The United Fuck-Ups of America
Americans like to know who the new president is on Election Day. Trump says whatever the count is at day’s end is the result. That is a threat, meaning: unless I am declared winner by midnight, I’ll take my armed thugs off stand-by and turn the Cold Civil War I’ve already launched into a hot one.
Let’s hold that thought till end of Election Day and pretend for now that there is no war.
A recent post in Daily Beast on these vigilantes eager to commit mayhem for their grievances, whatever they are
* * *
This year, counting all legitimate votes will not be so fast, because Covid means many millions of ballots are in the mail or in storage, and because Trump & Co are trashing the postal system, and because they’ve eliminated more than 1000 polling stations in poor neighbourhoods to discourage voting, and because other weird and possibly terrible things might happen.
Here are things that could delay a result into next year, or provide an excuse for the Republican Supreme Court justices to decide who becomes President, like they did in 2000. If all of them come together, the perfect storm, The United Fuck-Ups of America, then dog save us all.
HOW VOTES ARE COUNTED, OR NOT: Voting is managed by the 50 states, not by a federal authority. Rules differ – for example, about when postal votes are counted, when they’re too late to count, and about who gets ‘cleansed’ off the rolls from the last election to this one. Hundreds of thousands of mostly poor and/or black voters will be told they no longer exist. These matters are decided by local Party bosses; vast sums of money are involved.
WHICH STATES MATTER: A group of 538 people called “the electoral college” actually decides the presidential election. Each state has as many voters in the college as they have members in the two houses of Congress, so the same bias toward small-population states that plagues the Senate also skews the college. This system was originally designed to bribe slave-owning states into joining the union. Today it means a few toss-up states – such as Florida, Ohio, or Pennsylvania – will decide who wins. The 50 states combined have 538 votes, so whoever gets 270 or more wins. Democrats Gore and Clinton won the most votes in 2000 and 2016 but were screwed by the skewed electoral college, which could happen this time too.
WHAT ELSE COULD GO WRONG: Electoral college voters don’t have to vote for the candidate their citizens preferred – a state government could flip all their college votes to Trump even if Biden won that state by a landslide. They don’t need an excuse, but they might create one. Trump’s pal Roger Stone organized a riot that helped sabotage vote counting in 2000. Vote suppression expert Greg Palast asks: “What happens if Stone tweets, on Election Day: ‘There are 10,000 fraudulent ballots from Venezuela in the Jacksonville Post Office’ – how long before that P.O. is in flames?”
There are hundreds more nightmare scenarios and every one has a dozen possible lawsuits. If only one lawsuit by Trump or another Republican mogul makes it up to the Supreme Court, Trump’s six justices of the nine could endorse another four years of neo-fascism.
That ‘riot’ 20 years ago was staged by a few hired frat boys. Today there are thousands of angry “proud boys” in SUVs and pickup trucks with automatic weapons up their wazoos, just itching to open fire on the mile-long lines of regular Americans trying to vote in Democratic neighbourhoods.
There will be blood; how much and when it goes viral could determine the future of us all. If the people’s wishes are trashed again, America’s brewing Second Civil War will rage more viral then all our viruses, and wilder than all our wildfires.