November 4, 2020 - 8:55am
Back in July, we published a fascinating article by Daniel Baer entitled ‘How Trump could refuse to go’, which detailed how President Trump might reject the election result if it wasn’t in his favour. He sketched a hypothetical scenario:
But he doesn’t read the speech. “Today was a very bad day for real America and for real Americans!” he adlibs, “because we won this election. But right now, just as I warned, just like we all knew would happen, Joe Biden and the Democrats are printing millions of fake ballots, they are helping illegal aliens cast fake votes by mail, and they are trying to steal your White House!”
It has not played out exactly like this, and Trump may well yet win the election fair and square, but in the past hour a similar scenario began to play out in real life. The result is still unknown, with millions of absentee ballots still to count and with it all to play for in the key states of Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Georgia. But the President broke with precedent by already claiming victory and then asserted that the result is being stolen from him:
You know what happened? They knew they couldn’t win, so they said, ‘let’s go to court.’ And did I predict this? I’ve been saying this from the day I hear they were going to send out tens of millions of ballots… This is a fraud on the American public. This is an embarrassment to our country. We were getting ready to win this election — frankly, we did win this election…
This is a very big moment. This is a major fraud on our nation. We want the law to be used in a proper manner, so we’ll be going to the US Supreme Court, we want all voting to stop, we don’t want them to find any ballots at 4 o clock in the morning and add them to the list, ok?… To me, this is a very sad moment. We will win this, and as far as I’m concerned, we already have won it.
Vice President Mike Pence then took the microphone and seemed to temper Trump’s language with the more typical formulation. “While the votes continue to be counted, we are going to remain vigilant, as the President said. The right to vote has been at the centre of our democracy since the founding of this nation and we are going to protect the integrity of the vote.”
But the gun had already been fired. An incumbent President had claimed victory and rejected the legitimacy of the result, before all the votes have been counted.
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SubscribeI have been following this all night. Trump was either significantly or massively ahead in six key states, with almost all the votes counted in some of them. But they refused to call those states for Trump. And now It appears they have decided to either stop counting the votes, or to go looking for all sorts of dubious postal votes. This could be the biggest theft of all time.
They stopped counting the votes in Pennsylvania because the Republican Legislature made it law there that they had to wait until the next morning to count. Similarly, in Michigan they slowed counting until it became too late because Republican challengers were individually challenging thousands of ballots. The other states have similar stories. There is no theft as it is all a consequence of republican policies and actions. If Trump is ahead why would the democrats want them to stop counting?
As others are suggesting, they stopped the counting so that they would know how many ballots to stuff in the urban areas,
A better way would be to pass the crooked ballots in a timely way with the millions of others, holding back many real ones – to dump them in at the last minute if needed, and thus all the numbers look good if the outcome was as hoped. Mail in ballots can never be without doubt. Who ever knows if someone was coerced to vote one way at home under the eyes of a family member with strong views??
The writer supposes Trump saying:
“Joe Biden and the Democrats are printing millions of fake ballots, they are helping illegal aliens cast fake votes by mail,”But what if it really happened?
Mail in ballots are totally anti-Democratic. The point of the ‘Secret Ballot’ is so one may vote their conscious behind a curtain at the poling place and NONE may know which box they checked. If one lived with a person who was stridently for one and against the other candidate does the household have freedom to vote as they wish? They may have to suffer years of harassing over being seen to mark the wrong box at home! People are afraid to put Trump signs on their car and house for this reason, and thus voting should be behind private curtains in polling places! (excepting absentee and medical)
Reminds me of the old Joke under Stalin: The voter goes to the polling place and is given his ballot. They begin to tear it open to see the choices to be told ‘YOU CANNOT OPEN THAT! IT IS A SECRET BALLOT, PUT IT IN THE BOX!’ This may be the sort of thing which happens in some households!