USA Election 2020
 

How is it going?
What topics have emerged around it?
What are your predictions?

Let's continue discussing politics in a civilised manner on LQ!

i find Trump's attitude / behavior amazing. (i think it is bad for democracy in USA.)
IMO Biden is going to win, at least i hope so.

It appears Democrat run cities are going to 'find' enough votes to push Biden over the 270 mark. House will remain in D hands but large gains for Republicans will test Nancy's hold on "Speaker" position. It looks as if Mitch and Repubs will hold on to the Senate but barely, depending on the outcome of at least one, possibly two, run-off elections in Georgia.
The only fairly bright side for conservatives such as myself is that Trump may have brought many citizens with Caribbean and Central American Latino ancestry into the fold and exit polls seem to indicate he did better than expected with Black men.

In conversations with some American friends...

- change to a preferential voting system to try to break the two party deadlock (my favourite);

- scrap the Electoral College (they're mostly vocally in favour, I've never had to live with it - but it looks strange to my foreign eyes);

- remove the President's executive powers and just have them as a titular head of state (my suggestion, which just gets blank stares in reply).

Worth quoting David Strathairn in Good Night, and Good Luck:

Edit: corrected spelling mistake

From the other side of the pond, the U.S. elections have certainly provided considerable entertainment value. For instance:

• several states just stopping their vote tally for no reason, declaring that they would resume counting in the morning (I mean, it's not like this is important or anything)
  
  
• videos of people arriving at and entering the supposedly "closed" counting office, carrying boxes, and with no observers presents
  
  
• videos of windows to the counting areas being boarded up, preventing anyone from seeing what's going on inside
  
  
• numbers being reported while the counting is supposedly stopped
  
  
• large numbers of votes (100,000+) being reported, all of them for a single candidate (leaving CNN commentators speechless on live TV)
  
  
• videos emerging of boxes of votes being delivered late at night by a single, unidentified individual, alone, with no oversight
  
  
• videos of people entering and exiting the area where votes were being counted, carrying large bags and coolers, with no-one checking their ID or luggage
  
  
• several cases of registered votes from deceased individuals, even though the persons in question were born in 1900-1905 and have been dead for 30+ years, AND their names were manually purged from the rolls years ago (so someone must have manually re-registered them)
  
  
• one case of a deceased individual having requested an absentee ballot and subsequently voted, and even worse: the request, the mailing of the ballot, AND the receipt of the filled-out ballot are all registered as having occurred on 2. November (I guess the USPS must have invented the warp drive)
  
  
• one case of a person being refused to vote in person because her mail-in vote was already registered, even though she definitely did not vote by mail
  
  
• multiple cases of people receiving mail-in ballots in other people's names (in one case, in the name of their deceased cat)
  
  
• hidden camera videos of people confessing to "ballot harvesting", that is, visiting elderly people at their homes and "helping" them fill out their ballots
  
  
• states having received more votes than they have registered voters
  
  
• states having received more votes than they have registered residents of legal voting age
  
  
• states having 89+% election turnout
  
  
• one party trying to appeal/block a court ruling that allowed election observers to watch the tally

I mean, seriously guys? This stuff puts Belarus and North Korea to shame.

Without the Electoral College, a consensus in the most populous states would always decide the outcome of the presidential elections. No politician would ever campaign in (or care about the citizens of) any of the more sparsely populated states, so their concerns would never be considered. Why should those states then want to stay in the union?

They would still have a disproportionate influence on the senate (although in the hypothetical case where the presidential election rules are changed, I suppose the senate rules might be changed too).

Things are going the way they should: counting ballots after the election is normal and legal. The current POTUS is throwing a temper tantrum however, because he believe the opposition party is "stealing" the election. Not happening. The officials at the state level (for each state) are in charge of counting the ballots for their respective state. There are officials present at the counting events from BOTH parties to ensure rules and procedures are followed.

Now that the decision is in the hands of the states and not the federal government, I feel better about the situation. Even the news media seems to be on point for dismissing the president's rambling nonsense. What he is doing is what he has done for 4 years: spread FUD. Remember the Ballmer Microsoft days and the FUD campaigns against Linux? Same thing but on a political. level.

A good point. I understand from my reading that the Fathers specifically considered the situation in which a couple of big towns could gang up and outvote the rest of the country (even easier in their time than now), and they set out to protect both Congress and the Electoral College against it.

As far as fraud is concerned, a certain amount of it goes on in every election. Some people vote twice, some people fake their addresses, some people cast votes for their pets! It happens. But is there evidence of enough systematic fraud to swing a national election? Personally I doubt it. Remember, some of the most disputed states (Georgia for instance) are run by the Republicans.

We do have in my country an example of an election that was won by stuffing envelopes. A man called Lutfur Rahman was elected mayor of the London Borough of Tower Hamlets in an election that turned out to be completely fraudulent. I believe he's in prison now. But this exception proves the rule: Tower Hamlets is a tiny place. I don't see anything like this being possible right across a country the size of the United States.

My take on the result is that Trump will sue on an enormous scale, the whole thing will go to the Supreme Court, and the Court will decide for Trump because he has conveniently stuffed it with his supporters. Remember, some of these people genuinely believe that Trump is the Messiah and that Democrats are satanists who kill children and eat their adrenals!!

All this isn't going to do America's international reputation any good at all. The country will end up about as much respected as Belarus.

It has been reported that out of the 80+ million mail in ballots, the of number of Democrats to Republicans ratio is 3:1. As posted states make the election rules and many can not start counting mail in ballots till after the polls close. With thousands of ballots in heavily Democratic counties it just appears that Biden votes are appearing out of thin air. The military overseas ballots still have not been counted yet and in a race this close every ballot counts. It will still be a few days until know the unofficial results however some states have an automatic recount if close so it still could be awhile yet. The Presidential election is technically not official till Jan 6 when Congress meets and declares a winner.

As the saying goes, it matters not which votes are cast, what matters is who counts the votes.

The U.S. election machine is practically designed to enable voter fraud: Lax ID checks, no national standards for voting or tallying of votes, no automatic checks against census databases, and as of recently in several states, general mail-in voting with no chain of custody.

If that wasn't bad enough, some states (like Pennsylvania) have laws that specifically allow for tallying mail-in votes that arrive late, without a legible postmark. Not that a postmark would have helped much, as we've just had a USPS whistleblower name his superior as having ordered mail-in ballots collected on the day after the election to be separated from other mail, and then manually backdated with a (false) postmark.

The Trump campaign and Trump himself insists on investigations, so it's pretty safe to assume they're not involved in fraud in this election. Of course, that doesn't mean local republicans in various states aren't trying to rig the election.

The Democrats, however, are fighting tooth and nail to stop any and all investigations. I can only conclude that they know there's something fishy going on, and fear that an investigation would hurt them.

This was in Michigan and it does not make sense since there is no postmark rule. According to the reports I have read the video was a fake and any ballots not received by 8 PM 3 Nov were not counted.

After the 2016 election President Trump created the voter integrity commission ran by VP Spence and Kris Kobach. Kris Kobach claims of widespread voter fraud in the state of Kansas only found 9 cases. 7 of the 9 I believe were voting twice in CO and KS because they believed they could since they owned land in both states. The commission received such backlash from the states that it disbanded in 2018 and never published a report. Voter rolls are highly inaccurate but they found no evidence of widespread fraud from what I have read.

i said that to my friend but he insisted that if there are no evidence the law suit would not go forward, i said that Trump would make up evidence and would proceed forward with that lawsuit.

my buddy didn't believe me.
i am not sure how things go forward now.

While I might have many more agreements with one of them on a policy standpoint, I consider both Trump and Biden disgusting human beings. This is not negotiable.

A saw the report from Project Veritas. This was in Erie, Pennsylvania, BTW. Link.
Well, we certainly have an awful lot more evidence now, even before any investigations have started.

If an individual can find a list of SSNs for some long deceased individuals, punch them into a machine, and get told "Your vote was registered in Pennsylvania", should we believe a) that he was just really, really lucky and uncovered one of very few cases of fraudulent votes, or b) that this is probably the tip of a much larger iceberg?

And what about Wisconsin? Are we to believe that some 400,000+ voters registered to vote in the 3-4 days prior to the election (or used same-day registration), all without causing any noticeable delays, bringing the election turnout to a ridiculous 89%? Or might this perhaps warrant an investigation of some sorts?
Surely, the "voter rolls are highly inaccurate" part is in itself a cause for concern?

Project Veritas is a known right wing activist group for producing fake or highly edited videos. No other news source has reported this story so with something of this significance it is difficult to believe.

There were thousands of legal ballots not delivered by the USPS and that a Federal court order made them sweep the mail processing facilities searching for lost ballots.