The Real Purpose of Trump's Threat to Delay the Vote

[Celerity]

The real purpose of the threat by our Twittiot-in-Chief to delay the election is to lay the groundwork for massive challenges of mail-in ballots.

https://www.gregpalast.com/the-secret-purpose-of-trumps-threat-to-delay-the-vote/



Officially, 1,913,369 ballots were challenged and thrown away in 2016—that’s how Trump stole the last election and how he will steal 2020…they will question your mail-in ballot signature, the color of your ink—and if you put an “X” instead of filling in the little bubble—they’ll junk your ballot. Yes, Donald, “The 2020 election will be the most INACCURATE & FRAUDULENT election in history” — because your crew is defrauding voters out of their ballots. Whose ballots gets challenged? According to the US Civil Rights Commission which investigated in Florida, the chance of your ballot being challenged and uncounted is 900% higher if you’re Black than if you’re white.

That’s if you get your ballot at all. According to an MIT study, one in ten voters who request a mail in ballot don’t get one at all, or get it too late to count. We saw the test run in Georgia in March where the GOP state government delayed the ballot send-out, meaning thousands of African-Americans never received their ballot. Even the husband of the Executive Director of the ACLU of Georgia got his ballot the day after the election. (But yes, he was guilty of attempted VWB—Voting While Black.) Don’t cry; don’t whine: you can, you must, steal back your vote: that is, protect it. We can expose the steal and reverse it. That’s why I wrote, How Trump Stole 2020—it’s not a prediction, it’s a warning. I'm watching CNN right now and they’re telling me that Trump doesn't have the authority to delay the election. They are missing the f**king point.



Trump doesn't have to delay the vote. In America, elections aren't stolen like they're stolen in some right-wing fever dream of a movie. There's no military junta marching down Pennsylvania Avenue, no back alley assassinations like in an episode of House of Cards, no Russians needed. They're stolen in the back rooms of power by men in Brooks Brother suits, they're stolen using Excel spreadsheets, they're stolen by votes simply not being counted. It's really hard to make a true-to-life film version of how America gets stolen. Mind you, we tried. In The Best Democracy Money Can Buy we tried to warn America what was coming. Sadly, it seems that we were too late.

Now three months away from the next Presidential election, Donald Trump is sending out missives to his base: He’s whipping up his army of Boogaloo bozos in Hawaiian shirts into a frenzy over fraudulent mail-in votes. No, we won’t get a million bogus ballots from Bolivia, but the facts don’t matter. So what’s the point? The point is not to intimidate voters; no one’s scared of these Trumpito pinheads. Rather, the point is to place “poll watchers” who will challenge every single mail-in vote. This is what they did in Michigan (See Michigan Michigass) to prevent the counting of 75,355 ballots in Detroit—and that gave Trump a “victory margin” of 10,000 to take Michigan and the White House. Michigan 2016 will be USA 2020 unless we take back our ballots.



related


Trump's call to "delay" the election is a distraction — but it's also a serious threat

Remember, Bill Barr and Mitch McConnell are delighted to stomp on the rule of law to keep Republicans in power

https://www.salon.com/2020/07/30/trumps-call-to-delay-the-election-is-a-distraction--but-its-also-a-serious-threat/

The first thing to understand about Donald Trump's threat to delay the November election — should we call it a public fantasy? — is that it's a distraction, like so many things our president says and does. Around 8:30 Eastern time on Thursday morning, news came down that the U.S. economy saw its worst contraction since the advent of modern economic recordkeeping after World War II, with GDP falling at an annual rate of nearly 33% in the second quarter, 9.5% below where it was the previous quarter. This is a plunge exponentially larger than the fallout from the crash of 2008, and probably the largest since the Great Depression of the 1930s.

At 8:46 a.m., Trump let loose with this Twitter turd: "With Universal Mail-In Voting (not Absentee Voting, which is good), 2020 will be the most INACCURATE & FRAUDULENT Election in history. It will be a great embarrassment to the USA. Delay the Election until people can properly, securely and safely vote???" As a distraction, the gambit worked. Immediately, the shift in headlines and cable news focus went from the country's record-setting economic devastation toward this idiotic but deeply troubling question of whether Trump can really get away with delaying the election until such time as he thinks he can win it (which may be never). The second thing to understand about Trump's threat is that it's nonetheless deadly serious. No matter how many reassuring articles come out about how there's no mechanism available to Trump to delay the election, the public should not be complacent about this.

Rule of law, for the people who surround Donald Trump and prop him up, is something to be broken, not respected. Trump is a profoundly stupid man, but he does have a flight of much smarter people around him to do his bidding, especially when it comes to securing power for themselves and shutting down the ability of the American people to vote the bastards out. We should not underestimate what people like Attorney General Bill Barr and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell could come up with, if they decide that Trump's harebrained notion of using the pandemic as cover to "reschedule" (read: cancel) the election is the only path to keeping Republicans in power in 2021.

Barr, after all, has spent his time in charge of the Justice Department focused on remaking the institution as one focused on covering up Trump's crimes, instead of dedicated to fighting crime. He started by using his powers to falsely frame the findings of Robert Mueller's report on Russian election interference, claiming that Mueller found "no collusion." That was an outright lie. Mueller found extensive collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russian conspiracy, much of it right out in public, even if it fell short of what Mueller felt could be charged as criminal conspiracy. But Barr successfully pushed out the "no collusion" narrative, and the impact of the entire Russia investigation's dwindled to almost nothing, despite Trump's demonstrable guilt in the cover-up.

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