US Presidential Election 2020

[Grizzly]

excellent...^^^

Is that yellow-ish colour the Green Party?

[conniption]

^^^
Love that map!!! That's about how I feel... lol (I guess)


From the comments on this thread: https://off-guardian.org/2020/11/03/dis ... ction-day/

UPDATED: Election Day!
Nov 3, 2020
544 comments

>snip<

*

UPDATE 4/11/20 : Are these signs of potential electoral fraud?

Early in the morning CNN’s rolling coverage map suddenly attributed 138,339 votes to Biden in Michigan, without recording a single vote Trump or any of three independent candidates:


[click to enlarge]

This jump almost completely destroyed Trumps 5% lead.

Nate Silver’s statistics and analysis website fivethirtyeight.com has been plotting the votes on graphs. Both Wisconsin and Michigan have sudden, vertical jumps for Biden at around 4am:





It has been suggested that these are counties returning their results en masse,, which is technically possible, but if that were the case you’d expect a corresponding jump for Trump, even the most Democrat friendly areas of the country don’t give Biden 100% of their votes.

The best illustration of just how bizarre these events are, is the reaction of the CNN anchors. Watch how they handle Biden suddenly getting 109,000 new votes, and totally wiping out Trump’s 4 point lead in Wisconsin in an instant:

(Sorry, I don't know how to post the video...)

Video Player
00:00
01:11

“Where did it come from?” Indeed.

>snip<

https://off-guardian.org/2020/11/03/dis ... ction-day/

Now, just watch...someone here will accuse me of being some kind of Trump lover or accuse me of "^right wing rhetoric". or some shit like that.

[Grizzly]

Now, just watch...someone here will accuse me of being some kind of Trump lover or accuse me of "^right wing rhetoric". or some shit like that.

Fuck em, I want dump to win, anything to keep killary away from more war.

Basically this...

[mentalgongfu2]

I've been voting in America since 2000. The year the election was decided by the Supreme Court ruling that stopped the counting of votes in Florida. This happened many days after the First Tuesday in November.

This pretend reality where all of the votes are counted on Tuesday night and we all know the results is just that - pretend.

The best we have ever had is exit polls weighted clearly enough that NBC, CBS, ABC, FOX and CNN could confidently "call" states for one or another candidate before the votes were actually counted. Media calling of state vote counts based on exit polls and partial results has always been bad, and it's worse in a world where people are so inclined to imagine that actually constitutes an official result, which won't actually come until results are certified, likely weeks from now.

This stuff about maps/totals suddenly changing at CNN that Conniption posted -- without something substantial to add to it, is meaningless as far as I'm concerned. People's expectations in constantly refreshing a website are just wildly outside of reality. I was on my state's election website several times throughout the night. During part of that time, they showed Trump ahead by a hundred thousand votes with only 2 of 99 counties reporting, but if you clicked on the map, it showed about 40 counties reporting. I don';t think this was fraud; rather, it was shitty website updates. IF CNN suddenly updated its results, that's not evidence of fraud; more likely it's just them putting in the newest numbers all at once. Alternatively, if it's not that, then Paul Pate must be in the game for a conspiracy to elect Trump since there is no mathematical way any 2 counties in Iowa could have more than 100,000 thousand votes totaled for each candidate. More likely is the vote total and map were correct, but there were actually more than 2 counties reporting at that time.

Of course, this was Trump's strategy. The constant repetition that anything other than a monumental win for him is evidence of Democrat corruption. That doesn't make corruption out of the question, but coming from someone who has made blatant lying also part of his brand on a daily basis, it should bring pause before buying any claim that Biden has done him dirty.

[Grizzly]

Bonus

[Marionumber1]

The current claims of pro-Biden election fraud are not well-founded. While the 538 graphs showing sudden jumps for Biden are interesting at first glance, you can also find instances where these same jumps happened for Trump. Some batches of incoming votes will be heavily skewed towards one candidate or another, and it is no surprise after Trump spent months talking about the danger of voting by mail that far fewer of his supporters would be included in those later-arriving mail ballot batches. As for the apparent jump in Michigan votes for Biden by 140,000 with no change for any other candidates, this appears to trace back to a data entry error (I usually don't like linking to fact checkers as some authoritative source of truth but this is a good compilation of sources which all seem to check out): https://leadstories.com/hoax-alert/2020/11/fact-check-biden-did-not-go-up-138k-votes-in-michigan-with-no-change-to-trump.html

I have also seen garbage claims of there being more votes than registered voters in several states, all of which appear to be the result of erroneously using 2018 voter registration figures instead of this year's.

[Elvis]

Plus, the polls vs. the vote counts disfavor Biden, who was projected to have a bigger margin—suggesting that any vote-switching/rigging favored Trump.

Are exit polls by region/precinct available? Along with the corresponding votes? My default assumption is in places there'll be discrepancies favoring Trump.

News radio segments (NPR, BBC) are bringing on the experts to explain the gap between pre-election polls and the vote; it's just assumed that the vote counts are valid, so they're never questioned.

The current claims of pro-Biden election fraud are not well-founded. While the 538 graphs showing sudden jumps for Biden are interesting at first glance, you can also find instances where these same jumps happened for Trump. Some batches of incoming votes will be heavily skewed towards one candidate or another, and it is no surprise after Trump spent months talking about the danger of voting by mail that far fewer of his supporters would be included in those later-arriving mail ballot batches. As for the apparent jump in Michigan votes for Biden by 140,000 with no change for any other candidates, this appears to trace back to a data entry error (I usually don't like linking to fact checkers as some authoritative source of truth but this is a good compilation of sources which all seem to check out): https://leadstories.com/hoax-alert/2020/11/fact-check-biden-did-not-go-up-138k-votes-in-michigan-with-no-change-to-trump.html

I have also seen garbage claims of there being more votes than registered voters in several states, all of which appear to be the result of erroneously using 2018 voter registration figures instead of this year's.

[Grizzly]

Flashback...

[Belligerent Savant]

[Marionumber1]

Plus, the polls vs. the vote counts disfavor Biden, who was projected to have a bigger margin—suggesting that any vote-switching/rigging favored Trump.

Are exit polls by region/precinct available? Along with the corresponding votes? My default assumption is in places there'll be discrepancies favoring Trump.

News radio segments (NPR, BBC) are bringing on the experts to explain the gap between pre-election polls and the vote; it's just assumed that the vote counts are valid, so they're never questioned.

That is my suspicion as well, that what happened was an attempted red shift towards Trump which wasn't of sufficient magnitude to give him a definite victory on election night. Exit polls of the presidential race are available and do suggest this: https://tdmsresearch.com/2020/11/04/2020-presidential-election-table/ Iowa was a narrow Biden victory in the exit polls that became a strong Trump victory officially, and Wisconsin, Michigan, Nevada, and Pennsylvania went from fairly decisive Biden wins to the nail-biters they are right now.

[Elvis]

Thanks!

Plus, the polls vs. the vote counts disfavor Biden, who was projected to have a bigger margin—suggesting that any vote-switching/rigging favored Trump.

Are exit polls by region/precinct available? Along with the corresponding votes? My default assumption is in places there'll be discrepancies favoring Trump.

News radio segments (NPR, BBC) are bringing on the experts to explain the gap between pre-election polls and the vote; it's just assumed that the vote counts are valid, so they're never questioned.

That is my suspicion as well, that what happened was an attempted red shift towards Trump which wasn't of sufficient magnitude to give him a definite victory on election night. Exit polls of the presidential race are available and do suggest this: https://tdmsresearch.com/2020/11/04/2020-presidential-election-table/ Iowa was a narrow Biden victory in the exit polls that became a strong Trump victory officially, and Wisconsin, Michigan, Nevada, and Pennsylvania went from fairly decisive Biden wins to the nail-biters they are right now.

[DrEvil]

Mail-in ballots that arrive by the 12th can (and should) be counted, so obviously they won't have a full count until then.

[Belligerent Savant]

https://twitter.com/brainsturbator/stat ... 5438296065

[Grizzly]

^^^

Rex is brilliance...



Maybe...

[JackRiddler]

.

It's not so hard to present reveling in one's powerlessness and uncertainty as wisdom.

Anyway, meanwhile the actually announced

COUP STILL HAPPENING

Here's Allan Nairn, not a word of place. Includes pretty depressing if you think about it explanation of the real reason why Trump is going to lose. May have slept through his only chance.

ALLAN NAIRN: Well, Trump and the extremist Republicans, who constitute a minority of the population and have a minority of the votes, are trying to consolidate their minority rule. They’re aided in that by the U.S. Constitution and the structure of the U.S. system, which is against, fundamentally, in a certain sense, has many barriers to, majority rule. It’s fundamentally anti-democratic. Things wouldn’t even be close now if you just based the presidency, like most countries do, on who gets the most votes. Biden is way ahead in the popular vote. And both parties expected that from the very beginning.

They have a whole series of things they’re trying to leverage. Starting from the deep level, they’re in the midst of trying to sabotage the census to exclude as many nonwhites as they can, and therefore make it easier for the Republican state legislatures to further gerrymander and give their minority of supporters even more dominant representation in the U.S. Congress. And in fact, the election results so far indicate that the Democratic establishment, led by Schumer and Pelosi and others and the campaign committee, did not turn out enough Democrats to take control of enough state legislatures to turn the tide of this gerrymandering and redistricting. So the structure of system, even after this relatively high-turnout election, is likely to get even worse.

On COVID, where Trump has committed, in essence, criminally negligent homicide and has a stack of approaching a quarter of a million bodies, a quarter of a million victims, he’s cynically leveraging that to attempted political advantage. He told his followers, “Don’t worry about COVID. Go to the polling place. Vote. It’s not going to hurt you.” And he observed that the Democrats told their followers, “No, COVID can kill you.” They simply stated the medical fact. Trump saw this and said, “Great. The Democrats are going to vote by mail. I’ll just sabotage the post office.” And he did. There are undoubtedly significant numbers of votes, which Democrats mailed, which will not arrive in time.

Then, as the second step, Trump is now saying, “OK, those mailed-in votes that did arrive, invalidate them. Don’t count them.” Then the Republican lawyers will go to the courts hoping to eventually reach a tame federal judge that they have, or reach the now tame U.S. Supreme Court, and get them to say, “Yeah, these votes should be invalidated.” And if that doesn’t work, they’re ready, as Lindsey Graham alluded to, to try to call on some Republican state legislatures to simply ignore the popular vote in their states and send pro-Trump electors, even if Trump lost the popular vote in their state.

Then, on the street level, aside from this indoor game of politics, which they’re playing very ruthlessly, they have their armed tough guys who Trump has been cultivating from the start — the militias, the civilians who carry guns, the racist police unions who Trump appeals to. And they first called on them to show up at the polling places. And by the way, another aspect of the structural rigging was that over the years Republican legislatures and governors had been systematically reducing the number of polling places for voting in areas that tend to vote against Trump — what courts have called surgical, race-based targeting. But they were calling, in the election, for their armed tough guys to show up at the polling places that did remain in enemy territory to try to intimidate people away from the polls. Now, as the vote counting is in process, people like Don Jr. and Bannon and Gorka and Trump himself, though not yet as explicitly as them, are essentially raising the prospect of staging physical assaults on vote-counting facilities, because, as President Trump put it, any vote that is part of a tally that is not coming out in his favor should not be considered a legal vote.

However, I think, from having seen over many years and worked against U.S. operations overseas led by — operations led by American Special Forces and the CIA, where they systematically try to disrupt or thwart elections, and sometimes back coups, the most recent big one being in Bolivia in 2019, that you have to be very — you have to get the timing right in the use of your street forces. And I think, on election night, in the crucial hours after late election night, when Trump went into his tent and started sulking like a bully who had been thwarted, I think he may have missed his moment, because that was the key moment to call his people onto the streets and start stopping and trashing the votes, and he failed to do that. They’re now playing catch-up. At this moment, the political atmosphere, I think, is not quite sufficiently favorable to them to give them a favorable chance of getting the vote count stopped that they want stopped.

A lot of this turns on political atmosphere, especially in the courts. For example, the only reason that Obamacare still exists now, even in its weakened form, is that when it came to the Supreme Court several years ago, Justice Roberts decided to reject the Republican attempt to repeal Obamacare because he feared the public reaction. He feared the public backlash. Now even the most militant radical-rightist Republican judges, they have their ears up. They have their fingers to the wind. They’re looking at the mood on the streets and in the country. And they’re looking at what they can get away with. They will do with whatever they think they can get away with. But if they think they can’t get away with something, they won’t do it.

This leads to the issue of the Senate. The Senate, if Biden becomes president and somehow manages to actually take the White House because he had the majority of the electoral votes — Senate control becomes absolutely crucial. If the Democrats fail to control the Senate, McConnell will try to act as, in essence, co-president. And the radical-rightist Supreme Court, now with a 6-to-3 majority with Barrett, will feel emboldened, licensed to do anything, because they won’t be facing the constraint of possible legislation, which you could have with a Democratic Senate, that might expand the number of justices or might implement term limits for justices, as Representative Ro Khanna and others have proposed, and they won’t be facing the prospect of any new Biden replacement judges, in case someone leaves, who might be oppositional, or McConnell could even decide to block Biden from putting in any federal judges whatsoever. So, this could let the Republican Supreme Court completely off the leash, and they could go about invalidating basic tenets of civil rights, voting rights, democracy that still exists in the United States.

So, we’re at a point of epic struggle right now and of great plasticity. Things could move radically in one direction or radically in the other direction. And I think people have to be very alert and also very self-disciplined, because one of the tools they already used over the summer in the racial justice demonstrations and the demonstrations against police brutality is deliberate provocation by the extreme right to try to create scenes of looting and senseless violence, that can then be used as an argument for even stricter authoritarianism and racism and nullification of democracy. And we can’t allow that to happen.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well, Allan, I just wanted to ask you briefly — you were talking about the issue of the popular vote and the structural inequities built into the system. The actual margin for Joe Biden is likely to be much greater in the popular vote than it is right now, because most people are focusing on Arizona, obviously, and Pennsylvania and Georgia, but these states are actually much more advanced in their count than are a lot of the blue states. Like, California, New York, New Jersey have millions of votes that they have not yet counted. No one’s paying attention, obviously, because those states have already turned blue. But when the final vote total comes in, it’s very likely that Joe Biden may have about an 8 to 10 million margin in the popular vote, which I think will bring more into relief the problems, the structural problems right now, that the majority of the American people are not deciding these presidential elections. And yet, as you’re saying, the possibility for structural change will be even less now, given the fact that Republicans control the Senate. So, how do you see progressives moving forward to effect these structural changes in the future?

ALLAN NAIRN: Yes, the structural aspects could get even worse with the result of this election. You know, in most countries around the world, even those that have democracies that are not very strong, a direct popular presidential vote is the way it’s done. The U.S. Electoral College system is rather unique. And the Founders engineered it that way because they didn’t trust the majority, which made sense for them, because at the time of the founding, the majority was either disenfranchised and/or enslaved. But we’re still burdened with that system today.

But as bad as the Electoral College system is, as undemocratic as that is, the Senate structure is even more undemocratic, because it gives two senators to each state regardless of population. So, again, while people are nail biting over who wins the Electoral College, and they’re now nail biting over who’s going to control the Senate, if the Senate were allocated on some kind of basis of popular vote, again it wouldn’t be close. It would be an overwhelmingly Democratic Senate, reflecting the will of the clear majority of the United States residents and voters. But it’s engineered in the opposite directions, partly tracing back to the Founders and partly tracing back to the structural changes that Republicans have made, especially since around 1980, at the time of the rise of Reagan and at the time of the rise in Washington of the radical Republican lobby, funded by various industries, and then, in later years, by figures like the Koch brothers where they systematically set about trying to reengineer state legislatures and state voting rules around the country.

I think activists were on exactly the right track in setting out an agenda, a possible agenda for the coming year, if the Democrats got the presidency and the Senate, to push for all sorts of structural changes. But now that could be blocked if the Republicans, by their fingertips, hold on to the Senate. And I think it’s not clear yet exactly what tactics will be most effective in changing that reality. One of the tactics, I think, will have to be within the Democratic Party, to try to move out of power the corporate Democrats, who spent about a billion dollars on this campaign in things like Senate races that they could have won, that the polls said they were going to win easily, and that they actually lost, thereby opening the door to a McConnell, in effect, co-presidency. You know, those Democrats, those corporate Democrats, ended up making lots of political —

AMY GOODMAN: We have 10 seconds.

ALLAN NAIRN: — consultants extremely rich, but they didn’t flip the votes sufficiently.

AMY GOODMAN: Allan, we want to thank you for being with us. Allan Nairn, independent journalist.

Next, union organizer Jane McAlevey on her firsthand experience with what went wrong in the 2000 Florida recount and what she says needs to happen now to stop what she calls an electoral coup. Stay with us.