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reggieandlee

(775 posts)
Sat Aug 1, 2020, 10:27 AM Aug 2020

BTRTN: How The Election Gets Stolen... and How We Stop It.

Born To Run The Numbers examines the myriad of ways that Republicans may try to undermine the election, the underlying goals of these activities, and why we should all be extremely nervous:

http://www.borntorunthenumbers.com/2020/08/btrtn-how-election-gets-stolen-and-how.html

Excerpts: "Don’t start reading this at 11:30 p.m. It's likely to freak you out and make it hard to sleep, and if you do, you’re going to have nightmares. As my old Williams College history professor used to say: 'Who needs fiction when reality is this crazy?'...
"...in order to ensure that Joe Biden is sworn in as President of the United States on January 20, 2021, he is not just going to have to win a number of those big swing states, but he is going to have to win them by real and comfortable margins … or else there is the very real possibility that the Republicans will be able to muddy the waters just enough to create a Constitutional catastrophe. In a worst case scenario we will examine, Donald Trump loses the popular vote and the Electoral College… and still keeps the Presidency...
"Now comes the ground-zero impact of Palast's theory: (if)Wisconsin’s Republican Legislature then decides that the election is 'contaminated' by fraud, and refuses to ratify the election, forbidding Biden electors from convening with the Electoral College. Denied those ten votes, Biden has only 268 votes, Trump has 260, and ten votes go uncounted. Neither candidate wins a majority of the Electoral College. The Twelfth Amendment is invoked... "
"In every state in which the margin of victory is narrow, expect that on Wednesday, November 4, a fusillade of lawsuits will come thundering forth... The only way to bury the lawsuits is to render them moot before they are filed… to win by such a margin that the disputed ballots in one polling place do not change the results of the county, that a dispute in one county does not change the result of a state, that the results of one state do not change the outcome of the Electoral College..."

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BTRTN: How The Election Gets Stolen... and How We Stop It. (Original Post) reggieandlee Aug 2020 OP
Remember the long lines in 2004? And in 2008? raging moderate Aug 2020 #1
another election scenario? The Crisis Papers Aug 2020 #2
Important comment from that article caraher Aug 2020 #3

raging moderate

(4,281 posts)
1. Remember the long lines in 2004? And in 2008?
Sat Aug 1, 2020, 11:09 AM
Aug 2020

Remember the greasy smiles suddenly turning to long faces on the Faux Noise people, both times?

Remember the distraught look on Karl Rove's face in 2008, when he suddenly bolted from his Faux News program to rush down to the tech room to berate the meticulous techies, who just doubled down stolidly on their precise calculations to predict the re-election of President Barack Obama?

Ah, that was a golden moment.

Let's do it again!

2. another election scenario?
Sat Aug 1, 2020, 02:20 PM
Aug 2020

as long as we're throwing around possible scenarios, here's another one, lifted from the nixon/ford playbook: trump resigns, v.p. pence then full-pardons trump and trump relatives and high officials (barr, pompeo, miller, et al.)

caraher

(6,276 posts)
3. Important comment from that article
Sat Aug 1, 2020, 05:02 PM
Aug 2020
There is a flaw in Palast’s scenario. To prevail in the electoral college when the votes are opened and counted on January 6, one needs “a majority of the whole number of Electors appointed.” The key term in the 12th Amendment is “appointed.” Were a state to withhold its electoral votes then it has not “appointed” electors and effectively disenfranchises itself. In that scenario the “whole number of Elector’s appointed” is less than 538 and whatever that number is, a majority of it elects the President.

Nonetheless the possibility of manipulating the electoral college is even scarier than Palast’s scenario. This law-review article is a must-read:
[link: https://lawecommons.luc.edu/luclj/vol51/iss2/3/|
https://lawecommons.luc.edu/luclj/vol51/iss2/3/]
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