And in the “I’m going to order you to do something you’re already doing so I can feel powerful” department,
Justice Samuel Alito has ordered all county boards in Pennsylvania to segregate ballots received after Election Day and said that if the ballots are counted, they be counted separately.
This order is in line with the guidance that secretary of state of Pennsylvania had already issued.
So, Dumfuq Trumpy received an email today exhorting me, er, him to donate to Trump’s legal defense fund.
Insta-poll!
If you donate $100k to Trump’s defense fund, how much is guaranteed to go in this fund?
Shit
Bupkus
Barely Any
Lol
0voters
Good job!
Attached is the T&C directing where your money goes:
The first $2,800 goes to RETIRE CAMPAIGN DEBT!
The next $2,800 goes to the ‘recount’ fund.
The next $35,500 goes to the RNC’s general account.
The remaining gets deposited in either the RNC’s ‘Legal Proceedings’ account or the ‘Headquarters’ account.
How much do you think gets transferred to the ‘Headquarters’ account?
Damn near all of it
All of it
What isn’t missing or stolen went into the HQ account
0voters
So, for your $100k donation, 2.8% goes to pay Trump’s debt, 2.8% of it goes to his recount, and $94,400 goes to the RNC, to allocate as they see fit.
Yeah, probably not 100k. When I noticed some anomalies in the remaining mail-in ballots on Wednesday night (maybe? maybe Thursday? I can’t remember anymore), I reduced my expectations to about 50-75k. It’s unclear if that will be enough to avoid the mandatory recount or a network call.
I’ve got to admit, I’m not sure why so many people, in this thread and in general, are apparently waiting with bated breath on a call by the networks. The networks’ call neither determines nor changes the actual count or the actual outcome of the election, so I don’t understand why the lack of a “call” seems to get folks so worked up.
I made a similar point to some friends on Facebook today. A good friend of mine, a really smart guy who follows politics closely, argued that the networks had some sort of moral obligation to make the call, otherwise they were complicit in Trump’s malfeasance. He argued, too, that an early call would allow the nation’s healing process to begin. Quite frankly, I find that argument completely unconvincing, and I told him so. Trump’s gonna Trump, and MAGAts are gonna MAGAt, no matter what the “lamestream” or “fake news” media says or does.
As I said there, I think it’s worth sticking with the narrative that Democrats and rational people in general have been pushing all along: let’s do it right, let’s take our time, and let’s make sure that everything is clear and definitive before making final pronouncements about the winner.
I would not worry about recounts. They almost never (actually never?) change things by more than a few hundred votes.
So, unless the margin is within a few thousand votes there is no reason to expect a recount to change anything (and even a few thousand is a stretch). It is all just Trump throwing a tantrum and trying anything possible, no matter how unlikely, to throw doubt on the results.
The writing is on the wall. It would take some epic reversal at this point to save Trump’s presidency.
Well, I said in the very next sentence that it doesn’t matter at all to the eventual outcome.
And the same with the recounts. I’m not really worried about them - but I do think that avoiding them would be better for the country.
I still keep hoping that if all of these states end up with narrow but relatively recount-proof margins that the GOP powers will force a concession from Trump and help insure a sane and orderly transition. But I guess there is nobody that can actually do that, so it’s probably less important that the process start sooner rather than later.
My reasoning is that the network analysts might know things I don’t know and I’m sure that they are way better at math than I am.
I know that it’s not like their call is binding or anything - it’s just that somewhere in the back of my mind their reluctance makes me think that Trump still has a chance and the prospect of Trump prevailing is truly scary, way scarier that it would’ve been if he won on Election Day.
It’s like every night this week has been Christmas Eve, with the added twist of a small chance that Santa will take a dump on your hearth and kill your dog instead of leaving presents.
Well, SoS Hobbs just said 173k ballots state wide are still out, and 92k of those in Maricopa (not the 70k I assumed based on previous reporting).
47k of those are provisional.
Maricopa will report again tomorrow. The others will dribble in. All provisional (well, the ones that actually get validated) won’t be reported until Tuesday.