2020 Presidential Election thread

[TheStatGuy]

7 hours ago, swordfish said:

I remember Al Gore thinking he had won the election for a little over a month back in 2000.  Just pointing that out.  In other words - it ain't over until it's over......

Big difference between Florida when competing Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Arizona and Georgia. 

You are currently in denial. 

[TheStatGuy]

Comparing***

[TheStatGuy]

9 hours ago, Muda69 said:

So when is the MSM the sole decider of who wins a presidential election?  Wouldn't this year be on 12/14 when the Electoral College electors vote in their state?

 

Where did I say main stream media decided the election? 

The power of the people decided the election and we chose Joe Biden. 

If the electoral college electors go against the people. That means democracy in the united state's is over. 

Trump lost. Get over it. 

[DanteEstonia]

6 hours ago, swordfish said:

And yet the news outlets this morning are calling him the "presumptive" President Elect......

A few members of the EC could go rogue. 

[Muda69]

14 hours ago, TheStatGuy said:

Where did I say main stream media decided the election? 

The power of the people decided the election and we chose Joe Biden. 

If the electoral college electors go against the people. That means democracy in the united state's is over. 

Trump lost. Get over it. 

I did not vote for Mr. Trump, so there is nothing for me to "get over".

But his uni-party counterpart Mr. Biden is really no better.  Any objective individual who cares about personal freedom, responsibility and limited government can see that.

11-Trillion Joe.

 

[swordfish]

Count every (legal) vote!!

https://everylegalvote.com/country?fbclid=IwAR1_2ZQJ3D9_UXhRKiti-yJ7GsjCbTPsxuqdrxS4rN4XUmQyf54OJHhUcy8

Oh - and FYI - IF this were already over, the states still in question would already be certifying their results, and we wouldn't be having this conversation.  But they haven't.  Muda is correct, the media doesn't call the election.....

Edited November 11, 2020 by swordfish

[DanteEstonia]

8 hours ago, swordfish said:

Count every (legal) vote!!

https://everylegalvote.com/country?fbclid=IwAR1_2ZQJ3D9_UXhRKiti-yJ7GsjCbTPsxuqdrxS4rN4XUmQyf54OJHhUcy8

Oh - and FYI - IF this were already over, the states still in question would already be certifying their results, and we wouldn't be having this conversation.  But they haven't.  Muda is correct, the media doesn't call the election.....

For the record, MY VOTE hasn't yet been counted in NV. 

[TheStatGuy]

16 hours ago, swordfish said:

Count every (legal) vote!!

https://everylegalvote.com/country?fbclid=IwAR1_2ZQJ3D9_UXhRKiti-yJ7GsjCbTPsxuqdrxS4rN4XUmQyf54OJHhUcy8

Oh - and FYI - IF this were already over, the states still in question would already be certifying their results, and we wouldn't be having this conversation.  But they haven't.  Muda is correct, the media doesn't call the election.....

Pennsylvania and Michigan didn't certify in 2016 until November 28th. 

Georgia didn't certify in 2016 until November 22nd. 

Arizona didn't certify in 2016 until December 5th. 

Wisconsin didn't certify in 2016 until December 1st. 

 

You really need to look up stuff before you speak. 

 

7 hours ago, DanteEstonia said:

For the record, MY VOTE hasn't yet been counted in NV. 

Washoe or Clark?

[DanteEstonia]

3 hours ago, TheStatGuy said:

Pennsylvania and Michigan didn't certify in 2016 until November 28th. 

Georgia didn't certify in 2016 until November 22nd. 

Arizona didn't certify in 2016 until December 5th. 

Wisconsin didn't certify in 2016 until December 1st. 

 

You really need to look up stuff before you speak. 

 

Washoe or Clark?

Clark.

[swordfish]

4 hours ago, TheStatGuy said:

Pennsylvania and Michigan didn't certify in 2016 until November 28th. 

Georgia didn't certify in 2016 until November 22nd. 

Arizona didn't certify in 2016 until December 5th. 

Wisconsin didn't certify in 2016 until December 1st. 

OIC - (details) how many re-counts were there in 2016?  

You really need to look up stuff before you speak. 

 

Muda is correct, the media doesn't call the election.....

[TheStatGuy]

9 hours ago, DanteEstonia said:

Clark.

I follow Jon Rolston on twitter. He does a great job at explaining and updating votes about Nevada..  Learned a lot!

Glad to see Biden pick Ron Klain. He has experience dealing with Ebola and helped with the great recession. 

 

 

[TheStatGuy]

8 hours ago, swordfish said:

Muda is correct, the media doesn't call the election.....

Biden is up 146,137 in Michigan, hes up 20,557 in Wisconsin, 52,763 in Pennsylvania, 11,635 in Arizona and 14,056 in Georgia. 

Recounts don't over turn elections separated by 10,000+ votes. 

I'm confident cause I pay attention to newspapers in those states and people who deal with elections all the time. 

 

You are so in denial. TRUMP LOST MOVE ON!

BIDEN/HARRIS 2020!

 

[DanteEstonia]

On 11/12/2020 at 1:47 PM, TheStatGuy said:

Biden is up 146,137 in Michigan, hes up 20,557 in Wisconsin, 52,763 in Pennsylvania, 11,635 in Arizona and 14,056 in Georgia. 

Recounts don't over turn elections separated by 10,000+ votes. 

I'm confident cause I pay attention to newspapers in those states and people who deal with elections all the time. 

 

You are so in denial. TRUMP LOST MOVE ON!

BIDEN/HARRIS 2020!

 

Georgia is a nice little prize, since it's the home of Newt Gingrich's Congress seat. 

[TheStatGuy]

15 hours ago, DanteEstonia said:

Georgia is a nice little prize, since it's the home of Newt Gingrich's Congress seat. 

What's even cooler.. The person who currently represents that district is Lucy McBath who's son was murdered by gun violence. 

[Muda69]

Georgia discovers 2,600 previously uncounted votes in presidential recount

https://justthenews.com/politics-policy/elections/georgia-discovers-2600-previously-uncounted-votes-presidential-recount

Quote

During the recount of votes in Georgia’s presidential race, more than 2,600 ballots were found in Floyd County that had not originally been counted. According to the Atlanta Journal Constitution, this will likely reduce President Trump’s 14,000-vote deficit to Joe Biden by about 800 net votes. 

Apparently the county election officials didn’t upload votes in a ballot scanning machine, which the state’s voting system manager Gabriel Sterling called “an amazing blunder.” He said the county’s elections director should resign.

The uncounted votes were cast in person during early voting said Luke Martin, chairman of the Floyd County Republican Party.

 

“It’s very concerning,” Martin said. “But this doesn’t appear to be a widespread issue. I’m glad the audit revealed it, and it’s important that all votes are counted.”

 

[Muda69]

Sidney Powell's 'Kraken' Is Missing More Than a Few Tentacles

https://reason.com/2020/12/01/sidney-powells-kraken-is-missing-more-than-a-few-tentacles/

Quote

"I'm going to release the Kraken," former Trump lawyer Sidney Powell declared in an interview with a credulous Lou Dobbs on Fox Business a couple of weeks ago. She was referring to the overwhelming evidence that supposedly would validate her claim that the presidential election was stolen by Joe Biden through a massive fraud involving "hundreds of thousands" (or possibly "millions") of votes.

Last week Powell followed through on her threat by filing federal lawsuits challenging the election results in Michigan and Georgia. They are at least as hideous as the beast of legend and equally mythical.

Although the Trump campaign distanced itself from Powell on November 21, it was still presenting her as a member of its "elite strike force team" two days before that. Both the president himself and his personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, have repeatedly embraced key aspects of her elaborate conspiracy theory, and they continue to do so. During his bizarre press conference on November 19, Giuliani accepted and amplified Powell's story about fraud-facilitating voting machines and fabricated ballots, citing the affidavits she had collected as an important part of the president's case that Biden did not really win the election. So when we look at Powell's evidence, we are also looking at Trump's evidence.

I will focus on Powell's Michigan lawsuit, which alleges "a massive election fraud" aimed at "illegally and fraudulently manipulating the vote count to manufacture an election of Joe Biden as President of the United States." This scheme purportedly included "the unlawful counting, or manufacturing, of hundreds of thousands of illegal, ineligible, duplicate or purely fictitious ballots in the State of Michigan," representing "a multiple of Biden's purported lead in the State."

Powell's evidence overlaps a lot with affidavits that were already submitted in a Michigan lawsuit filed by the Great Lakes Justice Center on behalf of two Republican poll watchers. When he rejected that lawsuit on November 13, Wayne County Judge Timothy Kenny said the affidavits provided "no basis" for ordering an independent audit or issuing an injunction against certification of the election results in Detroit.

In one of those affidavits, Melissa Carone, a Republican who was working at Detroit's TCF Center, the convention center where votes were counted, as an I.T. contractor for Dominion Voting Systems (yes, the same company that supposedly supplies fraud-facilitating software), said she "witnessed nothing but fraudulent actions take place." The irregularities allegedly included a cover-up aimed at concealing the "loss of vast amounts of data" and "untrained counter tabulating machines that would get jammed four to five times per hour."

Kenny noted that "Ms. Carone's description of the events at the TCF Center does not square with any of the other affidavits"; that "there are no other reports of lost data, or tabulating machines that jammed repeatedly every hour during the count"; and that "neither Republican nor Democratic challengers nor city officials substantiate her version of events." He concluded that "the allegations simply are not credible." Yet here is Carone again, presented by Powell as one tentacle of her Kraken.

Kenny found that other affidavits were based on misunderstandings, offered unsubstantiated suspicions, or failed to make specific, checkable allegations. There is more of the same in the affidavits offered by Powell.

One example of a misunderstanding was the claim that absentee ballots had been backdated to make it seem as if they arrived earlier than they actually had. As Kenny noted, former Michigan Elections Director Christopher Thomas "explains that this action completed a data field inadvertently left blank during the initial absentee ballot verification process," and "the entries reflected the date the City received the absentee ballot." Yet here is Republican poll watcher Jessica Connarn, in an affidavit submitted by Powell, darkly reporting that an election worker "stated to me that she was being told to change the date on ballots to reflect that the ballots were received on an earlier date."

The previous lawsuit also featured complaints from Republican poll challengers who said they were treated rudely and inappropriately by Detroit election workers. Powell covers that base too. In a handwritten affidavit with multiple crossouts, for example, Alexandra Seely says election workers "would not take out the log to record my challenges," so "I had to write names and ballot numbers on my own." She adds that she "was harassed and threatened to be thrown out multiple times." At one point, she reports, "they told everyone to go to lunch if they haven't ate." But when poll watchers returned after eating, "they would not allow them back in and said they were at maximum capacity."

Kenny addressed a similar complaint in his ruling. According to two affidavits, he noted, "Democratic challengers were also prohibited from reentering the room because the maximum occupancy of the room had taken place. Given the COVID-19 concerns, no additional individuals could be allowed into the counting area."

Powell's lawsuit also includes an affidavit from Trump campaign volunteer Kayla Toma, who says she received troubling phone calls and emails from "poll challengers, poll watchers, or concerned voters." These secondhand reports include malfunctioning ballot-counting machines, rudeness to poll watchers, a machine that was "preemptively shut down" by an election worker who said "they could just tell when a machine was about to jam," and "containers/coolers in the polling location which could have contained ballots."

As evidence of fabricated ballots, Powell offers an affidavit from Matt Ciantir, who says he was walking his dog on "the afternoon following the election" when he saw "a young couple" in their late teens or early 20s transfer several "very large clear plastic bags" from their van to a "running USPS vehicle." He thought that was "odd," because "they did not walk inside the post office like a normal customer to drop of [sic] mail." Rather, "it was as if the postal worker was told to meet and standby until these large bags arrived." Another "oddity" was "the appearance of the couple": "After the drop, they were smiling, laughing at one another."

Ciantir took pictures of the bags "in an indiscriminate way" because he thought they could contain "ballots going to the TCF center or coming from the TCF center." But he "didn't get a chance to snap a license plate of the van nor the couple." The implication, I think, is that the highly sophisticated conspirators who rigged the election against Trump hired giggling teenagers to transport bags of phony ballots and load them into a truck in broad daylight.

"Patriots are coming forward every day, all day, faster than we can collect their information," Powell told Dobbs. If these affidavits represent the best Powell can do, you have to wonder about the quality of the "information" she decided to leave out.

Powell, joined by Trump and Giuliani, claims Dominion Voting Systems played a key role in denying the president his rightful victory. At the heart of that allegation is a redacted affidavit from an unnamed source who calls himself "an adult of sound mine" and claims to have worked for "the national security guard detail of the President of Venezuela." In that capacity, he says, he learned that President Hugo Chavez had commissioned Smartmatic (a different company) to "create and operate a voting system that could change the votes in elections from votes against persons running the Venezuelan government to votes in their favor in order to maintain control of the government." Although Powell calls this document the "Dominion Whistleblower Report," Wall Street Journal reporter Kevin Poulsen notes, "the voting software used in Venezuela has no connection to Dominion, and wasn't used anywhere in Michigan."

Another affiant cited by Powell averred that "data manipulation by artificial means" was clear from the way that Trump's early leads in battleground states shrank as more votes were counted. In Pennsylvania, for example, "President Trump's lead of more than 700,000" was "reduced to less than 300,000 in a few short hours, which does not occur in the real world without an external influence." The same affiant cited another example of suspicious tallies in "Edison County, MI," a jurisdiction that does not exist.

Newsweek notes several other errors in Powell's lawsuits:

The 104-page suit detailing allegations of fraud in Georgia and the 75-page document focusing on Michigan both contain a series of typos, including spelling "district" incorrectly twice in the Georgia suit's opening line. In the Michigan lawsuit, the court name is also misspelled in the top line to read "Eastern Distrct of Michigan."

The documents misspell the name of William Briggs, one of Powell's key expert witnesses, incorrectly referring to him as "Williams Briggs" and "William Higgs."

The Michigan document contains a number of pages where entire sentences do not have any spaces between the words.

While mistakes like these obviously do not go the heart of Powell's allegations, they do reflect a general lack of care. We will see what the courts make of her claims. But even if the lawsuits are quickly dismissed, it probably will not weaken the faith of Trump supporters who still believe he actually won.

Update: Today Powell filed another lawsuit in Wisconsin. It names as a plaintiff Derrick Van Orden, an unsuccessful Republican congressional candidate who said his inclusion in the lawsuit was a surprise to him. "I learned through social media today that my name was included in a lawsuit without my permission," Van Orden said on Twitter. "To be clear, I am not involved in the lawsuit seeking to overturn the election in Wisconsin."

Update II: "To date, we have not seen fraud on a scale that could have effected a different outcome in the election," Attorney General William Barr told the Associated Press today. Alluding to Powell-style claims, he added: "There's been one assertion that would be systemic fraud, and that would be the claim that machines were programmed essentially to skew the election results. And the DHS and DOJ have looked into that, and so far we haven't seen anything to substantiate that."

 

[swordfish]

While the time is drawing shorter for the Trump administration to prove anything, and the chances of pulling off a different election outcome are much slimmer, Attorney Powell has an impeccable reputation for making good on her legal claims, even as far-fetched as some may seem.  Chances are, she isn't going to pull something off before the electors meet this month, but IF anything actually exists it will come out sometime in the next few years.

The question is what will come of it?  My theory is and remains that JRB will not be in the position for very long for one reason or another, and we will have our country's first woman President well before the next election.

Edited December 2, 2020 by swordfish

[DanteEstonia]

 

[swordfish]

Sure Dante - I'm going to watch a Youtube video that has a "Party of Trump Stooges" graphic pop up 2 seconds into it and believe its an unbiased view......That's 2 seconds (plus the time it took to type this) I'll never get back.

[DE]

https://www.theepochtimes.com/state-farm-arena-footage-shows-poll-workers-staying-behind-pulling-out-suitcases-with-ballots_3603293.html?utm_source=newsnoe&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=breaking-2020-12-03-3

President Trump will be sworn in again on 1/20/21.

Have a great day.

[DanteEstonia]

8 hours ago, swordfish said:

"Party of Trump Stooges"

If the shoe fits...

[Muda69]

Trump Has Only Himself To Blame for Losing the Election

https://reason.com/2020/12/04/trump-has-only-himself-to-blame-for-losing-the-election/

Quote

If I argued that a group of highly intelligent, but nefarious aliens invaded the bodies of California's lawmakers in order to destroy our lovely state, you might expect me to share a little evidence to support those startling claims. The onus should always rest with the promoters of conspiracy theories to prove them true, not with the rest of us to disprove them.

Perhaps California officials embrace inexplicably destructive policy measures because they cling to misguided political ideologies. Maybe there is some other plausible explanation related to the state's unique culture or politics. We should consider many theories—is it something in the water?—before arriving at extraterrestrial invasions.

Likewise, it's time for President Donald Trump's supporters to consider that, quite possibly, there are reasons beyond a vast voter-fraud conspiracy that explain his decisive loss. The president and his legal advocates have argued that Trump actually won by millions of votes, Democratic operatives stuffed ballots (but were too stupid to fix down-ticket races), and rigged electronic voting software.

Maybe those local GOP election officials who dispute those claims were actually helping Biden. A dark, deep-state secret might also explain why the Department of Homeland Security disputed them. It's hard to prove a negative. I suppose the only reason you dispute my thesis about aliens is that they have also invaded your body. Prove me wrong.

Meanwhile, the judicial system, which still mercifully relies on evidence, has put a damper on the lunacy. Several judges slammed the campaign's allegations and even Trump's lawyers have backtracked in court. The Trump team has won two minor victories involving a minuscule number of irregular votes, but it has lost 35 cases.

Obviously, one can always find examples of fraud (and suppression) in any election involving 157 million votes. Governments run elections. They can be inefficient and incompetent. Stating that obvious fact, however, is a long way from proving widespread voter corruption.

"This court has been presented with strained legal arguments without merit and speculative accusations, unpled in the operative complaint and unsupported by evidence," ruled a Pennsylvania judge last week. "(T)his cannot justify the disenfranchisement of a single voter, let alone all the voters of its sixth most populated state." The judge has a point—or maybe he was in on it, too.

Trump's supporters may take solace in these nostrums, but the explanation is obvious. The Democratic ticket simply received more votes than the Republican one. Trumpworld's disbelief reminds me of that debunked factoid about a New York reporter who, after Nixon won the presidency, supposedly said the outcome was impossible because no one she knew voted for him. Americans need to get out more.

Why did the president lose by more than 6 million votes (albeit by slim margins in several states)? There are two ways to win. Candidates can expand their base and win new supporters, or energize their base and count on an enormous turnout. Trump spent his presidency placating his core constituency, which voted in droves. But Trump's opponents were even more motivated.

Years ago, a controversial conservative writer named Sam Francis called on the GOP to foment a "Middle American Revolution" that counterbalanced Democratic power in big cities and among minority voters by appealing to the interests of the nation's mostly white working-class voters. Trump followed that strategy closely, which is how in 2016 he achieved unexpected victories in the previously Democratic-leaning Rust Belt.

This approach explains Trump's focus on curbing immigration, avoiding military conflicts, promoting tariffs, embracing social conservatism, and heightening the culture wars. I agree with pulling back our international commitments (although Trump's successes were mainly rhetorical) and a few of his other policy objectives, but I found this agenda to be unnecessarily divisive and, at times, troublingly authoritarian.

Nevertheless, Trump has remade the Republican Party, even as he went down in defeat. By focusing almost exclusively on working-class voters, Trump built support in older, economically depressed regions and in rural America—but he did so at the expense of the nation's growing suburbs, where voters often turned away from his bluster. Politically speaking, it seemed like a bad trade.

In reality, the president could have appealed to both areas and cruised to a comfortable re-election margin. Many Trump supporters can't fathom why Republicans did well in congressional races, but lost the presidency. Again, simple analysis is more compelling than a fanciful theory. Many people—myself included—usually vote for Republican legislators, but found one particular Republican officeholder to be unworthy.

We tired of the president's conspiracy-mongering, whining, incessant tweeting, dishonesty, incompetence, and failure to grow into the office. The president could have tried to, at times, unite the country. He could have reined in his attacks, surrounded himself with truth-tellers rather than sycophants, and reached out to other voters. He didn't. That's why he lost. It had nothing to do with fraudulent voting or aliens.

Agreed.

[swordfish]

[DanteEstonia]

10 hours ago, swordfish said:

Show me that "video".

Unless it's from Edison County.

[DE]

I know.  I know.  Chavez died in 2013.

Nothing to see here.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/whats-happening-in-us-election-matches-what-happened-in-venezuela-expert-says_3605487.html?utm_source=newsnoe&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=breaking-2020-12-04-5