The Legal Fight Awaiting Us After the Election

Campaigns face a maddening variety of challenges as they try to change, or even fully understand, the rules of the road. The United States has arguably the most decentralized election administration of any advanced democracy. This is especially evident in the process for choosing a President. Each state conducts a separate contest for its electoral votes, with its own rules for casting and counting ballots. But there are approximately ten thousand five hundred different voting jurisdictions, many of which have their own distinctive procedures as well. The legal doctrine known as the Purcell principle, named for a Supreme Court case from 2006, holds that courts should refrain from making changes to election procedures close to Election Day, because of the potential for creating confusion for voters. (The court has never defined how close is too close.) As a result, the debates over Elias’s four pillars, and also over universal mail-in voting, are being played out in state after state at a frantic pace.

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One of the ironies of the Republicans’ obsession with fraud is that theirs is the party with the more significant recent history of misconduct at the polls. Shortly before the 1981 governor’s race in New Jersey, the Republican National Committee created the National Ballot Security Task Force. The group consisted mostly of armed off-duty police officers hired by the G.O.P. to monitor polling sites in Black and Hispanic neighborhoods in Newark and Trenton. The group, whose members wore “NBST” armbands, posted large signs outside polling places that read “WARNING—THIS AREA IS BEING PATROLLED BY THE NATIONAL BALLOT SECURITY TASK FORCE. IT IS A CRIME TO FALSIFY A BALLOT OR TO VIOLATE ELECTION LAWS.” The task-force members challenged the right of some people to vote and blocked the way to the polls for others. In the election, the Republican, Thomas Kean, narrowly defeated the Democrat, James Florio.

The high disqualification rate for absentee ballots poses a special peril for Democrats. According to a study co-written by Daniel Smith, a professor at the University of Florida Law School, the mail-in ballots of racial and ethnic minorities, and also of young voters, were rejected at a substantially higher rate than those of older white voters across counties, even though the counties varied in the over-all rate at which they rejected ballots. High disqualification rates for mail-in votes were evident in 2020 races around the country. According to studies by the Washington Post and NPR, during the primaries, mailed ballots were disqualified at a far higher rate than in 2016—five hundred thousand in total were deemed invalid. (By comparison, about three hundred and eighteen thousand ballots were disqualified in the 2016 general election.) Franita Tolson, a professor at the U.S.C. Gould School of Law, told me, “You will still see many claims that absentee ballots have been wrongly rejected, and those will lead to court cases. The fact that we are generating lots of voting by mail will generate a lot of litigation.”

They tried it with the ballots and sabotaging the USPS but they fucked up by not realizing how many people have made it their business to vote and have mentally prepared themselves to wait in line 6 hours to vote. Trump's plan is obsolete. His typical tactics of delaying and suing will not work. He will leave before January.

There’s an extreme imbalance in party resources when it comes to information about possible foreign interference, because the President controls the nation’s intelligence apparatus. In a public statement on August 7th, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence asserted that China, Russia, and Iran were already attempting to interfere in the election. Russia’s extensive efforts on Trump’s behalf in 2016 have long been documented, and, according to the statement, they are continuing in 2020: “Russia is using a range of measures to primarily denigrate former Vice President Biden.” Other possible foreign efforts “seek to compromise our election infrastructure for a range of possible purposes, such as interfering with the voting process, stealing sensitive data, or calling into question the validity of the election results.”

Later that month, the Trump Administration shut down some access to information about these foreign efforts, asserting without evidence that there had been leaks in previous briefings. In a series of letters to congressional leaders on August 29th, John Ratcliffe, whom Trump recently named the director of National Intelligence, after his service as a Republican representative from Texas, announced that he would cease in-person briefings about “election security, foreign malign influence, and election interference,” and instead supply only written reports. Democrats were indignant about being unable to question intelligence officials before the election. “President Trump, through his hand-picked DNI—chosen for loyalty, not experience—is attempting to deprive Congress of the information they need to do their part,” Biden said in a statement. “There can be only one conclusion: President Trump is hoping Vladimir Putin will once more boost his candidacy and cover his horrific failures to lead our country through the multiple crises we are facing.”

We have lots of lawyers. We have better lawyers than they do. We have some of the lawyers they used to have and can't get anymore because of the Orange Pig.

January 20, 2021, 12:01 (or whenever President Biden takes the Oath), the Secret Service, the Capitol Police and the US Marshals will escort Donald from the White House.

That's if he hasn't already left in a tantrum over his loss, which is what I believe will happen.

If their plan to steal the election is anywhere near as competent as their plan to frame Hunter Biden, then I don't think we have much to worry about.

Stealing the election like this would require a million stars to align. They can't even get a fake laptop right.

Considering the Chinese attempt to ruin Biden with Hunter sex vids, massive restrictions on voting, Handmaid Supe confirmation, and the general violent mania of MAGAts, it's still worrisome.

I'm hoping Jacob Wohl and his sidekick are in charge of rigging the election.