North Carolina has just been declared for Trump. He is also almost certain to win Alaska whenever the Alaskans get around to counting the rest of their votes. Decision Desk puts the count at Biden 279 and Trump 229. The expected flurry of law suits has commenced.
Here are the states in play:
| State | EV | Margin |
| GA | 16 | 12,566 |
| PA | 20 | 45,291 |
| MI | 16 | 146,137 |
| WI | 10 | 20,557 |
| NV | 6 | 36,274 |
| AZ | 11 | 14,746 |
Not exactly a big blue wave.
In baseball there are some players who swing for the fences every time they are at bat. Great to have on your team, but usually inconsistent. For a manager, a guy who gets on base consistently is often more valuable. With the sorts of fairly small numbers which could flip states to Trump, while it is certainly entertaining to try and knock out 800,000 absentee ballots in PA, it is much more efficient to look for ways to pick off 50,000, or 5000 a few times. All the more so in Georgia and Arizona.
From a legal perspective, judges are far more likely to declare the votes of the dead invalid, than to adopt a statistics based argument that a bunch of ballots turned up at 4:00AM all marked for Joe shouldn’t count. There is room for the high concept stuff and it should certainly be argued; but there is every chance states will be decided by eliminating demonstrably illegal ballots from the count pretty much one by one.
There are four obvious categories of ballot to challenge: the dead, the non-resident, the non-citizen and the ineligible because of age. To do this requires a hand recount and an audit for eligibility. It is not a big ask and it is one which has already been granted in Georgia.
Legally, there is a big difference between asking a judge to invalidate a swath of ballots and asking that same judge to require a recount and audit. No judge wants to order the removal of hundreds, maybe thousands of ballots some of which may, in fact, be perfectly valid, on the basis that they arrived late or were counted unobserved. The burden of proof in those homerun style actions will be, rightly, enormous. But requiring that each ballot be scrutinized for eligibility will have a much lower burden of proof as the consequences will be much less broad. (And, yes it would be nice to take a look for more “glitches” in the software.)
The headline cases with Rudy and world class lawyering are great and I hope that they proceed simply because they will hold the rather nasty practices of big city Democratic machines up to scrutiny; but for Trump to win he needs 41 Electoral College votes.
Grinding out singles isn’t glamorous, but it wins ball games. Especially close ball games.
Jay Currie 
Chances are very great that the damage is done. It becomes near impossible to segregate fraudulent ballots from legally cast ballots after they are intermixed. Part of the reason to have poll watchers is to be able to challenge irregularities. Overseeing the chain of custody of legally cast ballots. Ensuring that safeguards put in place to detect fraud are employed. Removing poll watchers is the first step toward loss of faith in a fair election. Why remove people who are there to oversee a fair election? Why, to be able to do what you need to, of course. Without oversight many fraudulent acts can, and will, occur.
Mail in voting is, and always will be, the most openly prone to fraud method available. The cries of “progressives” that the “right” is trying to suppress the vote should be met with derision. No one wants a fair election more than the “right”. No one wants more opportunity to cheat than the “progressives”. Their is nothing suppressive about wanting to see proof of identity to vote. You have to provide proof of age to purchase spirits, is that so much more important than a trustworthy election result?
So what specific poll watching issues are you concerned with? After Jay raised it in the post below I looked into it and reported my findings below.
I will note that as far as I can tell there is only 1 confirmed case of voter fraud and one reported case (being taken seriously by law enforcement) in Pennsylvania. The confirmed case was that of a man who is a Republican and who tried to obtain a ballot for his dead mother. The reported case was that of two armed individuals who drove to a voting Center in Pennsylvania. It is rumoured that they had ballots in their vehicle. They have been arrested but No confirmation if they are Republican. They did have Q-Anon paraphernalia so you can draw your own conclusions.
Much like the Hunter Biden laptop, the media has no interest in seeking any information that will refute their claim that Biden has won.
Your willful blindness reinforces my opinion that “progressives” are fine with a win “by any means necessary”
If your news sources of choice don’t tell you, you’ll never know, but I will leave you with this link:
https://www.newsweek.com/michigan-election-affidavits-fraud-trump-1546698
“The 234 pages of affidavits released by the Trump campaign—which they say show evidence of voter fraud—include complaints that Democrat counting volunteers wore Black Lives Matter clothing and were “verbally aggressive” and one claim that it was “odd” members of the military voted for Joe Biden, it has been reported.”
I am sure you have no desire to find any information that refutes your own belief, so I see no point in trying to point you to other sources because you will just discount them as biased.
American Pravda. The mainstream media are gaslighting America.
Well now, this is a conundrum! After berating me for blinding following the main-stream media you back up your claim with a link to – yes – the main-stream media! So do you mean that you actually don’t believe the link because it is in the main-stream media, or did the main-stream media slip up and publish this.
No matter. If you carefully read everything I have produced here I have made sure to separate out fact from opinion. It is unsubstantiated if the people carrying guns approaching the polling station were Republicans so I stated it as a reported case. However the information about the person who tried to get a ballot for their dead mother is based on court documents so I would consider it a fact.
It doesn’t matter what the source is, something is either a fact or not. For example, me saying that the vast majority of lawsuits files so far are being dismissed by the courts is an opinion based on what I have read. However me saying that the issue of using sharpies on the ballots in Maricopa County is being dismissed is a fact since it comes from the Arizona Attorney General’s Office!
I provided you a link that I presumed you would consider valid. As opposed to a “right wing” website. The link provided you proof via sworn affidavits, the punishment for making those claims is the same as perjury, and thus a felony in the state of Michigan, and prison time. That, in a court of law, is proof that merits investigation, not hand waving.
Tucker Carlson provided numerous names of dead people who voted, presumably for the Democratic candidate. There are many more examples. Thousands. If that does not bring into question the legality of the vote, nothing will.
The switch will be from “no fraud” to “no widespread fraud” to “the fraud is minor and will not change the out come” and so on.
The only organization that can label a person the President Elect is the Electoral College, and if they do not produce a majority vote it devolves to the House of Representatives to vote on the President, and the Senate to vote on the Vice President.
We await the final outcome of the tallies, official recounts, court challenges, and other legal decision. But have no doubt, over 70 million Americans believe that the Democrats cheated, lied, and possible will steal the election. Those people will not burn down their cities, but they will not forget. Just as the Democrats and others proclaimed “Not my President” for four years, you can be sure those people will feel the same way.
In that case you presume wrong. I don’t care what the media is – left, right, main, fringe – as long as they have their facts right and provide sources I can follow. I generally find that the left media (e.g. CNN) have their facts right more often than the right (e.g. Fox). However that could biased because I generally focus on science and not politics.
For example in Arizona there are media reports of fraud as well as media reports describing how free and fair the process was. They make interesting reading but don’t provide much in the way of facts.
However Arizona has produced a document that describes the results of their hand count audit of the 2020 election. It is detailed and describes basic methodology and I find that to be a reliable source. If I could post a link I would but it is easy enough to find.
My position has been consistent, let the legal challenges continue, but if they fail then they fail – end of story. I am afraid that when they are dismissed you will have charges of the Judge didn’t take everything into account or the Judge was a secret Democrat or something similar.
https://dfw.cbslocal.com/2020/11/06/texas-social-worker-charged-counts-election-fraud/
Matters not who the fraud is for, the article doesn’t say. What matters is it brings into doubt the ability of the system to counter the fraud, as well as bringing into doubt the outcome. From small scale fraud comes larger scale results.