Sunday, November 15, 2020

From The Washington Post

 I read a short article in The Washington Post this morning that makes a nice companion to the post I put up yesterday The Dead Man Voting Myth.

Here is a selection of that article from The Post:

By David Fahrenthold, Emma Brown, Hannah Knowles 

President Trump lost his reelection bid at the ballot box. But he said he could win it back in court.

In five key states, Trump and his allies filed lawsuits that — according to Trump — would reveal widespread electoral fraud, undo President-elect Joe Biden’s victory, and give Trump another four years. “Biden did not win, he lost by a lot!” Trump tweeted.

It’s not going well.

Rather than revealing widespread — or even isolated — fraud, the effort by Trump’s legal team has so far done the opposite: It’s affirmed the integrity of the election that Trump lost. Nearly every GOP challenge has been tossed out. Not a single vote has been overturned.

“The Trump legal team does not seem to have identified any kind of global litigation strategy that has any prospect of changing the outcome of the election, and all of the court filings to date underscore that — as do all of the court rulings that have been issued to date,” said Robert Kelner, a Republican lawyer who chairs the election and political law practice group at Covington & Burling, an international law firm based in Washington.

Part of the problem is that Trump’s approach has been backward: Declare crimes first, then look for proof afterward.

Again and again, the president or his allies said they’d found evidence that would stun the public and swing the election.

But, when Trump and his team revealed that evidence, it often was far less than they had promised. A “dead” voter turned out to be alive. “Thousands” of problematic ballots turned out to be one. Election-changing problems turned out to involve a few dozen, or a few hundred, ballots.

Some moments veered into the absurd, as the president’s lawyers tried — and failed — to use Trump’s reality-bending logic on baffled, unbending judges.

“Are your observers in the counting room?” Judge Paul Diamond asked Trump’s lawyers in Pennsylvania at one point, in a case where Trump was seeking to stop the vote count in Philadelphia.

In that case, Trump’s suit depended on the answer being “no.” The logic for stopping the vote count was that GOP observers were not being allowed to watch it.

But the actual answer was “yes.” The observers were there.

So Trump’s lawyer tried an answer that wasn’t yes or no.

“There’s a nonzero number of people in the room,” he responded.

That did not work.

Lawyers from two major firms have now backed out of helping Trump’s efforts. Inside the White House, some officials have grown pessimistic about this legal effort, according to people who have spoken to them.

The problem with this amusing little revelation of donnie's incompetence-driven fantasies of fraud and deep state conspiracy is that most of us, those who voted for Joe, read it, chuckle and move on with our lives, having had, yet again, the wisdom of our recent voting choice affirmed; but there are literally THOUSANDS of "Million Man MAGAS" out there oiling their AK 47s for imminent action.

It doesn't take a lot of conspiracy-driven high capacity 223 caliber magazines to wreak havock in a democracy, especially one that is clearly on the down side of waning.


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