. Over 24 hours, Ann Arbor processed about 55,000 absentee votes, or 93 percent of the absentee ballots it had issued.

In the following days, it made me angry — angrier than I thought I would be — to see people dismiss all that work out of hand with no basis at all, or based on wild, concocted claims. So much work and care and attention go into ensuring that our elections run well. The cooked-up outrage, all those accusations or insinuations, also just felt dumb. It betrays a profound lack of knowledge about the process — a process that is completely knowable, if you take a moment to learn.

For those 13 hours that we counted our city’s ballots, it felt like a bubble of calm amid the country’s chaos. Across party lines, we were working together on something important. At lunch, still phone-less, we chatted about our jobs and our lives in the city and the first thing we would do when the coronavirus pandemic was over. We were all identified by our party registrations, but no one talked about whom they voted for. We participated in our democracy, and there was no ugliness about it.

The past four years have been so discouraging and divisive, and it has made a lot of Americans feel that our country’s institutions are totally broken. But this one, small, crucial thing actually does work. I wish more people could see that.

 

I can feel that sorter's frustration. Not with working/counting the polls, but people not understanding the process. I live in PA, which instituted no-excuse mail-in last year for this year's election. The number of people locally saying that absentee is fine and mail-in is not is exasperating. I've done both and quite literally the only difference between the two was having to provide a reason for doing absentee. It's almost the same application, it's the same verification process, it's the same ballot, they're both counted if they're postmarked by the end of election day. Literally the only difference is having to provide a reason!

[Ticklish]

My aunt - who is generally a friendly and well liked person - has shared a detailed post on Facebook about how this is part of Trump's mastermind plan. See, he's been warning of election fraud and rigging for months now, so what he did is set up the election so the fraud would be caught and the Deep State would be outed and justice done. 

And if you don't understand how he supposedly accomplished all that, neither do I because the post she shared did not elaborate. 

I just...WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK IS WRONG WITH PEOPLE and how can they possibly believe this shit?!

[Giraffe]

I have no doubt his blood pressure is in stroke range today. He very well could be on tranquilizers (or similar meds) simply for that reason!

[GreyhoundFan]

We need this to happen with FBI agents doing the escort. Oh, and on video, so we can watch it over and over.