- On Election Day, I was one of the hundreds of credentialed “challengers” at the Absent Voter Counting Board in the TCF Center in Detroit. I volunteered with the Democratic Party of Michigan, completed two training sessions and was excited to help protect the integrity of the election, the ballots and the dignity of the workers.
What I saw was democracy in action, ordinary Americans working hard to count hundreds of thousands of ballots. It was a process so layered with checks, balances and hundreds of observers that fraud was nearly impossible.
But what my fellow challengers saw was conspiracy and fraud. That’s because they are Republicans and came determined to find it even if it wasn’t there.
DONALD TRUMP'S STABLE GENIUS RE-ELECTION PLAN (Look, it's NOT a Coup, folks)
1. Politicize caring about a pandemic, and further discourage mail-in voting from supporters with bogus claims of widespread fraudulence (see ecib's article for some results of this).
2. Slow down mail processing, and prevent increased funding to USPS, which should've been afforded on the basis of pandemic conditions.
3. Declare victory early, while still ahead in the popular vote, despite no reputable media outlets calling the election either way.
4. Pretend like it's evidence of voter fraud that left-leaning urban counties' mail-in ballots, which are tallied last, in accordance with some states' laws (like PA), took a while to count. (Maybe 1 million-ish votes should take a while to count?)
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Many of us predicted this exact thing would happen. Trump himself openly telegraphed the plan! I didn't anticipate how well it would be received by the average Trumpkin. But no, it fucking worked, by and large, in the court of GOP public opinion. It's still blowing my mind.
Did the left/establishment question whether or not Trump was legitimate? Only in the sense of wondering how successful Russian influence operations were in swing states. Never was election integrity seriously questioned, only the gullibility of American voters. So anyone pretending like this is simply a tit-for-tat can fuck right on off. Clinton conceded when it was clear she lost.
Again, I want unification ("unition" is a word), but it's going to take me at least a few more weeks before I might not feel like leading off conversations with Trumpkins: "So. You're a moron, huh?".
It's clear Trump will claim that the 2020 election was not legit forever. Time to start making jokes about it. The disparity between Trump's tweets and what his lawyers are saying in court is ripe.
edit: btw, another good one was a headline on the Fox homepage referring to the late Ruth Bader Ginsburg as "RGB"
edit2: one more prediction. We'll find out that online Russian influence campaigns aligned not only with Trump's attempted minimization and conspiracization of covid (this is known), but also with widespread election fraud claims. They don't really need to choreograph anything in private, it could all probably just unfold organically in public internet domain, memelord propaganda circlejerking. Meanwhile, the dems have... AOC, and maybe a few other spicy things now and then, but the disparity is pretty serious, especially on Fbook and insta, I think. Oh, and for whatever reason, Trump's twitter engagement is like twice or so what it was a month ago.
edit 3: