Donald is going to spend the rest of his time in office spreading grievances and misinformation. The purpose is to make the election look indecisive in order to polarize the two parties even further. That’s just what he does. It’s his special talent.
He’s relentless about the election in Pennsylvania.
Those of us who voted by mail cast millions of suspect “illegal” ballots. The mail in ballot law passed in 2019 was Republican legislation. Why did Democrats sign on to it? Don’t you know it wasn’t passed by your side?? Funny how demands for bipartisanship work, isn’t it? I saw Mitch McConnell just tweet that Democrats in the House have been dragging their feet on a stimulus bill when actually it’s the other way around. Pelosi had the CARES bill ready since last summer. It’s McConnell who’s been playing politics with peoples lives. But keeping track of this requires research and effort. (The truth is out there.).
But I think it’s hilarious that PA Democrats were supposed to reject all attempts to make voting easier even if it was a bill passed by a majority Republican legislature in 2019. Its a very Brer Rabbit kind of scenario. “No, noooo! Don’t make it easier for me to vote by mail so I don’t have to stand in a long, long line to throw Trump out! Noooo!!”
Please. 🙄
To keep the record straight on the PA election, Jessica Calefati at the Philadelphia Inquirer wrote a summary and reference piece that makes it easy to understand how and when the rules of the election here were set and what the outcome was. For example:
FACT: No, the number of mail ballots tallied doesn’t exceed the number submitted
Says more than one million Pennsylvania mail ballots were “created out of thin air.”
Trump, in a tweet on Nov. 28, 2020
A week ago, Trump tweeted that more than a million Pennsylvania mail ballots had been “created” and counted improperly.
The false conspiracy theory at the heart of the tweet involves data that State Sen. Doug Mastriano (R., Franklin) said he found on the Pennsylvania Department of State’s website. Mastriano claimed the data showed a 1.1 million-vote gap between the number of mail ballots requested and the number returned.
But the figures referenced in tweets by Trump and Mastriano conflatePennsylvania’s June primary election and the general election. And contrary to Mastriano’s claim that the data have been deleted, they are still available.
Trump and Mastriano compared the number of mail ballots cast in the June primary election with the number cast in last month’s general election. The two figures have nothing to do with each other, nor are they evidence of fraud.
This piece is useful because Calefati includes citations at the end of it but it’s only effective if the reader acknowledges the sources of truth and believes them. The sky has to be the same color for all of us.
The piece doesn’t tell us how to get Donald from calling state legislators to make them screw more than half the electorate who either voted by mail or directly at the polls for Biden. But if you’re trying to figure out how we got to mail in ballots in the first place (hint: it wasn’t about Covid) then follow Lt Gov John Fetterman and PA AG Josh Shapiro on Twitter. They tweet about the election laws, their enactment and their enforcement. As tribalized as this state has become, we got our sh*t together after the disaster of 2016 and made sure there were paper trails this time.
Do I believe Trump won PA in 2016? Let’s just say that without the paper trails that most of our voting machines lacked back then, there’s just no way of knowing for sure. Do I believe he lost in 2020? Absolutely. Each vote had a paper ballot complete with traceable bar code or a paper readout from a voting machine. Having those trackable paper mail in ballots makes it much harder to commit fraud. You’d think Trump would commend us for that. Instead, he’s trying to undermine the election here. And note that he’s not challenging mail in ballots in Washington state or Oregon. No, he’s attracted to states where there is a Republican legislative body that he appears to believe is malleable and unscrupulous. There’s resistance from these GOP paragons of virtue but just barely.
Besides, a single individual shouldn’t be able to reverse an election just because he doesn’t like the outcome. What would be the point of elections if someone could get away with that? We might as well be living in Moscow.
The explanation for why Trump lost Pennsylvania could be fraud. But it’s more likely that I and millions of my fellow Pennsylvanians voting in good faith just saw that he was a shitty president and our votes for Biden outnumbered the votes for Trump. This is the more likely answer because downballot Democrats for the two state legislature bodies were not nearly as successful. That suggests that voters really did not like Trump.
Does it matter what Trump’s motive is for spreading disinformation? Not really. What matters is the result. We can accept it or reject it. Accept it and the process of national fragmentation continues. Each group will eventually turn on each other causing more atomization. Who does that benefit?
Reject it and face a headwind of powerful forces with deep pockets that can keep this up for a very, VERY long time. But as hard as it is to resist, this is the only way to actual freedom.
Don’t let them separate us.
Filed under: General |
The Confluence 
Your Quote…”This is the more likely answer because downballot Democrats for the two state legislature bodies were not nearly as successful”. End Quote.
That could actually be a reason for some voting irregularities. Trump had a closer voting percentage to his downstream Republican Candidates, closer in many of the contested States than Biden did to downstream Democrat Candidates.
That suggests to me that even some Republican voters found that re-electing him was unpalatable.
But the argument has been that Democrats somehow submitted fraudulent ballots and that caused Trump to lose. Our side is not stupid enough to rig the election for Biden but ignore all the state legislature seats that will bedevil us for the next two years.
If YOU were going to steal the election, why stop with the top of the ticket?
So, I think we have to resign ourselves to the fact that more people in PA loathe Donald Trump than their own party.
That may be true, but these people are just delusional. The GOP has been progressing towards a Trump, and against the common American for 40+ years, and they still don’t get it… and likely never will. When we lived in Hillborough there was an article in the Beacon where someone had stated that ‘they were a born Republican’… that has stuck with us for over 20 years… this is the definition of stupidity, I am sure that those who feel this way, can list dozens of things their parents were wrong about, but somehow exclude political leanings.
Yeah, I never understood that born a political party thing. I always thought that my values guided my political affiliation and if my party screwed up, I didn’t have to keep beating my head against the wall.
Even in Hillsborough, Republicans were a PITA. Remember the referendum for the new high school? The township committee (mostly Republican) told us in a closed door meeting that sure, they knew the first referendum was the best option and would save money for taxpayers in the end but they weren’t going on the record as endorsing a tax increase, no matter how modest, under any circumstances. As far as they were concerned, the referendum was just a political football. They weren’t going to help it pass even if it meant overcrowded schools for decades to come and higher taxes in the end when additional schools would need to be built.
They really were evil fucks.
This was around the time I moved, may have been after I left… The one that got me was the proposal for Green Briar (I think) assisted living that was to go up off of Mill Road. I am pretty certain the Rs wanted this, but it got voted down… It was the first time I ever voted with an absentee ballot.
Most Republicans are fine with Trump continuing to attack the validity of the PA election, and in states like GA and MI as well. One of the goals is to allow more repressive voting laws, which will make it even harder for non-rich people to vote. IDs needed for mail-in ballots, more rejections of ballots because of made-up signature issues, all that will lessen the voting totals, and that is the major purpose. In theory, the more successful Republicans are at limiting the number of accepted ballots, the more they can insure that they never lose an election.
So beyond Trump’s unending complaining and vilifying and trying to cause some kind of civil war, this fits the Republican playbook. I will be stunned if we do not see stories about a bunch of states “tightening their voting systems,” which in reality means deliberately trying to make it harder for Democrats to vote. The biggest mistake which the Democratic Party makes, in my opinion, is not going after the Republican Party as a whole, the way that Republicans have done to them forever. Do not keep acting as if the party is full of decent people that you want to work with. Call them the party which wants only the rich to get benefits, which will tear down every safety net and protection. Maybe then people will stop voting for Republicans in their state legislatures, which allows them to stymie Democratic governors as well as draw districts and make voting rules which are set up to give Republicans permanent control. Republicans keep scaring people about “socialism,” but the truth is that the Republicans want socialism for the rich, and nothing for anyone else.
Quite so, William. Very well said.