My guess? They really fucking thought he would win and all his cult can either cop to the fact that he is a complete con man who took them for a ride for half a decade or they can double down and pretend what he says makes sense. What do you expect them to do, admit they were wrong?
Election results discussion thread (and sadly the inevitable aftermath)
- Thread starter Godzillarich(aka tf2godz)
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I would say they're sucking ass to beg for pardons for anything they've done these last 4 years. Look at Lindsey Graham - what are the odds the first time he ever tries to commit voter fraud the dude says no? Do you know how to approach that subject out of the blue? I sure as shit don't. And we're expected to believe a Good Ol' Southern racist like him in danger of losing to a black man didn't have votes thrown out?
Same with melting Giuliani - probably been pulling a lot of sketchy financial fraud these past few years, and the whole thing with Ukraine. If Trump loses and just bolts, a lot of people are left with their pants down and federal crimes on the way up.
I am happy to wear the mantle of Socrates whilst debating: which is to say being over-rated and annoying.
It's easy to dunk on a partisan hack like Cheong, but he inadvertently leads to an important point: she's NOT throwing away her repuation. If anything she pulling in fans. When Biden is sworn in and it's revealed there was never any Hammer & Scorecard plot and no Dominion Voting hack, there will be no penalty for this as far as hardcore Trump supporters are concerned because they'll absolutely still believe the Democrats stole the election. So a small number of folks on the right will correctly peg her as a Qanon crank and a shameless Trump toadie, but those are exactly the kind of people that make up the base now. So again, there is no penalty for Powell, and she knows she can spout nonsense about Hugo Chavez with impunity and people will believe her no matter what.
The fuckery involved here is that the 2 Reps voted in favor of wayne county results after they'd been assured there would be audits of the results, but they were lied to (and threatened to comply). I don't know if the MI Reps can hold their ground here. Trump's lawyers had a lawsuit about this as well (something about the number of votes being over 100% of residents) and was dropped after the Reps voted against approving the results. I stopped following this, as you can see when I was reminded of the Rep Speaker's position on this, and I have no energy to keep following this.
I am unclear, I suppose. Must be the case - Trump's crew has, I think, 5 lawsuits in total. One of those was dropped in MI because the certification of wayne county votes was dropped. This proceeded beyond my capability to give a shit, mostly because I'm busy.
You hear that? That's the sound of irrelevance because the votes were already cast and Biden won the state anyway.
hehe.
If the vote results aren't certified, the electors can't be assigned. If neither side has 270 electors, the vote goes to the house with each state getting one vote. Reps have the majority of states (27-23). They're playing the long game. If it actually pays off is beyond me.
A coup by any other name. But I wouldn't bet money on them pulling it off if I were you.
Trump claimed this, yes, but it was obviously and demonstrably a lie. Both the numbers of registered voters and the number of ballots cast are publicly available details.
Yeaurgh, pretty scummy.
Less so than Trump's "recount fund", of course, which isn't even using the funds for the stated purpose, and is just paying off his massive debts.
I can't bet on the elections since it's currently ongoing... what a joke.
Who demonstrated it was a lie? Honestly I'm unconvinced as you are. Then again I don't really want to look into this, courts can decide it.
The recount fund is similar, I think half of it goes to the debts of the campaign.
edit: if you want to look into it you can search up the allegations the Reps have over wayne county, even listen to them, I'm pretty sure there's a recording of the zoom call somewhere.
Someone can explain to me why "throw more money" supposed to ensure a peaceful transition of power?
Is this another "quirk" of american politics?
Paying things like salaries is a big one. Another would be legal fees related to Trump's lawsuits; just having competent representation show up on that first day when they're inevitably tossed for lacking evidence costs money.
There's plenty of other non-transition uses though that the tweet likely "forgot" to mention such as paying down debts.
Actually the number filed by the Donald Trump for President Inc. is 28, most of which(like 25) have already been tossed for being frivolous or admitting they have no evidence.
So... with the caveat that I did not click the link, transitions actually do cost money as they have personnel and logistical requirements. Normally this is a line item in the GSA budget that is released as part of transition operations. But the administration is not cooperating with participating in said transition and isn't authorizing the standard support given to transition operations, but the work remains.
But, more often than not, post-election fundraising is to pay off outstanding campaign debts, which are common.
It's sad that you'd believe anything that Republicans are saying at this point. Certifying the results is a formality. There was no evidence of any fraud, much less widespread fraud. Any attempt to delay or refuse to certify the results without evidence of any wrongdoing is the actual fuckery. Republicans tried to steal the election, and they tried to do it the way they always have - by disenfranchising minorities. They're nothing but a bunch of authoritarian, criminal, racist and sexist dirtbags.
Well its important to frame everything in correct context. Those two Trump operatives who were """promised""" an audit weren't promised shit. Its simply not true. What they were hoping for was another recount to postpone the results long enough for Trump to continue fund raising for his temper tantrum. However the recount is only triggered automatically if the vote total between the two candidates are within less than a percentage of each other. And in Wayne County they weren't. Which means there was no reason for an audit. And even then Georgia itself was recounted, and Biden was declared a winner. If Trump wants a second recount that includes counties that Biden won strongly, he has to pay for it. $3 Million was the price I saw quoted. And Trump is nothing if not a cheapskate. So he wants those two Trump operatives to keep the election open so he can keep the idea of a recount in the news so he can continue to fund raise off the idea.
At least in Georgia its just another Trump money scam.
In this exchange? Your argument essentially amounts to a glorified "no you" wherein you're positing that the electoral shenanigans are on Democrats rather than Trump et al, and that they're simply objecting to him trying to overturn their chicanery. Generously, we might see this as reflective of your apparent lack of research into the subject matter.
I'll be blunt, Iron. You've made it clear that you don't have any practical understanding of how the process works, and by all appearances no real desire to learn it. For instance, it's called Election Day because that's the day that votes are cast, not because that's when the definitive results have to be known and announced. The Trump campaign called foul, and that's evidently all you needed to believe them. You don't know the timeframes involved. You don't seem to give a damn about the exacerbating circumstances that would affect those timeframes, such as COVID's role in making this a record setting year for mail-in votes, efforts in the weeks leading up to the election to cripple the Post Office's ability to perform its duties and thus delay the arrival of mail-in votes by forbidding overtime, removing public mailboxes, reducing staff, and throwing out mail sorters. Never mind that courts ruled to pass a deadline extension so as to account for the delays in mail delivery expected as a result of those factors so long as the evidence indicated that the mail-in ballots had been in the mail by Nov 3.
Nor do you apparently care to do the due diligence that would tell you just how transparently baseless (see Donald J. Trump for President Inc. v. Philadelphia County Board of Elections), toothless (none of the suits have a scope that would overturn the results), and frankly bizarre the Trump campaign and its supporters' suits have been. There's literally a case where a woman demanded that her state stop counting votes because she claimed to believe her neighbor had illicitly cast her vote for her. Said vote had been signature verified and the signature was a match for what they had on file. When she talked to election officials about it on Oct 28 and disputed that it was actually her ballot, they gave her the option to challenge her ballot and cast a new provisional ballot, she refused...and then claimed to have been simply turned away from the polls. Setting aside that she's effectively suing the state over her own deliberate inaction, the demanded relief has absolutely nothing to do with her case and is so far outside its scope as to make it hard to believe that it wasn't a flimsy excuse for partisan action.
And that's before we even get into the fact that the only 'evidence' many of these cases brought to the table doesn't actually qualify as such. For instance, let's take the case predicated on the star witness claimed that an unknown individual had allegedly heard discussions about voter fraud. That's not just inadmissible hearsay, it's inadmissible hearsay of inadmissible hearsay. To quote the court itself: "This 'supplemental evidence' is inadmissible as hearsay. The assertion that Connarn was informed by an unknown individual what 'other hired poll workers at her table' had been told, is inadmissible hearsay within hearsay, and plaintiffs have provided no hearsay exception for either level of hearsay that would warrant consideration of the evidence. See MRE 801(c)"
And you want to cite delay in the certification? That's on Trump et al and his supporters, and it again ended up being predicated on the plaintiff making shit up whole cloth. Or to quote the court directly: the plaintiffs did "not offer any affidavits or specific eyewitness evidence to substantiate their assertions ... Plaintiffs' allegation is mere speculation. Plaintiffs' pleadings do not set forth a cause of action" See also Donald J. Trump for President v. Benson, and Donald J. Trump for President v. Boockvar. Or we could perhaps talk about the two Republicans on the Michigan Board of State Canvassers, who were holding up that state's certification on the explicit grounds of Trump's long-debunked rhetoric and who by their own accounts have been getting calls from Republicans to convince them not to certify the vote. See what I mean about you not doing your homework?
Moreover, it's worth recalling that Trump does this song and dance literally every time he competes, and especially if he doesn't win. The guy was railing against how the 2016 election was obviously rigged against him in the weeks leading up to the 2016 election (and months before this one). Curiously, as soon as he won the electoral college those claims evaporated and he started bragging about how resounding his victory was. When he found out that he lost the popular vote, he started claiming that he actually won the popular vote, it was just that millions of illegitimate votes made it seem otherwise (a claim he pulled out of nowhere and has never been able to substantiate). He railed against the Emmys as rigged against him because the Apprentice lost to the Amazing Race in 2004-2006. Any time he doesn't like the results, he claims the results only happened because of foul play. He claimed that Obama's reelection in 2012 was proof that America was not really a democracy and that the American people needed to "fight like hell and stop this great and disgusting injustice". He claimed that he didn't actually lose the Iowa Caucus to Ted Cruz, but that Cruz stole it, and that - wait for it - the results should be invalidated (sound familiar?). "Based on the fraud committed by Senator Ted Cruz during the Iowa Caucus, either a new election should take place or Cruz results nullified." Hell, for this election he actually laid it bare that he'd assume the election to be fair if he won but unfair if he lost. "The only way we're going to lose this election is if the election is rigged".
Every. Goddamn. Time. It's always "Heads I win. Tails they cheated". And it's always a baseless claim he jumps out the gate with. No evidence, he just assumes it to be true for the sake of his ego. This case is no different. As shown repeatedly in court, they don't actually have evidence of large scale fraud. They're simply refusing to accept that Trump could have lost legitimately and are working backwards from that conclusion to speculate that large scale fraud must exist, and that that without it Trump would have not only won but would have had a landslide victory in which he won by "millions of votes".
It's the same canard Trump pulled with the Emmys. The same one Trump pulled with Obama's reelection. And the Iowa Caucus. And the 2016 election until Trump winning the electoral college made them immediately change their tune. And then, it's just like they did with the popular vote after that. Let me reemphasize that: As soon as he learned of the results he immediately went from "the results will be fraudulent" to "the part I won is legitimate but the part I didn't win is fraudulent". "Heads I win. Tails they cheated". Or, in his own words months ago, "The only way we can lose is if cheating goes on". They're brazenly throwing shit at the wall and hoping that something will stick. How many times does he have to pull this stunt before you start being skeptical and actually give his claims a long hard look instead of simply assuming them to be true?
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