By Tim Dixon
So Donald Trump and the GOP have told us – inadvertently – about what will happen during the 2024 election. You can tell by the troop buildup, ie, an increase in GOP (read MAGA) influence in local electoral councils. These are the groups that ratify electoral results in every county in the US.
In Australia we have one Electoral Commission that oversees all elections in this country. While in the US, every one of the over 3 thousand counties has a council that is set up to ratify the result of voting in those counties. These councils are made up of partisan political constituents… there is a shit fight as to whether these councils are dominated by Democrat or Republican representatives, and these people are not paid, they are volunteers. They can come from any walk of life… so unlike the AEC, who may not employ you if you are partisan to any political party, the overseers of local electorates in the US are overseen by totally partisan electoral councils, and there is a huge fight to be a part of these councils.
Moderate Republicans have been ejected in the last few years in favour of MAGA representatives, and in red states, Democrats are hardly given a say.
The bottom line is that these local electoral counties have always ratified the results of their counties, it’s what by law they have to do, and it happened in 2020; these counties ratified their results and these feed into the overall state results that are then sent to the electoral college.
Donald Trump tried to steal the election by denying that the results of the electoral college were valid in 2020, but by then the horse had already bolted; Pence did the one great thing of his political career by ratifying the Electoral College votes, even though he and his colleagues had been under fire (literally) in the capital earlier that day to not do this.
In 2024, Trump and the GOP are far smarter; they have inundated certain electoral counties in decisive counties to favour MAGA, and I say MAGA on purpose – these are no longer Republican-held counties, even though they are in name. So even though it is the directive of these local counties to ratify the election results as they pan out, because MAGA have stacked these councils with their followers, it is possible, no, inevitable, that these councils will fail to ratify results that they disagree with, ie. Trump losses. This is unprecedented, and can mean that these council members can be arrested and face court. But what it will no doubt mean is Trump’s favourite way of operation; endless law suits, and it means that state results will not be sent to the electoral college by the December 11 deadline, which in turn means that unlike in 2020 when the results showed that Trump had lost the electoral college because the results were in, there may not be any state results known in the decisive states, because the local electoral councils have not ratified results…
We know that Trump and the GOP will do this. We have known for years that they have been stacking electoral councils, so why is it that we are so focused on Harris and Trump being locked together as far as polls are showing. It is moot… we may not know who has won or lost due to the currently illegal failure of counties to ratify results… especially if Trump looks like losing the decisive states.
Further reading: What to Know About the Looming Election Certification Crisis
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It is almost desirable for him to win so that the country becomes a third world backwater and is bankrupted by this dangerous moron. Only then will the people realise what they’ve done – but it won’t matter because he will be a dictator like his friends Kim and Vlad.
Part of me wants it to happen – except I have friends in the US who will suffer greatly and that makes me sad.
I’d like to say you get what you asked for but in this case even America doesn’t deserve another term of total chaos and anarchy from the worst loser in history. That is what he was in 2020 and this time around he will be an even bigger tantrum throwing baby if/when he loses again because it will be his last ever chance of sitting in the big chair so he will try every dirty trick him and his scumbag hangers-on can invent.
American politics to an outsider is one of the biggest joke in the world, sometimes I’m almost rolling on the floor in laughter, more entertaining than most Hollywood movies ever are and always full of vile and despicable characters that belong locked up for life rather than running for the highest office their country has. It really is like a bad Z grade movie made in Californication.
Every effect has a cause, and every cause is itself the effect of a prior cause… an unbroken chain of causality that disappears into the past; America’s current chaotic state has been in gestation over many decades and it’s probably the case that the too many wrongs that have been birthed and brought to fruition have now given that country a set of issues and challenges that are insurmountable and unsolvable. The great experiment, if graded, perhaps a D minus or worse.
The assumption that it would be a single four-year term, and that it would be Trump in the Oval Office, is ludicrous. The MAGAts have shown quite clearly that once they get enough power, they will dismantle all the checks and balances, and instal themselves as rulers of an autocratic state. And Trump’s mental decline is so obvious that they’ll Article 25 him as soon as the results are announced.
From the 19th century most of the world were drawn to look at America, from mid-20th century America reminded most of the world of a debt owed to it, since then most of the world wants to look away from America’s increasing horror, yet we remain transfixed.
For the whole time, those within America have been beguiled by politicians, clerics, generals, corporations and organized crime, with the majority paying dearly for it. Those paying dearly have been taught and increasingly learned to hate, and now they want revenge in whatever form they can avail themselves of.
As America is stuck feeling sorry for itself, the whole world looks on aghast.
In Slate today:
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2024/10/trump-harris-election-pardon-jan-6-russia-bannon.html?sid=651118659de38fc222022021&email=7e5b03c42e8ce19c7675801c17859620a7c0d07ceb2615c00cb72534501bbb78&email2=87722d954ac42a7fc0de2ab021ec9611&email3=01f47ca0f79766651176d268258d5fe708322659&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=traffic&utm_source=newsletter&utm_content=TheSlatest
Fires have been set in ballot boxes.
Steve Bannon released from minimum security today.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/28/us/politics/steve-bannon-trump-campaign-war-room.html
Make what you will of these assorted facts while facts and the truth remains accessible:
‘Jeff Bezos believes that his interests will be served through an appeasement of those of Donald Trump. Just like that, The Washington Post, a supremely important news organization, an icon of the power of the First Amendment, has chosen self-immolation with a deafening act of self-censorship that makes clear that America’s truth will soon be controlled in the same way that it is in Hungary. Frightening and appalling don’t begin to describe it, and it is going to get worse. Elon Musk controls X, and soon one of Donald Trump’s largest donors — Larry Ellison — will control CBS News, while Comcast and Disney control NBC and ABC respectively. And of course there’s Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News.’ (Steve Schmidt/ The Warning)