Voter Suppression

[tomcat 569]

The long-standing MO of the Republican Party is voter suppression. In its various guises the R Party has worked to limit the vote...especially among the underprivileged. Purging voter roles, limiting voting locations...on and on.

So now we are looking at multiple lawsuits challenging the vote of the people. Frivolous actions that, thus far, have produced zero evidence of wrongdoing. Oh, yeah...many allegations that have either been withdrawn or laughed out of court. Actions by the current President to manipulate or overturn electoral votes. So...the end is set. Biden is the President Elect of the United States of America.

[AURex 2,016]

You wanna see voter suppression? Just wait. The Republicans now have even more control over state legislatures, and they will be gerrymandering even more for the 2022 midterm elections as well as the presidential elections for 2024. The Democrats may continue to win statewide races in states like Wisconsin., Maryland, Pennsylvania, etc. But Republicans will contibute to control all the state legislatures due to their gerrymandering. As a result, they will pass more laws limiting the power of governors and suppressing voting.

The reality is, our democratic system will be completely subjugated to minority fascism over the next decade and there is *nothing* the defenders of democracy can do about it. Our republic is on the slide towards authoritarianism.

I'm old enough that I will not be here for the worst. But those who do not see the current trend have not learned the lessons of history. Now it is just a race to determine whether climate change or political fascism will be the prime driver for the detruction of our country.

 

 

[DKW 86 7,431]

3 hours ago, AURex said:

You wanna see voter suppression? Just wait. The Republicans now have even more control over state legislatures, and they will be gerrymandering even more for the 2022 midterm elections as well as the presidential elections for 2024. The Democrats may continue to win statewide races in states like Wisconsin., Maryland, Pennsylvania, etc. But Republicans will contibute to control all the state legislatures due to their gerrymandering. As a result, they will pass more laws limiting the power of governors and suppressing voting.

The reality is, our democratic system will be completely subjugated to minority fascism over the next decade and there is *nothing* the defenders of democracy can do about it. Our republic is on the slide towards authoritarianism.

I'm old enough that I will not be here for the worst. But those who do not see the current trend have not learned the lessons of history. Now it is just a race to determine whether climate change or political fascism will be the prime driver for the detruction of our country.

You know, we just had a TWELVE YEAR RUN of crazy people screaming EVERYTHING THEY CAN HALLUCINATE is an "Existential Threat" to Democracy, Truth, Justice, and the American Way!!!! <FER> And of course: EVERYONE AND EVERYTHING IS HITLER.

Trump was an incompetent boob, a failure at just about everything he has done in his life other than conning a lot of people and a few banks out of their money. He will leave the WH Noon 1-20-21 as planned,. nothing will stop that. If you thought otherwise, please turn in your "Adulting Badge."
Trump is not Hitler, he is a used cars salesman with WWWAAAYYY too much power, that is all. 

The man is too f'in stupid to be Hitler. He cant think past the end of his nose. 
Hitler planned on a 1000 year Reich.
Trump plans on a 6 Big Mac Meal before bed. 

WARNING: THE FOLLOWING ARTICLE USES THE TERM FALSE EQUIVALENCIES IN ITS PROPER CONTEXT...

https://theconversation.com/trump-hitler-comparisons-too-easy-and-ignore-the-murderous-history-92394

“Everyone seems to have become Hitler.”

Historian Gavriel D. Rosenfeld wrote these words in his study of how the Nazi past has become a recurring theme in contemporary culture – to the point of almost becoming trivial. What is especially interesting is that he had already reached that conclusion a year before Donald Trump was elected to be the 45th president of the United States.

Since then, comparisons between Trump and Hitler – and even between current developments in the United States and the waning days of Germany’s ill-fated Weimar Republic — have become almost daily fare. This is perhaps no surprise, given his unbridled attacks against his political opponents and the mainstream press, his singling out of minority groups as scapegoats for the challenges that American society faces, and his populist, demagogic style more generally.

As a historian of modern Germany, I have spent many years exploring the crimes that Hitler and his followers committed. When people make facile comparisons to Hitler and the Nazis, they are trying, usually in good faith, to warn us about the dangers of ignoring history and its supposed lessons.

But it is my very familiarity with that history that makes me highly skeptical about the inflationary use of such comparisons. They do more to confuse than clarify the urgent issues at stake.

Long history of Nazi comparisons

Godwin’s Law holds that the longer an online discussion progresses, the likelier someone will eventually be compared to Hitler. By now, this seems to apply not just to the virtual world of chat rooms, but also to living rooms across America.

Comparing politicians to Hitler is nothing new, of course. We live in an age where George W. Bush, Saddam Hussein, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Vladimir Putin, Donald Trump, Angela Merkel, Hillary Clinton (“Hitlery”) and Barack Obama have all seamlessly been compared to Hitler. That’s just a few of the more recent examples, but they clearly show just how little value such glib analogies have.

The Trump presidency has made use of the Hitler card even more pronounced. Such comparisons have not just increased in frequency and intensity, however. Serious ones are now even being made by leading experts on Nazi Germany.

The British historian Jane Caplan, for example, wrote an analysis in November 2016 directly addressing the question of whether or not Trump was a fascist.

Caplan didn’t reach any definite conclusions, but she did point out quite a few striking similarities between the rise of fascism in Germany then and the current political climate in the United States now. In short, she feels that America is in a vulnerable position right now – one that radical forces can use to their advantage.

A few months later, Yale historian Timothy Snyder published “On Tyranny.” His book similarly concludes that America under Trump bears striking similarities to Germany in the interwar period and reads like something of a how-to manual for resisting the rise of authoritarianism in today’s America.

Respectable warning voices like these, engaging in historical analysis grounded in empirical scholarship, give the lie to any fears that Hitler is somehow being trivialized.

In fact, such experts are well equipped to communicate to a broader public the potential value of historical analogies. When paying close attention to historical context, analogies can become useful tools – ones that help us understand our present, and perhaps even shape it for the better.

Unfortunately, considered analysis on par with that of Caplan or Snyder is the exception, not the rule. That’s no surprise given the frenzied, often nasty character of current political discourse.

False equivalency risks trivializing evil

The Hitler comparison has, for many, become nothing more than a cudgel for branding someone or something as morally wrong or evil, for making what the Germans call a Totschlagargument: a “knock-out” or “killer” argument intended to end all discussion.

I believe there are several reasons why conversations tend to end at this point. For one, few people wish to trivialize Hitler. Just as important: When such accusations are made, those on the receiving end are understandably upset about the comparison.

False comparisons to Hitler risk trivializing the horror he unleashed. Here, the entrance to the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp in 1945. AP Photo/Stanislaw Mucha

While it seems that many people in the U.S. no longer feel that they’re able to agree on anything – including sometimes even facts – they still seem able to agree on one point: Hitler epitomizes evil.

Take, for example, a recent ad campaign by the NRA featuring their spokesperson, Dana Loesch. Loesch describes the current state of American society in almost apocalyptic terms, with ominous background music and blurry pictures of street fighting helping her to make her point.

The United States is presented in the ad as a country coming apart at the seams because of liberal protesters. What is especially interesting here is how Loesch begins her rant: “They use their media to assassinate real news. They use schools to teach children that their president is another Hitler!”

Loesch clearly finds Trump comparisons to Hitler outrageous – just as Obama supporters found it outrageous when Hitler comparisons were being made about Obama.

Let us be clear: Hitler unleashed a war aimed at achieving global domination that resulted in the deaths of tens of millions. This included the industrialized murder of 6 million men, women and children whose only “crime” was being born Jewish. This is not to diminish the horrors wrought by tyrants like former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein or Slobodan Milošević, former president of Serbia. But the magnitude of their crimes still pales in comparison. And whatever one may think of Donald Trump, he has – although the jury is still out on this one – remained within the bounds of constitutional legality. And clearly he has not been responsible for mass death.

Another aspect of our shared cultural knowledge of Hitler is that negotiating with him was futile. In hindsight, historians agree that the appeasement policies of the 1930s were a failure and that forceful means were the only way to have stopped Hitler. No matter how many concessions were made to the German dictator over the course of the 1930s, he wanted more – and he wanted war.

This is why, as a historian of the Nazi period, I find inflated contemporary comparisons and analogies problematic.

False equivalencies not only risk trivializing Hitler and the horrors he unleashed. They also prevent people from engaging with the actual issues at hand – ones that urgently require our attention: immigration reform, rampant xenophobia, social and economic restructuring in a globalized world, and a loss of faith in government’s ability to solve pressing problems.

There is an ultimate reason why the Hitler comparison should not be used as lightly as it often is nowadays.

Whenever we apply that political or moral comparison, we set the bar for inhumanity as high as possible. Should the abyss of World War II and the Holocaust really be the main measure for all things political?

The danger here is that policies only become worthy of moral outrage if they lead to genocidal violence. One would hope that in the 21st century, our society would have developed higher – or perhaps lower – standards than these.

[homersapien 11,393]

Ga. secretary of state says fellow Republicans are pressuring him to find ways to exclude ballots

By

Amy Gardner

November 16, 2020 at 6:30 p.m. EST

Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger said Monday that he has come under increasing pressure in recent days from fellow Republicans, including Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (S.C.), who he said questioned the validity of legally cast absentee ballots, in an effort to reverse President Trump’s narrow loss in the state.

In a wide-ranging interview about the election, Raffensperger expressed exasperation over a string of baseless allegations coming from Trump and his allies about the integrity of the Georgia results, including claims that Dominion Voting Systems, the Colorado-based manufacturer of Georgia’s voting machines, is a “leftist” company with ties to Venezuela that engineered thousands of Trump votes to be left out of the count.

The atmosphere has grown so contentious, Raffensperger said, that he and his wife, Tricia, have received death threats in recent days, including a text to him that read: “You better not botch this recount. Your life depends on it.”

“Other than getting you angry, it’s also very disillusioning,” Raffensperger said of the threats, “particularly when it comes from people on my side of the aisle. Everyone that is working on this needs to elevate their speech. We need to be thoughtful and careful about what we say.” He said he reported the threats to state authorities.

The pressure on Raffensperger, who has bucked his party in defending the state’s voting process, comes as Georgia is in the midst of a laborious hand recount of about 5 million ballots. President-elect Joe Biden has a 14,000-vote lead in the initial count.

The normally mild-mannered Raffensperger saved his harshest language for Rep. Douglas A. Collins (R-Ga.), who is leading the president’s efforts in Georgia and whom Raffensperger called a “liar” and a “charlatan.”

Collins has questioned Raffensperger’s handling of the vote and accused him of capitulating to Democrats by not backing allegations of voter fraud more strongly.

Raffensperger has said that every accusation of fraud will be thoroughly investigated, but that there is currently no credible evidence that fraud occurred on a broad enough scale to affect the outcome of the election.

The recount, Raffensperger said in the interview Monday, will “affirm” the results of the initial count. He said the hand-counted audit that began last week will also prove the accuracy of the Dominion machines; some counties have already reported that their hand recounts exactly match the machine tallies previously reported. Election officials in one county, Floyd, discovered about 2,600 eligible votes that were not included in the initial tallies because of a failure to upload them off a memory stick. The secretary of state’s office said those votes probably would have been discovered, but it called for the resignation of the county election director.

“I’m an engineer. We look at numbers. We look at hard data,” Raffensperger said. “I can’t help it that a failed candidate like Collins is running around lying to everyone. He’s a liar.”

A spokeswoman for Collins replied to a request for comment by linking to a tweet Collins sent on Monday in which he described Raffensperger’s “incompetence as Secretary of State.”

Collins ran unsuccessfully for Senate this year and is blamed by some Republicans for pushing the incumbent in that race, fellow Republican Sen. Kelly Loeffler, into a runoff against the Rev. Raphael Warnock, a Democrat.

His fellow Republicans turned on him, but Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger isn’t backing down

In the interview, Raffensperger also said he spoke on Friday to Graham, the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, who has echoed Trump’s unfounded claims about voting irregularities.

In their conversation, Graham questioned Raffensperger about the state’s signature-matching law and whether political bias could have prompted poll workers to accept ballots with nonmatching signatures, according to Raffensperger. Graham also asked whether Raffensperger had the power to toss all mail ballots in counties found to have higher rates of nonmatching signatures, Raffensperger said.

Raffensperger said he was stunned that Graham appeared to suggest that he find a way to toss legally cast ballots. Absent court intervention, Raffensperger doesn’t have the power to do what Graham suggested because counties administer elections in Georgia.

“It sure looked like he was wanting to go down that road,” Raffensperger said.

In an interview on Capitol Hill on Monday evening, Graham denied that he had suggested that Raffensperger toss legal ballots, calling that characterization “ridiculous.”

But he said he did seek out the secretary of state to understand the state’s signature-matching requirements. Graham said he contacted Raffensperger on his own and was not asked to do so by Trump.

“The main issue for me is: How do you protect the integrity of mail-in voting, and how does signature verification work?” he said.

“If he feels threatened by that conversation, he’s got a problem,” Graham added. “I actually thought it was a good conversation.”

On the same day that Graham spoke to Raffensperger about signature matching, a lawsuit was filed in federal court in Georgia challenging the way county election officials check signatures and allow voters a chance to fix ballots with errors.

The suit, filed by Atlanta lawyer and Trump supporter Lin Wood, seeks to block certification of Georgia’s election until all ballot envelopes are inspected.

Also that day, Trump tweeted about signature-matching in Georgia and criticized Raffensperger for his management of the state elections: “Georgia Secretary of State, a so-called Republican (RINO), won’t let the people checking the ballots see the signatures for fraud. Why? Without this the whole process is very unfair and close to meaningless. Everyone knows that we won the state.”

Raffensperger said he will vigorously fight the lawsuit, which would require the matching of ballot envelopes with ballots — potentially exposing individual voters’ choices.

“It doesn’t matter what political party or which campaign does that,” Raffensperger said. “The secrecy of the vote is sacred.”

The secretary of state also warned that the Republican attacks on Dominion voting machines could create issues for the state’s Republican U.S. senators, Loeffler and David Perdue, who face runoffs on Jan. 5 that will be administered using the same Dominion machines.

Over the weekend, social media posts began appearing from Trump supporters questioning whether they feel comfortable using Dominion machines in the two runoff elections, which will determine which party controls the Senate.

“I don’t think it’s helpful when you create doubt in the election process,” Raffensperger said. “People might throw up their arms and say, ‘Why vote?’ ”

 

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/brad-raffensperger-georgia-vote/2020/11/16/6b6cb2f4-283e-11eb-8fa2-06e7cbb145c0_story.html

[CleCoTiger 1,957]

13 hours ago, AURex said:

You wanna see voter suppression? Just wait. The Republicans now have even more control over state legislatures, and they will be gerrymandering even more for the 2022 midterm elections as well as the presidential elections for 2024. The Democrats may continue to win statewide races in states like Wisconsin., Maryland, Pennsylvania, etc. But Republicans will continue to control all the state legislatures due to their gerrymandering. As a result, they will pass more laws limiting the power of governors and suppressing voting.

Man, you said a mouthful there. In Wisconsin it's so bad that Democrats can win over 50 percent of the vote but Republicans take 63 or 64 out of 99 seats in the legislature. That sort of hyper-partisan gerrymandering should not be allowed to stand.

[DKW 86 7,431]

Then win elections. Elections have consequences. 

[TexasTiger 12,961]

On 11/17/2020 at 12:59 AM, DKW 86 said:

You know, we just had a TWELVE YEAR RUN of crazy people screaming EVERYTHING THEY CAN HALLUCINATE is an "Existential Threat" to Democracy, Truth, Justice, and the American Way!!!! <FER> And of course: EVERYONE AND EVERYTHING IS HITLER.

Trump was an incompetent boob, a failure at just about everything he has done in his life other than conning a lot of people and a few banks out of their money. He will leave the WH Noon 1-20-21 as planned,. nothing will stop that. If you thought otherwise, please turn in your "Adulting Badge."
Trump is not Hitler, he is a used cars salesman with WWWAAAYYY too much power, that is all. 

The man is too f'in stupid to be Hitler. He cant think past the end of his nose. 
Hitler planned on a 1000 year Reich.
Trump plans on a 6 Big Mac Meal before bed. 

WARNING: THE FOLLOWING ARTICLE USES THE TERM FALSE EQUIVALENCIES IN ITS PROPER CONTEXT...

https://theconversation.com/trump-hitler-comparisons-too-easy-and-ignore-the-murderous-history-92394

“Everyone seems to have become Hitler.”

Historian Gavriel D. Rosenfeld wrote these words in his study of how the Nazi past has become a recurring theme in contemporary culture – to the point of almost becoming trivial. What is especially interesting is that he had already reached that conclusion a year before Donald Trump was elected to be the 45th president of the United States.

Since then, comparisons between Trump and Hitler – and even between current developments in the United States and the waning days of Germany’s ill-fated Weimar Republic — have become almost daily fare. This is perhaps no surprise, given his unbridled attacks against his political opponents and the mainstream press, his singling out of minority groups as scapegoats for the challenges that American society faces, and his populist, demagogic style more generally.

As a historian of modern Germany, I have spent many years exploring the crimes that Hitler and his followers committed. When people make facile comparisons to Hitler and the Nazis, they are trying, usually in good faith, to warn us about the dangers of ignoring history and its supposed lessons.

But it is my very familiarity with that history that makes me highly skeptical about the inflationary use of such comparisons. They do more to confuse than clarify the urgent issues at stake.

Long history of Nazi comparisons

Godwin’s Law holds that the longer an online discussion progresses, the likelier someone will eventually be compared to Hitler. By now, this seems to apply not just to the virtual world of chat rooms, but also to living rooms across America.

Comparing politicians to Hitler is nothing new, of course. We live in an age where George W. Bush, Saddam Hussein, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Vladimir Putin, Donald Trump, Angela Merkel, Hillary Clinton (“Hitlery”) and Barack Obama have all seamlessly been compared to Hitler. That’s just a few of the more recent examples, but they clearly show just how little value such glib analogies have.

The Trump presidency has made use of the Hitler card even more pronounced. Such comparisons have not just increased in frequency and intensity, however. Serious ones are now even being made by leading experts on Nazi Germany.

The British historian Jane Caplan, for example, wrote an analysis in November 2016 directly addressing the question of whether or not Trump was a fascist.

Caplan didn’t reach any definite conclusions, but she did point out quite a few striking similarities between the rise of fascism in Germany then and the current political climate in the United States now. In short, she feels that America is in a vulnerable position right now – one that radical forces can use to their advantage.

A few months later, Yale historian Timothy Snyder published “On Tyranny.” His book similarly concludes that America under Trump bears striking similarities to Germany in the interwar period and reads like something of a how-to manual for resisting the rise of authoritarianism in today’s America.

Respectable warning voices like these, engaging in historical analysis grounded in empirical scholarship, give the lie to any fears that Hitler is somehow being trivialized.

In fact, such experts are well equipped to communicate to a broader public the potential value of historical analogies. When paying close attention to historical context, analogies can become useful tools – ones that help us understand our present, and perhaps even shape it for the better.

Unfortunately, considered analysis on par with that of Caplan or Snyder is the exception, not the rule. That’s no surprise given the frenzied, often nasty character of current political discourse.

False equivalency risks trivializing evil

The Hitler comparison has, for many, become nothing more than a cudgel for branding someone or something as morally wrong or evil, for making what the Germans call a Totschlagargument: a “knock-out” or “killer” argument intended to end all discussion.

I believe there are several reasons why conversations tend to end at this point. For one, few people wish to trivialize Hitler. Just as important: When such accusations are made, those on the receiving end are understandably upset about the comparison.

False comparisons to Hitler risk trivializing the horror he unleashed. Here, the entrance to the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp in 1945. AP Photo/Stanislaw Mucha

While it seems that many people in the U.S. no longer feel that they’re able to agree on anything – including sometimes even facts – they still seem able to agree on one point: Hitler epitomizes evil.

Take, for example, a recent ad campaign by the NRA featuring their spokesperson, Dana Loesch. Loesch describes the current state of American society in almost apocalyptic terms, with ominous background music and blurry pictures of street fighting helping her to make her point.

The United States is presented in the ad as a country coming apart at the seams because of liberal protesters. What is especially interesting here is how Loesch begins her rant: “They use their media to assassinate real news. They use schools to teach children that their president is another Hitler!”

Loesch clearly finds Trump comparisons to Hitler outrageous – just as Obama supporters found it outrageous when Hitler comparisons were being made about Obama.

Let us be clear: Hitler unleashed a war aimed at achieving global domination that resulted in the deaths of tens of millions. This included the industrialized murder of 6 million men, women and children whose only “crime” was being born Jewish. This is not to diminish the horrors wrought by tyrants like former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein or Slobodan Milošević, former president of Serbia. But the magnitude of their crimes still pales in comparison. And whatever one may think of Donald Trump, he has – although the jury is still out on this one – remained within the bounds of constitutional legality. And clearly he has not been responsible for mass death.

Another aspect of our shared cultural knowledge of Hitler is that negotiating with him was futile. In hindsight, historians agree that the appeasement policies of the 1930s were a failure and that forceful means were the only way to have stopped Hitler. No matter how many concessions were made to the German dictator over the course of the 1930s, he wanted more – and he wanted war.

This is why, as a historian of the Nazi period, I find inflated contemporary comparisons and analogies problematic.

False equivalencies not only risk trivializing Hitler and the horrors he unleashed. They also prevent people from engaging with the actual issues at hand – ones that urgently require our attention: immigration reform, rampant xenophobia, social and economic restructuring in a globalized world, and a loss of faith in government’s ability to solve pressing problems.

There is an ultimate reason why the Hitler comparison should not be used as lightly as it often is nowadays.

Whenever we apply that political or moral comparison, we set the bar for inhumanity as high as possible. Should the abyss of World War II and the Holocaust really be the main measure for all things political?

The danger here is that policies only become worthy of moral outrage if they lead to genocidal violence. One would hope that in the 21st century, our society would have developed higher – or perhaps lower – standards than these.

Doesn’t take much to “trigger” Dave.

[DKW 86 7,431]

1 hour ago, TexasTiger said:

Doesn’t take much to “trigger” Dave.

I am not triggered at all. I am laughing to beat the band at how f'in silly some of my supposedly educated adult friends are these days. 

[homersapien 11,393]

We came much closer to an election catastrophe than many realize

Opinion by

Paul Waldman

Columnist

November 18, 2020 at 11:05 a.m. EST

As President Trump refuses to concede that he lost the election, and his dead-enders trot out increasingly bizarre conspiracy theories and legal tantrums, we are witnessing an attack on democracy that is at turns sickening and comical. But as it turns more the latter than the former, we should be aware of how close we came to catastrophe.

You may look at President-elect Joe Biden’s 306-to-232 lead in the electoral college, and his popular vote lead of 5.8 million votes and growing, and say that, thankfully, the results weren’t that close. As my colleague Greg Sargent wrote before the election, Trump’s legal strategy was predicated on getting within “cheating distance,” with the margins narrow enough that he could convince Republican judges to intercede on his behalf and hand him the election. It hasn’t happened.

But it was closer than you think. And it raises the frightening possibility that if Trump’s team were not such a bunch of buffoons, and if Republican officials at the state level were just a little more corrupt than they already are, he might have been able to steal the election after all.

That’s because the 2020 election was, in one critical way, even closer than 2016.

You may remember that four years ago, Trump managed to win the electoral college because he prevailed in Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania by a combined total of just 77,000 votes. That tiny margin was enough to overcome Hillary Clinton’s 3 million-vote lead in the popular vote and make him president with 304 electoral votes.

In the time since, Democrats have cited that number over and over, often as proof of the Clinton campaign’s strategic missteps. How hard would it have been to grab 77,000 more votes? Couldn’t they have done it with a few more visits to those states?

So what’s the analogous magic number for 2020? It’s even smaller.

Final tallies are being completed; Georgia is conducting a hand recount, and there could be a recount in Wisconsin if the Trump campaign decides to pay for one. But here are the margins by which Biden won three critical states, as of Wednesday morning:

• Arizona: 10,457
• Georgia: 14,028
• Wisconsin: 20,565
• Total: 45,050

If we’re thinking about whether Trump could make up any of those deficits in a recount, the answer is almost certainly no; recounts seldom find mistakes that move more than a few hundred votes in one direction or another, and could just as easily make Biden’s leads larger.

But if Trump had managed to get those 45,000 votes, he would have won 37 more electoral votes, making the electoral college a 269-to-269 tie. Under the Constitution, the election would have then been decided by the House of Representatives, with each state delegation getting just one vote. Even though Democrats have a majority in the House, more state delegations have Republican majorities. Trump would have been reelected.

That’s the bullet we just dodged, all because of 45,000 votes.

Which raises the question of whether Trump might still be able to convince election officials and courts to toss out enough Democratic votes to pull it off.

The answer at this point is plainly no. The simple reason is that there are no grounds to do so and no fraud to be found (despite Republicans’ efforts). The suits they have filed around the country have been almost laughed out of court — but they’re still trying. On Tuesday, the Trump campaign filed suit in Nevada asking that Biden’s 34,000-vote victory simply be nullified and the state’s electoral votes be awarded to Trump or at least given to neither candidate. In Pennsylvania, the increasingly unhinged Rudolph W. Giuliani, appearing in court for the first time in decades, made an utter fool out of himself; as the Associated Press described his performance, “Over the next several hours, he fiddled with his Twitter account, forgot which judge he was talking to and threw around wild, unsupported accusations about a nationwide conspiracy by Democrats to steal the election.”

And in Michigan, the Republican members of the elections board of Wayne County, which includes Detroit, initially refused to certify the results; one of them said that she’d be willing to certify those from cities other than Detroit. It was a momentary lifting of the veil, as the GOP’s belief that the votes of Black people are inherently illegitimate became disturbingly explicit.

After an outpouring of protest, the two Republicans relented and certified the results. But had they been more committed to giving Trump the election at all costs, we could have eventually found ourselves in the situation many feared, in which a state’s Republican legislature simply decided to grant its electoral votes to Trump no matter what the voters wanted.

And if one state’s GOP legislature did it, others might have, too. The legislatures in Wisconsin, Arizona and Georgia are all controlled by Republicans.

At this point, it isn’t going to happen. But what if, say, Trump had won Arizona and Georgia (which would have taken just 25,000 votes combined), and it was all up to Wisconsin? Would the Republican legislators who engineered the country’s most brutal partisan gerrymander have respected the will of the voters enough not to just hand Trump the election?

Fortunately, we won’t have to find out. But the fact that we came so close shows us how fragile this system is. Until we find a way to fix it, we’ll always live with the threat of the kind of stolen election Trump is still hoping he can pull off.

 

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/11/18/how-2020-election-was-closer-than-2016/