The honorable thing is for you to slink out of the White House in the dead of night. https://t.co/ssxxuuaVmv— Charles P. Pierce (@CharlesPPierce) August 15, 2020
He doesn't understand how voting works. (The tweet Trump includes in his original tweet notes a voting scandal in Paterson, N.J., where a DA is prosecuting 4 people for voting fraud. 4! Not exactly the "millions" Trump alleged in 2016. And the 4 got caught. The system, IOW, worked. Voting fraud is not a significant problem, even assuming the information in the tweet is accurate; which I don't.)
Not only is mail-in voting common in all 50 states, more states recently (like Kentucky, specifically due to covid-19) have made universal mail-in voting possible. How absentee ballots differ from other mail-in ballots is an angels-dancing-on-pin-heads question Trump is incapable of explaining. It's the homoousias v. homoiousias argument of the Council of Nicea (no, he won't get that reference, either), but there was more basis for that distinction than there is for this one.
He really isn't a Machiavellian genius. He really is nothing more than a toddler with a shotgun. It won't even matter who "won" in November, because he is going to lose, at the ballot box or, if it comes to it, in the House of Representatives. He may imagine he will tie up enough states in litigation the Supreme Court will once again have to cut the Gordian Knot he imagines he will tie. Unless it is down to one state, again, and the scenario of Bush v. Gore repeats itself, that won't happen. Trump can try to prevent states from sending electors to the meeting required by the Constitution. That won't invoke the Court, either; only the House.
In January, we will know who lost. If we have to, we can wait that long. AP and pollsters, after all, play no part in the Constitutional process of selecting a POTUS. And exit polls, the favorite chicken entrails of analysts on Election Night? With mail in voting and early voting? Meaningless. Time to take a comfortable step backward to a time when we had to wait patiently to find out who the next President would be.
The system, after all, was never meant to leave it up to the TeeVee to decide for us.
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