Rogue electors or other election-day weirditude
(Tremble in awe! Despite that headline this actually isn't a doom-and-gloom post! Well, unless the responses drag the thread that way...)
At this point I'm well past hoping for Obama to reduce the Romney campaign to a gently smoking hole in the ground, and thoroughly into the realm of anticipating it with a certain not-quite-malicious glee. Feeling good about the first digit in the Democrats' electoral vote count to be a three, that sort of thing, to say nothing of getting the whole circus over with for at least a year or so before we're plunged back into it all again.
That out of the way, I'm also wondering what the odds of various weirdnesses going on this time. Some of it's the vague unease surrounding a really intense, hostile election campaign - shenanigans at the polls, or in response to a Democratic win, that sort of thing - but I'd also been wondering about more unusual scenarios, especially since it feels like a politically unusual time. One I'd been thinking of is whether any of the electors are going to do something stupid like vote against their state this time around.
It's definitely not something I'm concerned about (in DU's sense of the word especially) - most of the states forbid that sort of thing from what I can tell, it'd be almost immediately dealt with, and one or two of them wouldn't impact the election result even if their vote was allowed to stand. If a faithless elector showed up and did his or her thing, the whole affair would probably become a footnote in hours save for among the crazier fringes. However, it's just as obvious that the politics this election are at least as crazily hyper-polarized as the previous few, and that kind of environment makes people get on the news in embarrassing ways.
The last couple days I've been curious, in a kind of preparing-for-the-schadenfreude sense, of the odds of an almost-certainly rightwinging elector in one state or another trying to pull that kind of gesture. I've been kind of half-expecting to see it happen, almost certainly no more than once, this time around in one close state or another, regardless of the legality in order to make some kind of grand, idiotic gesture that we'll laugh about afterwards anyway. I'm feeling pretty good about the big picture turning out the way it ought to next week, so I'm kind of amusing myself by thinking about the zillion smaller things that will probably happen but probably won't change things in the long run.
Anyway, that's the odd fringe scenario that I'd been thinking about the last couple of days. I'm wondering if any of you guys have been wondering about any other situations that may or may not pop up - not necessarily the huge flashy ones like vigilantism at the polls or the Republicans challenging every other polling station in the United States or Donald Trump's head exploding with enough force to level whatever gated community he's currently hiding in, but smaller, weirder situations like that, those "WTF?" sort of incidents that you tend to get in a really polarized situation where someone decides to get innovative in throwing a political tantrum.
So yeah. What ridiculous weirdness are you expecting?
