Wonderful insight! Simply marvelous!
That’s just a patently ignorant response. Check out some of the elections worldwide in which the political loser refuses to accept election outcomes, or in which outcomes are contested. It ain’t pretty. I know we’re exceptional all, except that, we’re not really as exceptional as we think.
Smh. You and the OP would make a cute couple. Maybe you could PM him a sexy selfie?
There have been multiple U.S. Presidential elections where the loser initially refused to accept defeat. It’d be hard to top the Tilden-Hayes contest of 1876 for brouhaha, shenanigans and double-dealing. The stakes were high in that election (which effectively saw the beginning of the end for Reconstruction).
Yet somehow the Republic survived.
There will be a 2020 election, despite the paranoid ravings of Trumpians and anti-Trumpians. I just wish I could go to sleep now and wake up after it’s over. :smack:
yes, there will be a 2020 election. This shit is nothing new. The right was agitating about how Bill Clinton would suspend the 1996 election. The left panicked because they thought Bush II would cancel the 2008 election. The right frothed at the mouth because Obama would christen himself president for life.
as far as I’m concerned we should get rid of old people who parrot what they read on cable “news” sites. I’m at the point where I think if you have to wait until you’re 18 to be able to vote, you should lose your right to vote at 65 or 70.
I am reassured, but I thought you appeared by hologram in the Time Vault after the Crisis had passed, not in the lead-up to it.
Of course, there’s something else that needs to be considered.
The government of the United States, of which Donald Trump is in charge of, does not run Presidential elections.
There are fifty separate state elections (plus the District of Columbia.) Voters in each of those 51 elections select electors, who then meet at their state capitals and cast ballots for President and Vice President. Those ballots are counted in front of a joint session of Congress.
The President has nothing to do with the process.
And even if the Senate Republicans refused to show up for the counting of ballots, meaning no one was elected (and I could argue that once the electoral ballots are cast, Congress can’t simply refuse to count them,) the duty to choose a President would fall to the House of Representatives.
Again, the President has no say in the process.
Not to mention the election of 1800, where Aaron Burr accidentally tied with Thomas Jefferson. Burr forgot he was supposed to be Vice President, got greedy and forced the House to take 34 ballots before an exhausted John Adams supporter struck a deal with Jefferson’s forces.
Or the election of 1824, where no one won until House Speaker Henry Clay did or did not strike a “corrupt bargain” with John Quincy Adams.
Or 1860, 1876, 1912, 1948, 1968 (when Chicago’s Mayor Daley may have decided to not steal enough votes to elect Hubert Humphrey,) or, lest we forget, 2000 and 2016. Each one of those could have ripped the electoral process irrevocably apart.
QFT
Hey, you and I are on the same side. Why do you want to put me on an ice floe and push me away from shore?:eek:
Double post.
A better question is if there will be enough interference from everybody from Albania to Zimbabwe to render the result invalid in the minds of many Americans. After all, if Russia is interfering other nations might feel compelled to follow suit.
It would be a shame if there wasn’t. The Russians have already spent so much time and money on it…
If the Democrats don’t get their act together soon, we can expect to suffer through another four years of relative peace and low unemployment.
There will probably be an election. But will it be a fair election?
The 2000 election was so close that a recount was needed in Florida. Yet the party that controlled Florida successfully prevented a recount. Independent of the recount, it is certain that the “butterfly ballots” in Palm Beach County cost Gore the election. It is unknown whether that ballot design was deliberate Republican mischief or just “bad luck.”
In the 2016 election, there were significant measures to suppress voter registration and turnout in states like Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. Certainly enough to swing the election. In some states, voters in D-leaning counties or precincts are required to drive for miles and wait for hours to vote; R’s are allowed to vote much more easily. Even when the right to vote isn’t absolutely denied, voters can be discouraged. Was it Trump himself or some R operative that encouraged R’s to stand outside precincts and intimidate non-whites trying to vote?
A few years ago in Virginia(?) an R election judge, seeing the election was close, was allowed to revise her assessment of one particular ballot the next day! This is irregular to the point of criminality.
Yes, there will be an election. But expect even more cheating than usual by the Republicans, and post-election litigation if the result is close. It will not be a “free and fair” election.
That wouldn’t break my heart. It would save me the trouble of voting for the least objectionable slimeball every four years.
In the run-up to the 1860 Election, the Whig party completely collapsed, the Democratic Party completely split into the Northern Democratic Party and the Southern Democratic Party, and two groups that had almost nothing in common (abolitionists and northern industrialists) slapped themselves together to form a haphazard party (the Republican Party) with the only thing really holding the party together was the fact that both halves didn’t like the South. With no history of working together and with very little in common between the two sides, this party obviously didn’t stand a chance. With all of the major parties completely self-destructing, smaller parties like the Constitutional Union Party managed to gain a significant number of electoral votes.
The party that won? That hurriedly slapped-together upstart Republican Party whose two major factions mostly didn’t give two hoots about each other’s causes.
And you think today is crazy? Dude, what you’re seeing today doesn’t even crack the Top Ten for what this country has been through.
Don’t blame the Russians. They got the idea from the British back in '04.
Thirded.
Trump has essentially given the green light to foreign interference as well as the continuing erosion of fair elections. There may be prolonged debate and inquiries following a narrow trump win.
…but a narrow trump defeat would be far worse: because trump has also played with the idea of a civil war if he loses, and at this point I have absolutely no doubt his base are crazy enough to implement it. 
(or rather: significant, bloody, civil unrest. You need two sides for a civil war)
The American Right has always preferred rigged elections over suspending them. If they were in a position to suspend the elections they wouldn’t; instead they’d do something like surround the polling places with thugs with orders to drive off any brown people or women who try to vote.
Oh, that’s good. Bravo.
Of course there will be an election, even if it’s between a giant douche and a turd sandwich.
We wuz robbed. :mad: That was the 2017 election for the Virginia House of Delegates in the 94th district. The Democratic candidate, Shelly Simonds, won the recount by **one **vote. That gave the House of Delegates a Democratic majority for the first time in years, by the slimmest margin: **one **seat. Thereupon the judges ruled one previously invalidated ballot was now valid and counted for the Republican, making a tie. They pulled the Republican name out of a bowl and made him the winner, giving the House of Delegates back to Republican control by that one seat.
All they did was delay the inevitable Democratic majority by two years. Just this month *both *the House and Senate flipped to Democratic majorities! All’s well that ends well?