"A test for democracy: Experts worry about a nightmare election during a pandemic marred by disenfranchisement and chaos, followed by an acrimonious legal and political dispute over the results that would test the nation’s democratic resolve.
The warnings sound one state or city at a time. This will be an Election Day like no other.
In Denver, the capital of hotly contested Colorado, intimations of approaching trouble come early. Workers coughing at a ballot-printing facility are the first sign — an outbreak of coronavirus, right before ballots are set to go out.
Elsewhere in town, protests force the closure of an early voting site on a college campus, and an autumn blizzard renders some other voting centers unusable. A nameless malefactor falsely claims to have hacked the voter rolls, sowing unease in a critical hour. And many poll workers fail to show up, fearing COVID, leaving enormous lines of frustrated voters snaking down city blocks.
Across the nation, preemptive legal challenges are launched by both parties. Mailed in ballots pile up; some arrive too late to be counted, and others are thrown out over tiny mistakes. Rival, surly factions collide near polling places and government offices, as voting sites in Black, Latino, and immigrant neighborhoods report harassment and intimidation. Will federal officers move to intervene?
It is a nightmare scenario — nothing that has happened, or necessarily will. It is not a prediction, but rather a sum of the fears of those who closely track how the combination of pandemic and partisan extremes could test this country’s fragile election system as never before.
All of a sudden our system is fragile.
The Globe’s Washington Bureau staff fanned out last month and consulted voters, voting advocates, officials, and experts all over, including those who “gamed out” the Denver scenario. They see much to worry about, but also voiced optimism that elections officials and average Americans will take steps now to make sure votes are properly cast and counted, laying the groundwork for a peaceful and credible democratic outcome.
Then the FIX must be IN!
The Globe spoke to more than two dozen elections experts in reporting this story. Here’s what they advised to make sure your vote is counted, and yet, the anxiety. This is sure to be the most complicated election in modern US history, and because of our deliberately decentralized federal system, it will be, as ever, not one election but more like 10,000 — each precarious in its own way. Then there is the question of how a norm-shattering president will behave in the weeks that follow. The list of what could go wrong is longer than its hopeful counterpart.
The baseline fear going in is that millions of voters get left out — a concern that is hardly new in America. The electoral system here was a welcoming environment for voter suppression long before the US Supreme Court loosened the rules, and before this terrifying pandemic, especially for Black, poor, and young voters. The potential is very real for disenfranchisement on a vast scale, and so it is, this day — this vision of an election gone haywire.
Absentee ballots requested in record amounts by voters during the pandemic don’t arrive, forcing local officials to reissue them as people worry they will lose their chance to vote. Sudden changes to state laws or court decisions scuttle weeks of planning by elections officials.
President Trump is no help. He has repeatedly warned his supporters against mail-in ballots, so more Republicans vote in person than usual, adding to the crowds. Lines stretch outside the doors of high school gyms, libraries, and town halls. They will be longer still in Black and Latino neighborhoods.
Some voters give up and go home.
Those who mailed in their ballots wait as elections officials begin counting them — which will not start until Election Day in many states, and could take days or weeks. Ballots get thrown out because of mismatched signatures, or technical issues with the envelope or postmark, errors that can be fixed or avoided if a ballot comes back early enough, but will be impossible to cure if postal delays slow them down. Democratic lawyers race to the courthouse to stop more from being discarded. Republicans oppose them — the first steps in the legal trench warfare that will stretch for weeks, making the 2000 “hanging chad” election standoff look comparatively small bore. Will the Supreme Court, which could be stacked with another conservative after the death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, intervene?
As officials urge Americans to be patient while the tallying continues, foreign adversaries, domestic operatives, and shadowy groups like QAnon jump into that vacuum, sowing confusion and distrust in the results online.
That is the pre$$'s job, and they do it quite well.
Get ready.
The election is six weeks from Tuesday and nothing is preordained except this: The success or failure of the contest between Trump and Joe Biden depends on the people on the front-line of democracy who plan to work to the last hour to ensure the outcome, whichever way it goes, is one we can believe in.....
Only if Trump wins in a landslide, as he should, and I'll have to get the report from somewhere else to believe it.
Fuck the Bo$ton Globe.
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Related:
"This year, the pandemic, the sputtering postal service, and President Trump’s verbal assaults on the integrity of the electoral system, have raised the specter of widespread voter disenfranchisement, but those are simply new fractures in the bones of a system that has often seemed better at shutting out voters than protecting them. The right to participate in an American election — particularly if you are Black, brown, poor, or young — has always been fragile, and few voters know that better than those in Montgomery, Alabama....."
They are hoping to stuffing the ballot box for Joe Biden because elections are won by the candidate who gets the most votes.
"Trust in the elections process was already being eroded, and then the pandemic struck" by Liz Goodwin / Globe staff
It is what voting has come to in 2020, and Florida is a reminder of how complicated it could be.
The secure ballot drop boxes were a popular attraction in Miami during the state’s primary election in mid-August, after President Trump spent weeks stirring up fears about mail-in voting and Democrats raised alarms about moves his administration was making that could slow down the US Postal Service. Absorbing the warnings, some voters — Republican and Democrat — who had planned to mail their ballots instead drove to precincts like this one, a library located in the north of the city, to personally deliver their votes.
As opposed to the pre$$ stirring up fear over the mythical COVID for months.
Fuck these assholes from the Bo$ton Globe.
“I wasn’t scared about COVID, I was scared about the ballot not reaching the supervisor of elections,” said Geisha Labour, 37, who decided to personally deliver her ballot after reading about mail delays in the news. “I just wanted to drop it off personally. ”
Labour is a Democrat, but caution wasn’t limited to those wary of Trump.
“I don’t want my vote manipulated,” said Cynthia Alfonso, a 28 year-old nursing aide who supports the president. “I came in person to make sure.”
Florida’s August primary provided a preview of the potential problems on Election Day this November in a crucial swing state known for producing nail-biter elections and the nation’s most famous recount 20 years ago. It also gave a glimpse into the minds of voters at a scary time in American life — one marked by a global pandemic, social unrest, and job losses, but the most common fear expressed by Floridians who showed up to vote on Aug. 18 wasn’t any of those looming threats — it was that their ballot would not be counted at all. It’s an anxiety stoked by a president who seems determined to discredit any election result unfavorable to him and heightened by the uncertainty the coronavirus has lent to all the rituals of what we knew once as normal life.
The Globe complaining about how the virus has affected normal life when they have been one of the lead liars pushing the crap.
Trump’s attacks on mail-in voting have flipped voting trends on their heads in Florida and some other states, where vote-by-mail has tended to skew older and Republican — including Trump, who voted absentee in the primary himself. Trump eventually tweeted that, in Florida specifically, it was “Safe and Secure” to vote by mail, but reassurance has been outrun by the doubts he sowed. That is why he wins in a landslide.
In past years, Trump would be finished, but we now live in the era of COVID!
That’s evident in the data so far: Out of the more than 4 million voters in Florida who have already requested a November mail-in ballot, Democrats enjoy a more than 600,000 request lead over Republicans. Republicans are also lagging far behind Democrats in requesting ballots in other battleground states, including Pennsylvania and North Carolina, and polls show Republicans are far more skeptical of voting by mail than Democrats are.
Republicans voting at polling places could close that ballot difference on Election Day. During the primary, many older Floridians from both political parties said they were motivated to vote in person and planned to do so again on Nov. 3.
Milo Gonzalez, 87, a Republican, carefully packed his wife’s walker into their minivan after they cast their ballots in person. He said they wouldn’t consider mailing their votes.
“The president we have now, he’s not perfect; but compared to the others, I’d rather have him,” Gonzalez said, alluding darkly to potential “tricks” other politicians might be playing with the vote.
Despite his age, Gonzalez, who immigrated to the United States from Cuba decades ago, said he and his wife weren’t scared to vote in person. “I’m protected; we wash our hands,” he said, pointing to his face mask.
Public health experts stress that voting in person is safe, as long as people wear masks and maintain distance, which can be difficult if polling sites become crowded.
The "public health experts" they cite should be hanging from lampposts.
This has gone too fucking far!
Mail-in voting comes with its own risks, however. More than 1,200 ballots arrived too late to be counted in Volusia County despite being postmarked in time for the primary. Overall, 1.5 percent of mail-in ballots cast in the primary were rejected because they arrived late or had technical errors, according to an analysis for Politico.
So Trump is right after all!
Experts recommend voters fill out ballots by hand and then return them in person to drop boxes to avoid any delays.
If past elections are any indication, younger, first-time, and minority voters have more to lose when using mail-in ballots.
An ACLU analysis of the 2018 election in Florida found that Black and Latino voters were twice as likely to have their mail-in ballots rejected as white voters, due to a combination of errors filling them out and uneven standards in how counties process them. That has given many Black residents another fear: that their votes are being intentionally suppressed.
I would like to know why the ACLU is night filing lockdown lawsuits all across the country for the unconstitutional violation of ALL our civil liberties?
Why is the ACLJU MIA, 'eh?
“What’s going on right now is disgusting,” said Bernice Adams, 77, who dropped off her 80-year-old husband to vote in person.
Jason Johnson, a 42-year-old systems engineer, said he was motivated to cast his ballot even more by the feeling that there were attempts to suppress his vote.
“If you tell me that I can’t do something, that just makes me drive harder,” he said. “The people’s voice needs to be heard."
That's why I do what I do because you are not going to hear the people's voices in the pre$$!
--more--"
Also see:
"How do you run 10,000 elections safely during a pandemic, because if there is one thing that defines the 2020 election, it is uncertainty because “we have a fragmented, polarized, decentralized, and under resourced electoral system,” and the country is not planning one election for Nov. 3 but rather 10,000, each run locally, one at a time, as “the pandemic is a new curveball for us, but for the past decade, we’ve been operating in a voting landscape that has constant change, almost always right before an election. At what point in our democracy did we say it’s OK to rewrite the rules so that your party wins The trust is eroding.”
Seems to trace back to 2016 and Trump's victory, hypocrites.
Let loose the lawyers:
"Armies of lawyers are locked in battles around the country. It’s just a taste of what could happen post-election" by Liz Goodwin / Globe staff
And so it goes. The rules for November’s election are being drawn right now in courts just like this one, with Democrats and Republicans spending millions of dollars to battle over how people can vote in hundreds of lawsuits in almost every state in the nation. The fights are just a preview of the legal brawl that could break out after the election in states where the presidential race is close.
What the Globe is doing with these articles is pre-programming you for the pre-ordained outcome, whatever that may be.
In many cases, Democrats are seeking to expand access to mail-in ballots and to give people more time to return them. Republicans are opposing those efforts, pushing for ballots to be counted only if they’re received by Election Day and to uphold strict standards on signature matching and other verification procedures that would result in more mail-in ballots being thrown out on suspicion of fraud.
They need to know how many ballots they will need to forge.
“There’s more litigation in 2020 than there’s been in prior cycles combined,” said Marc Elias, a veteran voting rights lawyer representing Democrats in dozens of elections cases.
Meet your shadow government:
"Joe Biden’s campaign is establishing a major new legal operation, bringing in two former solicitors general and hundreds of lawyers in what the campaign billed as the largest election protection program in presidential campaign history. Legal battles are already raging over how people will vote — and how ballots will be counted — this fall during the pandemic, and senior Biden officials described the ramp-up as necessary to guard the integrity of a fall election already clouded by President Trump’s baseless accusations of widespread fraud. The new operation will be overseen by Dana Remus, who has served as Mr. Biden’s general counsel on the 2020 campaign, and Bob Bauer, a former White House counsel during the Obama administration who joined the Biden campaign full-time over the summer as a senior adviser. Inside the campaign, they are creating a “special litigation” unit, which will be led by Donald B. Verrilli Jr. and Walter Dellinger, two former solicitors general, who are joining the campaign. Hundreds of lawyers will be involved, including a team at the Democratic law firm Perkins Coie, led by Marc Elias, which will focus on the state-by-state fight over vote casting and counting rules, and Eric H. Holder Jr., the former attorney general in the Obama administration, will serve as something of a liaison between the campaign and the many independent groups involved in the legal fight over the election, which is already raging in the courts....."
The power-mad Democraps are bringing in the most motley cue imaginable! Holder is one of the few AGs ever to be held in contempt of Congre$$ for the Fast-and Furious gunrunning, and the law firm Perkins Coie is notorious for being a channel for the Clinton campaign ca$h that funded the discredited Steele dossier that was later used by the Obama administration to facilitate spying on the Trump campaign.
The victor of this sprawling legal war so far is unclear. The US Supreme Court may ultimately step in and decide some of the issues definitively, but the justices have a limited window to do so. Most legal experts say courts tend to avoid stepping into disputes five weeks or fewer before an election, when absentee ballots begin to be mailed out and it’s “pencils down” for justices who do not want to appear to be interfering with the most vital process of our democracy.
Each case in dispute has the potential to profoundly affect voters and the chance their ballots will be counted.
“In the end, elections are decided by inches — not by feet or yards or miles,” Elias said. “Each one of these legal disputes that may seem like we’re fighting over 10,000 ballot applications here, 50,000 ballots that may or may not count there — in a closely divided election, these things matter.”
One of the attorneys on the Texas case, Luis Roberto Vera, said he believes limiting mail-in options there will benefit Republicans on Election Day, especially if there are long lines at polling places, which tend to disproportionately affect minority voters.
“Those people are in lines for hours and hours and hours,” Vera said. “If you have small children, if you have elderly parents, are you going to go stand in that line and risk something that may not hurt you but could kill the most precious people in your life?”
F**k that fraud!
Another phase of the legal war begins on Election Day itself — one that will likely be even fiercer and more frantic than the battles thus far. Justin Riemer, the chief counsel of the Republican National Committee, expects a “dash to the courthouse” from Democrats seeking to extend hours for polling places with long lines and to push deadlines on counting mail-in ballots that are received later.
The RNC will be ready to counter. “We feel like the deadline is the deadline,” Riemer said. “Our push is for ballots to be returned and counted as close to Election Day as possible.”
With many more Americans voting by mail than ever before, and a patchwork of still evolving rules about which ballots can be counted, the country may find itself experiencing multiple recounts at once, all heavily litigated, if the race is close.
Joseph Sandler, a Democratic lawyer who represented the party during the 2000 recount in Florida, said he sees a “recipe for litigation” if local Republican officials begin disqualifying a lot of mail-in ballots in a close race. Similarly, Republicans would likely sue to stop Democratic officials from counting ballots that arrived after Election Day or were missing postmarks or other information.
The result could be a bonanza of Bush v. Gores, all around the country.
“There’s no precedent for this,” Sandler said.....
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If Trump wins, you know who will be blamed:
"Russians flooded Americans with disinformation in 2016. They’re back in 2020, but the disinformation now often comes from the White House" by Jazmine Ulloa / Globe staff
The warning came from a Department of Homeland Security agent in August 2016, as the presidential race between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump heated up. Hackers had obtained the personal information of some 200,000 voters in Illinois and unsuccessfully tried to do the same in Arizona. Now investigators were picking up chatter that foreign adversaries sought to target the state with the largest and most diverse trove of voters: California.
Alex Padilla, 47, California’s secretary of state, was not entirely surprised when he received the call. He and other election officials had been put on alert a month earlier after nefarious actors with possible Russian ties had leaked a cache of e-mails from the Clinton campaign, but Padilla could not predict then that his state would spend the next four years sparring not only with the Kremlin, but the White House.
The pre$$ finally admitted it was a leak and not a hack!
Over his five years in the job, Padilla, a Democrat, has sought to expand the ways Californians can register and vote. He has worked to tighten his agency’s cybersecurity systems and to encourage trust in the voting process by combating election disinformation, but like other secretaries of state, Padilla is getting little help from Washington to protect his state’s systems from hacking attempts and disinformation campaigns — foreign and domestic — that could wreak havoc on the presidential election.
At virtual cybersecurity conferences in August, where the US election was an intense topic even among experts tuned in from around the world, Matt Blaze, a computer science professor at Georgetown University, said there is no easy technical solution to the Election Day threats. The conditions required to make a system safe and reliable — secrecy and transparency — are often at odds with each other. Improving one, degrades the other.
Above it all looms a simple fact. “The people who are spending money to influence how you vote have a lot more resources than the people who are trying to ensure that everything runs smoothly,” Blaze said.
REALLY?
See: Mike Bloomberg raises $16 million to allow former felons to vote in Florida
Oh, they didn't mean him.
After the DHS call in 2016, Padilla stayed in touch with federal agents and began to share election security data with counterparts in Georgia and Connecticut. Even then, he recalled, he was growing increasingly concerned about Trump, who had been making incendiary claims to supporters that rampant voter fraud was the only thing that could deny him victory.
The first direct confrontation between Trump and Padilla took place just after Election Day 2016. On Thanksgiving, the president-elect fired off tweets falsely alleging that millions had illegally voted in California. “It appears that Mr. Trump is troubled by the fact that a growing majority of Americans did not vote for him,” Padilla shot back.
Trump lost the state by more than 4 million votes.
The skirmishes continued as federal indictments against 13 Russian agents, a report by former special counsel Robert Mueller, and congressional investigations uncovered the sweeping involvement of Russian online operatives in the 2016 election. Officials now know that links existed between Trump campaign officials and Moscow; that Russian agents attempted to breach the systems of several states; and that a Russian troll farm, the Internet Research Agency, infiltrated left and far right groups, creating thousands of fake accounts and a stream of content that exploited divisions in American society to sow electoral confusion and discord.
Still flogging that discredit dead horse, huh, Globe?
They also assume that the few hundreds of thousands of dollars in Facebook ads had any effect on how we voted. The pre$$ acts like we are empty-headed idiots who believe whatever is poured into us, and I'm sure they wish it were true; however, if it were, we would all believe in the lying, agenda-pushing media so FUCK OFF!
In California, Padilla learned in September 2017 that Russian actors had “scanned” his systems to spot weaknesses. Padilla said officials have found “no sign or evidence or indicator that there was a hack or breach of any kind,” but that hasn’t stopped him from continuing to strengthen his systems: In 2018, his office received more than $130 million in state funds to upgrade firewalls and help county elections offices replace voting machines and other equipment.
It's ALL SHIT, folks, and yet the pre$$ is furiously shoveling it!
The state for the first time also earmarked an additional $3 million to create the Office of Election Cybersecurity to report activity to national security officials and social media companies, as well as track online disinformation. It was among the first efforts of its kind, and only a few other states have followed suit.
The people of California are suffering and on fire (sure looks like directed-energy weaponry seeing as the trees are untouched), and money is being wa$ted on this $hit!
WAKE UP, AMERICA! VOTE TRUMP!
Ahead of the 2018 midterms, the new office successfully demanded that social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter remove some 300 pieces of content, including posts with erroneous polling locations and fake memes featuring the actor Aziz Ansari encouraging Democrats to tweet in their votes from home, but the office relied on only a handful of staffers to scan the vastness of the web.
Communi$t cen$or$hip!
As Election Day approaches, the online disinformation campaigns have become more widespread. Domestic operatives — Democratic and Republican, white supremacists and amateur anarchists — have adopted the Russian methods.
HA-HA-HA-HA-HA-HA-HA-HA!
Yeah, I'm a Russian dupe, not someone who loves and cares about his country and its people (making me an anarchic white supremacist)!
State-sponsored actors from Iran, China, and other countries are likely to join the fray as the pandemic has created ideal conditions to spread misinformation and conspiracy theories. Although social media companies are now quicker to take down posts and kick off malicious users, criticism continues that they aren’t doing more to stop the propagation of rumors and lies, with Trump and a right-wing media ecosystem further complicating the landscape by amplifying some misinformation.
The whining is really something to behold, and it is disgusting.
National security operatives have told Padilla to remain vigilant, and just this month, Facebook took down fake accounts and pages by Russian operatives who tried to enlist US journalists to write articles critical of Democratic nominee Joe Biden and his running mate, Kamala Harris.
Like the CIA did with Operation Mockingbird?
Now the papers simply parrot the CIA line!
Now Padilla is only asking voters for two things: Trust and patience. “It’s the process at work, and it’s because we want to make sure we get it right.”
I'm out of both when it comes to political $cum of all stripes, sorry.
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Btw, the CIA report is shit:
"The C.I.A. has moderate confidence in its analysis, a lower degree of certainty than its 2016, according to people familiar with the matter. The new analysis was published ahead of the sanctions in the C.I.A. Worldwide Intelligence Review, a classified document that circulates to members of Congress and the Trump administration. For years, many Republicans have taken issue with the C.I.A. analysis of Russian interference, and Trump himself remains hostile to arguments that Russia is intervening to support him. American intelligence officials say that while China opposes Mr. Trump’s re-election, Beijing has not mounted significant covert efforts to hamper the president’s campaign, but intelligence officials said there is little doubt that Putin is broadly orchestrating Russian campaigns and has continued to allow his intelligence operatives to try to influence American politics....."
China and Iran are helping Biden, and thus it is not interference!
Of course, the solution is ramping up mail-in voting as Election Day is just the beginning:
"Election Day might not be the end of the challenges – just the beginning" by Jess Bidgood, Jazmine Ulloa and Liz Goodwin / Globe staff
It is Nov. 3 and the polls have closed, but the election, in this dark envisioning, is far from over.
Across the country, populous states like California, Pennsylvania, and Arizona are still tallying votes and the margins are thin. Arizona Secretary of State Katie Hobbs is in her office, trying to keep the wheels on American democracy.
None of the official counts in her state’s 15 counties are finalized yet — a process that can take days, not just one night. Hobbs knows that the candidate who has the lead in those first hours could lose it as votes from dense, liberal-leaning areas are slowly tallied. None of this is evidence of fraud, which is exceedingly rare, but as he watches the “blue shift” in action, President Trump begins tweeting that Hobbs and other state officials are trying to “steal” the election, inflaming his supporters and upping the pressure on her as officials keep steadily counting.
“I think we’ve seen enough from the president that he’s going to try to hold onto power no matter what,” said Hobbs, a Democrat.
These are the people counting the votes?
Even if the worst-case scenarios feared by experts are avoided this Election Day, there is one looming disaster that has announced itself loud and clear already: a sitting president who has suggested he won’t concede, no matter the result, and has a long track record of crying foul — even after the election he won, in 2016.
Nor should he, and Clinton saying Biden shouldn't concede no matter what is ignored by the Globe.
The narrower the vote margins, the more fraught and chaotic things could be. A few hundred ballots missing a postmark in Pennsylvania could trigger wild conspiracy theories. A recount in Michigan could lead to armed protests there.
PFFFFFFFFFT!
“Every election security risk that we’re facing right now is about undermining the confidence in the system and disrupting our democracy,” Hobbs said.
The days stretch on. The lawsuits rev up. Officials count, and count again. Both sides envision the worst: Joe Biden and the Democrats seethe at the possibility of losing — again — with a popular vote victory failing to yield an Electoral College majority. Republicans insist that the election is theirs.
It’s uncharted territory, and it will fall to Hobbs and other public servants to carry the nation through to a conclusion, grounded in the truth. After millions of ballots are checked, counted, and preserved, she will end up with what matters most: a certified election result she can stand behind.
It’s left to be seen whether Americans, divided, will stand with people like her.
It depends on the result. Just because an election is certified by Deep State Democrats doesn't mean it's legit.
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It could all come down to North Carolina:
"The White House, Senate and Supreme Court Could All Hinge on North Carolina" by Jonathan Martin, New York Times | Sept. 22, 2020
CHAPEL HILL, N.C. — North Carolina, where the changing demography reflects America as much as the urban-rural divisions mirror its polarization, was already a crucial bellwether. The state is critical to President Trump’s re-election, particularly as he has slipped in the industrial Midwest and come under more pressure to retain the rest of his 2016 map.
With competitive races for president, Senate and governor and control of the State Legislature up for grabs, voters are being deluged by advertisements: More money has been spent on television commercials here than in any other state, and now, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s death has made North Carolina even more important this year. That makes North Carolina not just a bellwether but a linchpin, with Senator Thom Tillis holding perhaps the deciding seat in who controls the Senate. The White House, the Senate and the Supreme Court, then, could hang in the balance here.
“We have more of an ability to shape the future of the state, nation and world than anybody else,” said Josh Stein, the state’s Democratic attorney general who is also on the ballot and has used that line to rally supporters at drive-in church services and other Covid-era gatherings.
Vote him out!
It is not just Democrats who see the looming Supreme Court battle as an opportunity to rouse their supporters.
“No one believes we can keep a Senate majority unless we win North Carolina,” Mr. Tillis said on Saturday at a rally with Mr. Trump in Fayetteville, N.C., shortly before the president took the podium and announced his plans to pick a female justice as early as this week.
After nearly facing a primary from the right over his seemingly less-than-total support for Mr. Trump — he initially opposed using Pentagon funds for the border wall, and sponsored a bill protecting Robert S. Mueller III, the former special counsel — Mr. Tillis is seizing on the Supreme Court opening to reach for the president’s coattails. At the event Saturday, he said that he would support whomever the president selects to replace Justice Ginsburg.
“The president has the responsibility and the authority to nominate a justice,” said Mr. Tillis, before citing the list of potential Supreme Court justices Mr. Trump released earlier in the month. “He’s going to nominate one of those justices, and I’m going to vote for their confirmation.”
Mr. Tillis is calculating that the president will win North Carolina again, and that the court fight will somehow polarize the electorate further, in a way that benefits the Republicans — and him.....
--more--"
Let the nightmare begin:
"Bernie Sanders Sounds Alarm on a Trump ‘Nightmare Scenario’" by Sydney Ember, New York Times | Sept. 22, 2020
Senator Bernie Sanders is planning to mount an aggressive campaign to counter potential attempts by President Trump to delegitimize the results of the November election, warning that Democrats and Republicans alike must do “everything that we can to prevent that from happening.”
In a phone interview on Monday evening, Mr. Sanders said he would spend the next six weeks urging the country to prepare for a “nightmare scenario” in which Mr. Trump declares himself the winner of the election and refuses to step down even if he loses.
As part of his effort, he is set to deliver a speech in Washington on Thursday — his first in-person appearance related to the election since before he dropped out of the presidential race — to outline in stark terms the danger that he says Mr. Trump poses to the nation’s democracy.
“We are living in an unprecedented and dangerous moment — extremely dangerous moment — in American history,” Mr. Sanders said, “and what this speech is going to be about is whether or not the United States of America will continue to be a democracy and a nation ruled by law and our Constitution.”
Unreal!
They are the ones shredding the thing with their TDS!
In the interview, Mr. Sanders said that he thought there was an “excellent chance” that Joseph R. Biden Jr., the Democratic presidential nominee, would win the election, but that he was worried that the Biden campaign was not doing enough to reach “nontraditional voters,” including young people and Latinos. He held a virtual town hall event on Tuesday with Julián Castro, the former housing secretary under President Barack Obama, “to get the word out” to Latino voters about the importance of the election.
Mr. Trump, who has consistently trailed Mr. Biden in national and swing-state polls, has spent months trying to sow doubt about voting and the election. The president has claimed without evidence that mail voting will lead to “the greatest Rigged Election in history”; has urged people in North Carolina to illegally vote twice to stress-test the election system; and has even suggested delaying the election, which he cannot do on his own.
There is plenty of evidence of fraud, but the Globe ignores it as they walk a tightrope between our fragile election system and the need for credible results regarding the narrative.
Mr. Biden himself has warned that Mr. Trump might try to disrupt the election, and Democrats and some anti-Trump Republicans have grown increasingly anxious about such a possibility before, during and after Election Day. Some groups have begun gaming out how to respond to various doomsday scenarios. Facebook and other large tech companies have also taken steps to prepare for any potential efforts by Mr. Trump or his campaign to use the companies’ platforms to delegitimize the vote.
Disrupt it how, by starting a war?
Mr. Sanders, Vermont’s junior senator, will continue what an aide described as the “public awareness” phase of his effort while campaigning on Mr. Biden’s behalf. The aide would not say whether Mr. Sanders would hit the campaign trail before Election Day. Mr. Sanders demurred when asked if he was involved in any preparations should his predictions about Mr. Trump and the election come true.
So much for being an "independent."
It is clear now that his presence during the last two elections was to swing this country towards communism.
“Right now,” he said, “my main focus is to prevent Donald Trump from staying in office if he loses the election, to prevent him from delegitimizing the election results, to make sure that every vote cast is counted, to make sure that voters are not intimidated.”
In recent weeks, Mr. Sanders has privately spoken with experts, including Rosa Brooks, a law professor at Georgetown and a co-founder of the Transition Integrity Project, a bipartisan group of former government officials, political professionals and journalists that has gamed out election scenarios. The senator said he had also spoken to the Biden campaign about these issues.
That is a SHADOW GOVERNMENT of DEEP STATE DEMOCRAT OPERATIVES -- exposing Sanders as nothing more than part of the problem!
In the interview, Mr. Sanders laid out a series of steps to prevent Mr. Trump from corrupting the election, including urging states to count mail-in ballots “as rapidly as they can” and encouraging them to begin processing and counting ballots before Election Day.....
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When he looks back on Biden's upcoming loss he will realize it was because of the anti-communist Latino vote.
The Globe hopes another whistleblower comes forward before Election Day as the struggle to vote continues and Trump tries to turn back the clock and make the Republic a fascist state after four more years.
Related:
It's a rebuke of Trump.
Also see:
Envelope addressed to White House contained ricin
Was sent by a woman and is the Deep State's last resort.
