In the ongoing attempts to dismantle the flux capacitor operating our election system, this morning another hit on the T-Rump and the foolish attempts at pure lunatic bullshit (CNN): ‘Arizona certified its election results on Monday, awarding the state’s 11 electoral votes to President-elect Joe Biden and clearing the way for Senator-elect Mark Kelly, a Democrat, to be sworn in this week.‘
T-Rump’s lawyer-boys/girls are losers:
Key states that have certified their election results:
?Arizona
?Georgia (ongoing recount)
?Michigan
?Nevada
?Pennsylvania— Marc E. Elias (@marceelias) November 30, 2020
Added as a plus, it seems American democracy at least on the short ticket has so far survived T-Rump’s fanciful bullshit — the Guardian this morning listed five levels of perservering:
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No central authority oversees US elections.National elections are broken down by 50 states and the District of Columbia.
Elections within each state are run in turn by counties and by precincts within counties.
People vote locally, in thousands of jurisdictions; ballots are tallied locally; and the results are reported locally, and then added up in the public eye.
The sheer number of people involved defies both coordination and conspiracy. -
A persistent symptom of weakness in US democracy has been low voter turnout.
Less voter participation means less representative government.
But turnout was a bright spot in 2020.
Before this November’s election, no presidential ticket had ever notched 70m votes — Barack Obama got 69.5m in 2008.
In 2020, Trump’s tally was building toward 74m — while Biden had surpassed the incredible total of 80m, with many ballots from the majority-Democrat New York state yet to be reported.
The previous benchmark for total votes cast for the two major parties in a presidential election was about 130m.
Astoundingly, the 2020 election is on track to record almost 20-percent more votes than that for the Republican and Democratic tickets.
As a uniquely polarizing and inescapable figure in politics,Trump appears to have been a huge driver of turnout, both for and against. -
Despite Trump’s false assertions, US presidential elections are not subject to widespread fraud, miscounts or other significant irregularities.
This is in part thanks to the tireless work of activists and no thanks to routine attempts at voter suppression.
No significant instances of fraud emerged from the 2020 election, conducted over more than a month with an unprecedented number of mail-in ballots cast amid a pandemic.
No Trump lawyer dared impute election fraud in court, despite the lies filling Trump’s Twitter feed. -
From melting hair dye to Four Seasons Total Landscaping, Trump’s legal team has been much-derided.
But in key states, the campaign also hired top-flight lawyers from firms such as Jones Day and Porter Wright Morris & Arthur.
On the whole these lawyers have fared miserably, winning only one minor case out of 43 in six states, while losing 35 cases so far, according to a running tally maintained by the Democratic lawyer Marc Elias.
The judges who threw out Trump campaign cases include Trump appointees.
Judge Steven Grimberg in the northern district of Georgia booted a complaint by a Trump elector seeking to block certification of the state’s vote.
“I didn’t hear any justification for why the plaintiff delayed bringing this claim until two weeks after this election and on the cusp of these election results being certified,” Grimberg wrote. -
Apart from Congress, the media is one of the least-loved institutions in the United States, abused with glee from the White House on down.
And the American media has been terribly crippled by the loss over the last decade of countless local outlets that offered irreplaceable, knowledgable coverage of local events.
Pseudo-media propaganda services such as Breitbart, One America News, Newsmax and Parler, financed by conservative billionaires, represent ominous new entries on the media landscape given invaluable support by Trump.
But strong and independent media, afforded powerful protections by the first amendment, remain a vital feature of US democracy.
With no central authority over US elections, it falls to the media to project a winner.
Where the intimidation of voters or poll workers is reported, it falls to the media to shine a light.
Where false accusations about election fraud are spread by the president, it falls to the media to investigate and explain what is true and what is false.
However, end result is just to create cheerful anxiety…
(Illustration: Pablo Picasso’s ‘Les Deux Saltimbanques: l’Arlequin et Sa Compagne,’ found here).