We Need to Be Prepared for the Coup on Election Night
- Oct 29, 2020
- 6 min read
Ok, so we are finally hitting the home stretch, election day is a mere five days away, and Biden is leading in every metric pretty handily. I don’t think I need to make the case to vote for Biden over Trump this go around, but if you need a refresher on why you should vote for a pretty bland centrist democrat over Trump, check out my blog I posted right before the 2016 election night and sub Biden for Hillary.
That’s actually not entirely fair for Biden, because at least on paper his policy proposals are very progressive when compared to Hillary’s in 2016. He has a decent tax hike for the wealthy which is basically going to reset the disastrous Republican tax plan, and $15/hr minimum wage used to be a huge controversial topic for Hillary in 2016 is now standard for Biden in 2020. His comprehensive plan to combat global warming is a decent start. Of course, this issue is something we need to hit the emergency button on in this decade if we want to merely keep the rise in temperatures to about 1 to 2C globally, because of very slow progress. So it definitely needs to be more right now. However, the plan is orders of magnitude better than Trumps’ environmental plan of…..dismantling every regulation possible (water quality, emissions, air quality, food regulations, etc) and selling our national parks to the highest bidder. So yea, there’s just one small example of how if you want to compare candidates, and you are at all on the left, Biden has a policy plan for you that is at least 50% of what you want, and Trump has exactly the polar opposite in mind, if he has a policy at all.
But, I’m not here to convince you to vote for Biden. I think most of the left and middle have decided that’s the only sane course to keep our country afloat at this point. I’m here to convince you that it probably isn’t going to matter come election night.
Thanks to Trump and the GOP’s complete and utterly catastrophic handling of the coronavirus , we are careening towards an election day where of course, it isn’t safe to congregate. And you can read up on my wealth of posts on the topic here:
So places with huge lines and people who don’t want to wear masks are generally not great places to go if you subscribe to, you know, science. So that means there has been a massive uptick in mail in voting for this election, because here in America, we like to have 8 hour crowded lines to exercise our right to vote.
“With one week still remaining until Election Day, Americans have already cast a record-breaking 66 million early ballots, putting the 2020 election on track for historic levels of voter turnout. That's some 19 million more pre-election votes than were cast in the 2016 election, according to the U.S. Elections Project, a turnout-tracking database run by University of Florida professor Michael McDonald.”
Already we are seeing record breaking mail in votes coming in because (sane) people of course, would rather not go in person and risk their safety and that of their loved ones. But, thanks to Trump turning the coronavirus and science and reality itself into partisan politics, the people who are generally not too worried about going to vote in person on election day are going to be voting for him.
Trump knows this, and it’s been why every chance he gets he’s been trying to curb mail in voting, by kneecapping the USPS’ ability to handle the ballots, (https://mikemisgivings.wixsite.com/mikemisgivings/post/if-you-think-trump-can-t-win-this-november-you-haven-t-been-paying-attention ), or by preemptively calling every mail in vote fraudulent when there is zero evidence of a widespread trend of fraud in mail in voting, something that states and the US military have been doing just fine for decades.
In fact, voter fraud in general is something that study after study has found almost no evidence of in the US.
“the rate of voting fraud overall in the US is less than 0.0009%, according to a 2017 study by the Brennan Center for Justice.”
But that doesn’t actually matter to Trump and his republican supporters. He wants the idea that all mail in votes are fraudulent to be a pervasive topic. Evidence isn’t actually a thing that’s ever been required for Trump. Just perception. Because now you combine the idea that Trump will contest mail in votes with the fact that some key states cannot begin counting their mail in votes until election day, and you see where this is going.
We will most likely see the first votes counted in some states be only the in person votes, and those states will appear initially for Trump. In fact, we probably won’t know the election results for some days, depending on how the in person votes shape up.
I don’t think people are really accepting that reality on the right or the left, even if they are told this. Everyone is still planning on staying up all night on election night, glued to CNN or Fox News or whatever and expecting a result by midnight or 1am. Someone will concede, someone will celebrate with confetti. Business as usual.
But that most likely isn’t going to happen. With the record of mail in ballots, the election could come down to key states that have to count their mail in ballots on election day. The biggest contender being Pennsylvania, a state that many models are looking at like the lynch-pin state.
“Pennsylvania, arguably the most important swing state this election as it’s currently the likeliest “tipping-point state” in our forecast, or the state that could determine the winner of the Electoral College.”
Because of the probability of the majority of in person voters voting for Trump because they do not believe in basic medical science due to the politicization of the pandemic, we will most likely see an initial lead in Trumps’ favor in PA and many other swing states. And if the election hinges on PA for Trump, he most assuredly is going to declare victory on election night if it shows him ahead early. Remember, we probably won’t know PA’s results for days, maybe even a week. And it probably will be close either way.
“ But because the state can’t begin processing mail ballots until 7 a.m. on Election Day, it could be awhile before we get full results in Pennsylvania. State officials have said that it could take until Friday to finish counting most ballots. And between Tuesday and Friday, there could be a pretty big shift in terms of which party is favored in the vote tally, given that Biden supporters are far more likely to vote early or absentee than Trump supporters, who are far more likely to vote on Election Day.”
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/why-pennsylvanias-vote-count-could-change-after-election-night/
This isn’t going to stop Trump. Prepare to see the confetti and the victory speech come election night from him, and prepare for Fox News and the GOP to go right along with it. And once that message is disseminated to his lemmings through these propaganda outlets, prepare for about 40% of the country to accept it as gospel. They will declare all the votes counted after election night invalid or fraudulent, they will muddy the waters with any anecdotal story they can, and it’ll go to the courts. Which, I don’t entirely have faith in at this point, after judge after judge has been packed in by Trump and the GOP.
We are about to see a coup at least attempted and half the country is going to accept it as normal. It won’t be. Already, Trump is saying this:
"Hopefully, the few states remaining that want to take a lot of time after November 3rd to count ballots, that won't be allowed by the various courts," he added.”
This is his plan on election night. He doesn’t want any votes counted after November 3rd, which is completely unprecedented and undemocratic. But if he can sow chaos on the night of and the following days and muddy every water possible and stir up as much noise as he can about fraudulent voting, he may have it with a conservative court backing him.
Everyone has been saying to vote, vote, vote. And yea, that is what we needed to do this election and looks like by the polls alone, we are and we are voting Trump out. But what do we do when that doesn’t matter? People in the US look at other countries with authoritarian regimes and rampant corruption where voting is always rigged and for show like in South America and Russia and they scoff and think, “How could the citizens stand for that? That would never happen here.”
Well, it’s happening right now. And we are all standing by and watching it. What will you do when Trump declares victory on election night before the results are done being counted? If we aren’t ready to camp out in front of the White House and fight for our country en masse, I don’t know if we deserve it anymore. I hope to see you all there, that’s where I’ll be.
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