As a mark of just how premature declaring a Biden victory is, consider these observations from Philip Wegmann of RealClearPolitics:
Election Day has come and gone, but Election Week has just begun. So says the Trump campaign, whose chief strategist urged reporters Wednesday evening to wait and see what happens by Friday.
“By the end of this week,†Jason Miller said on a conference call, “it will be clear to the entire nation that President Trump and Vice President Pence will be reelected for another four years.â€
And on that same call, the campaign not only claimed that it had a good chance of winning Arizona, Michigan, Nevada and Wisconsin, it unilaterally and without any outside confirmation declared victory in Pennsylvania.
“We are confident in our pathway. We are confident in our math. We said all along we are viewing some of these races as math equations,†Miller added. “If we count all legal ballots, the president wins.â€
It’s hard for me to see how this will materialize but, if it does, it will mark as big a journalistic debacle as has occurred in my memory.
The state of play as 11am CST.
Trump must win North Carolina; it is close but the consensus Trump has won it.
Trump must win Pennsylvania.
Then Trump must win 2 of 3; Arizona, Georgia, Nevada.
If it is Nevada, Arizona; then it is a 269-269 tie; otherwise it is straight win.
The modal probability is Trump loses all 4 (Az, NV, GA, PA).
By the way this is the true chaos scenario.
The counting ends and there is 269-269 tie. The senate is 49-49 with 2 runoffs in GA. The house by party was 26-24 before the elections, based on the results so far, Democrats aren’t likely to tie or win control of 25 of the 26 R delegations, but Democrats think they can take Alaska.
You could end up going into January with arguments in court over multiple states that are decisive in the electoral college (but most likely indicating a 269-269 tie), an evenly divided Senate with determinative Senate races that are tied in court disputes, and a narrowly divided House where the state delegations are tied (with probably certain House races determining control of state delegations tied in court disputes).
2020 is one heck of a year.
A chicken drop election would much easier and accurate. After the chicken ‘votes’, each candidate’s picture is weighed, and the shittiest candidate wins.
Drop, chicken, drop.
What is interesting about this post election phase is that a light is being shone on ballot irregularities – something usually dismissed, in prior elections by R’s, in order to not rock the election boat, causing any disruption in the electoral process. Whether or not, these legal questions and challenges provide any changes in the EVs remains to be seen. However, hopefully what it will do is initiate an oversight magnification discouraging the ease of fraud to take place in future elections.
Just today, for instance, these suspicious developments have happened:
Antrim County, MI has removed their totals due to denoting â€skewed results.†In lieu of John James lead being suddenly reduced by a large batch of ballots materializing in the early morning hours – this also negatively effected Trump’s numbers too – it puts the MI democrat call into question.
AZ is full of discrepancies and irregularities, not only because of it’s unreasonable early call by news organizations at the tail end of voting there, but by the sheer enormity of ballots remaining to be counted in R districts. This is followed by evidence of sharpies being given out on Nov 3 that would invalidate the ballot from being counted, and R poll watchers being kept away or out of observation range to conduct legitimate oversight duties. Even after an Appellate Court Judge issued an injunction against this behavior this morning, it is being ignored by those counting the ballots.
Nevada’s transparency is also being disputed in Clark County’s ballot counting, where there is evidence of residence laws being violated, making the inclusion of such ballots illegal (10,000 said violations are being cited). Again, Clark County officials are simply ignoring these concerns, counting ballots privately, in their seemingly overt attempts to call Nevada for Biden, which would technically give him the 270 EVs needed to call the race for himself. Such an optical win would of course be a great advantage for him.
All of this reminds me of LBJ’s Senate run, when he was beaten by his opponent by 112 votes. Soon thereafter, county officials were able to amend this count after claiming to find a box of uncounted ballots – 202 ballots, of which 200 were magically for LBJ. The same unusual circumstances are happening, all over the place, in this election with large batches and boxes of ballots suddenly appearing with 100% going for Biden.
What this is proving is that it’s not those who vote, but those who count the votes deciding outcomes of elections.
BTW, as a recommended election reform, why not have all states cooperate in combing through their voter registration rolls, taking out the dead and those who have moved away, as a way to legitimately update and contribute to the ongoing accuracy of these rolls?
In his WSJ piece this morning Karl Rove said it pretty well.
Anybody who thinks that election fraud never takes place or, indeed, is rare is just naive. It takes place frequently. The issue is scale and fraud on the scale being proposed is extremely unlikely.
”Anybody who thinks that election fraud never takes place or, indeed, is rare is just naive. It takes place frequently. The issue is scale and fraud on the scale being proposed is extremely unlikely.”
That would have been true in the past, not true today any longer unfortunately. The Democrats effectively control mass media, Big tech, vast swathes of the federal bureaucracy, the Intelligence agencies, Hollywood, Academia, even increasingly Big business, etc. They have employed a scorched earth policy against Trump, norms be damned even before he took office, in the process doing irreparable damage against the very institutions that they control and pretend to care about. They have repeatedly lied and cheated shamelessly over and over without any repercussions or consequences. Their polls ended up being lies. The have come this far without suffering major consequences. They barely covered Biden and his many lies nor any Democrat for that matter. There will be no holding of accounts for a Biden administration except maybe for some random Republicans, but who will believe or hear them when they can be censored and gaslighted at will, sooo good luck with all that btw !!! Liberals can literally say almost anything and no one will challenge them nor censor them as they routinely do conservatives. Pelosi and Biden can lie at will and they have repeatedly, but unlike OMB, they will be protected.
They’ve allowed their own cities to burn, again without suffering many consequences…
They will have the presidency, one way or another. There is far too much at stake for them at this point. The Democratic party crossed the Rubicon into far left nuttiness the moment they chose to go for impeachment. There’s no turning back for them now…
It’s true, Donald Trump is a corrupt, probably immoral man. And he doesn’t deserve the Presidency.
But Donald Trump has nothing on corruption when it comes to Democrats. Every institution they control, even indirectly they have corrupted beyond recognition.
And Joe Biden is certainly as immoral, as corrupt and as underserving of the Presidency as Donald Trump. The difference being that he has his revolutionary guards everywhere in virtually every American institution that will do the dirty work for him (until they no longer have a need for him). The only institution they don’t control fully YET is the judiciary but not for lack of trying…
All that, just a small tiny, insignificant advantage. Nothing that could tip the scale in his favor at all. Totally totally free and fair election…yup /end sarcasm
Every single candidate, from every single party deserves to be treated like their adversaries; they need to be treated and judged fairly as much as possible. Even Donald Trump. This did NOT happen in any meaningful way at all. Sorry, it just didn’t…
And even through all this unprecedented level of corruption and unfairness, Trump still has a chance, albeit a shrinking one at that. And he assembled one of the most impressive and diversified coalitions of any modern Republican, despite and in spite of everything thrown at him. But I suspect Trump will not go quietly into the night. And he will take as many down with him as he can, deservedly so. Anybody that was delusional to believe that a vote for Biden was ”a return to normal”, well you deserve everything that will come next.
8 years of Biden and Obama (and frankly Bush) helped create the environment in which a Donald Trump could flourish.
Should be fun to see what 4 years of an increasingly mentally declining Biden and Harris controlled by the far left will birth…
Biden will also probably be impeached as soon as the GOP regains the house, so that should be fun too 🙂
Btw, 89% of registered voters ”voted” in Wisconsin, AFTER the coincidental dump of votes that gave the state to Biden…
Nothing suspicious there at all…
89% that’s almost Russian ”elections” impressive !!!
In Trump’s shoes, I wouldn’t concede any contested state unless every single vote and ballot can be recounted AND verified. I wouldn’t trust not one Democrat…
And then I’d spend the next four years following the example of his predecessor, another immoral, self-serving, corrupted narcissist who also broke norms whenever it suited his purpose although coincidentally enough, he wasn’t really called on it too much…funny that ! Vive la résistance !!!!
Sorry for the rant Dave, I really only lurk but this election and its aftermaths, it’s too much. I think you’re actually closer to an outright civil war than ever before. Hopefully I’m wrong. Anyway, I’ve been reading your blog daily for over 10 years. You’re the best there is. Keep it up 🙂 If there were more American politicians and elites like you, you probably wouldn’t be in this mess. Alas…
Scale, of course matters, where there is a huge difference in votes being disputed between opposing candidates. In those where the difference is smaller, then anything is possible, and many races have been decided by a few hundred ballots being discovered “in the trunk of a car,†such as a past senate race in MN, or, year’s back, a governor’s contest in WA State.
Fraud of course has occurred. The magnitude is probably not determinable, although it does seem to be a decidedly one way event.
Shutting down the vote in the middle of the night? sudden discoveries of wildly disproportionate vote for Biden from red counties. C’mon. These things are sometime IQ or honesty tests.
I thought I would relay the voting experience here in SC. You walked in and presented ID. You walked to a kiosk that had an Ipad type input and tapped in your vote. You inspected your choices on the screen. If satisfied, you printed a ballot. You looked at the ballot to see if it reflected your choices. If so, you fed it into a ballot reading machine. Done. Now I suppose software programs could screw with this. That’s fraud, and I presume auditable. But no sharpies, no chads. And so on. No 4am deliveries of mysterious ballots.
If you want to do it right, you can. Everyone in America has a cell phone for Christ’s sake. We can’t set up foolproof voting? But note where the issues exist. Big, Dem controlled cities. If I was a cynic I might venture that this is by design. Suspending voting because people are tired? Please. I’ve worked all nighters so many times in my life. This is premeditated, stop the count, “how many votes do we need.”
It is what it is. But we can do better. Support of the current system is a reflection of poor moral character.
The kind of fraud that would be stopped by voter ID is rare. Anyone who believes other wise is engaging in fantasy. The Repubs have been looking for it for years and cant find it. OTOH there is fraud at the polling places. No one cares enough to address it.
Voting at our place? I told them my name. I got a ballot and filled it out. Took it to the scanner. Fast and easy.
Steve
Trump will leave behind a very different Republican Party.
Despite, like Reagan, having been previously a Democrat.
(Which says more about the Democratic Party than the Republican).
He has gone uphill against headwinds for four years, providing an example of what pushback against Marxist globalization looks like.
Others will rise to the defense,
Inspired by his relentless energy and confidence.
But we haven’t faced “Marxist globalization” for 30 years. What we have faced is other countries including our own putative allies pursuing their own interests while we steadfastly declined from pursuing our own.
Marxist globalization
I assume you mean the CCCP, I mean domestic proponents who hate this country and prefer almost any foreign formulation, from socialist villages to 1.5 Billion member communist beehives.