If the Margin of Victory Is Smaller Than the Number of Rejected Ballots, the Courts Will Decide the Election

by Thomas Neuburger

The November election is shaping up as a mess no matter what happens. Forget the politics for a moment and consider just the logistics. From a practical standpoint, it will be next to impossible for any state that doesn't already do full-on vote-by-mail — which is most of them ­— to even conduct it.

Almost all of the post-Covid primaries produced questionable results, even though Biden was by then the shoe-in nominee. Were there enough polling places? Not in most states. Were there enough poll workers? Not in most states. Does that not by itself mean the system prevented voting, even if unintentionally? Of course it does.

Systemic disenfranchisement — a system that prevents voting — yields doubtful outcomes at best, litigation and charges of illegitimacy at worst.

The Logistical Mail-In Mess

Now add in the task, greater by an order-of-magnitude, faced by states new to mail-in voting — and also by voters themselves. Each state has to actually manage this election — provide ballots to everyone who wants to vote, receive those ballots, verify them, and count them. Every one of those steps will give critics cause to complain, especially in "battleground" states.

Mailing out ballots to the entire electorate will be costly, especially in more populous states, and these costs fall on the states themselves. That's the reason many wanted the Covid relief packages to contain additional funding to states to run this election. That effort failed.

Receiving those ballots will burden the already lumbered Post Office to an previously unanticipated degree. Will ballots be mailed in time to be received? Laws that determine the mailing deadline vary from state to state, some allowing more time, some less. Laws covering when ballots must be received vary as well. "Election day" will turn into election month, which allows for sowing of much confusion and distrust.

Will there be accusations of political interference in those deliveries? We're already seeing them, teed up and ready to go. And those problems are present before votes are even counted.

Not Just Logistics, But Fraud

As to verifying and tallying votes, states face another mess. Voters in most states aren't used to voting by mail, and a great many of them will make "mistakes" that could cause their ballots to be disqualified.

Some of those disqualifications will be easy to justify — forgetting to sign the envelope, for example. But some disqualification may be capricious — for example, if the signature "doesn't match" the one on the registration card in the judgment of some (perhaps partisan) election official. Many Republican officials will seek to disqualify as many ballots in "Democratic" districts as they can, just as they worked to disqualify as many Democratic "hanging chad" ballots as possible in Florida during the stolen election of 2000.

Does this mean I don't think Democrats don't steal elections? Far from it; check out this recent piece. But unless the result is a blowout in both the popular vote and the Electoral College, this election will be different: Biden enters this race with a lead, so Democratic interests will be to protect that lead, not diminish the other side's total.

Any Close Election Will Be Litigated

This leads to one conclusion:

• If the margin of victory in November is smaller than the number of disqualified ballots, the courts will decide the election.

According to NPR, "An extraordinarily high number of ballots — more than 550,000 — have been rejected in this year's presidential primaries." That was just the primary, and that total is larger by half than the number of disqualified ballots in the entire 2016 general election, roughly 320,000. In addition, the writers note that "voters of color and young voters are more likely than others to have their ballots not count."

Which means, if the election is close, litigation is sure to come from the losing side, whichever side is declared the winner. Yes, Republicans are likely, if past is prologue, to cheat. But given the cluster that will undoubtedly occur, both sides' partisans will have ample cause to complain.

Hillary Clinton eventually won the 2016 popular vote by close to 3,000,000 votes, but lost the Electoral College 304-227 — not even close. In contrast, George Bush lost the popular vote by just 500,000 in 2000, and won the Electoral College by just five, 271-266.

If the year 2000 repeats itself in just this respect, its closeness (ignoring the Supreme Court's unopposed theft of it), November will be a nightmare, as will December and January. And if the courts do make the final decision, watch out.

It will be great for ratings if a protracted battle occurs — those who channel Les Moonves are already salivating — but our close-to-failed-state democracy, already on the ropes, may well go down for the count.
  

Why Does David Dreier Want To Poison Your Family With Tainted Food Products? And He's Got Some Cronies In Congress Who Feel The Same Way

CA Congressmembers Dreier & Bono Mack dream of free market e. coli

Conservatives have always fought like mad dogs (if not blue ones) against protecting consumers from being poisoned by people selling bad food. Learning about the battles between progressives and conservatives regarding food safety in school helped me understand why I would never support conservatives and why I was-- and am-- a progressive. How in the pocket of Big Business do you have to be to risk killing your own constituents-- or even family members-- in the name of unregulated markets?

Yesterday the House failed to pass HR 2749, John Dingell's Food Safety Enhancement Act of 2009, a major overhaul of the FDA 280- 150. (It needed a 2/3's margin to pass under the rules so it lost by about 10 votes). Who would vote against food safety? You know the answer: conservatives, the whole reactionary Republican leadership and almost all the GOP loons in the House plus 23 mostly disgraceful Democrats, primarily Blue Dog congenital aisle jumpers like Heath Shuler (NC), Walt Minnick (ID), Travis Childers (MS), Parker Griffith (AL), Frank Kratovil (MD), Jim Marshall (GA), etc.

The DCCC sent out press releases today pointing out how California reactionaries Brian Bilbray, Mary Bono Mack, Ken Calvert, David Dreier, Elton Gallegly, Dana Rohrabacher, Dan Lungren, Tom McClintock, and Buck McKeon blocked Dingell's bill:

Despite recent outbreaks of food borne illnesses such as E.coli and salmonella, today Representative David Dreier blocked an attempt to strengthen and modernize the way we protect America’s food supply.
 
“Americans worrying about when the next outbreak of E.coli or salmonella will strike their families deserve better than Representative Dreier blocking a plan to keep our food supply safe,” said Ryan Rudominer, National Press Secretary for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.

“It’s outrageous that Representative Dreier is willing to block solutions to make sure the food Americans feed to children is healthy and safe.” 

It is outrageous and Dreier should be defeated next year. But so should Minnick, Childers, Griffith and Kratovil, all of whom voted with Dreier and the Republicans and all of whom are on the Debbie Wasserman Schultz' DCCC Frontline Program. Donate to the DCCC and help defeat Republicans who want to poison our families and help re-elect with the same check Democrats who want to poison our families. How does Debbie Wasserman Schultz fall asleep at night or look in a mirror?

Meanwhile, the bill will be voted on today and it will only need a simple majority to pass. (Astute readers may have noticed that a small handful of dedicated progressives voted against the bill yesterday as well-- Lynn Woolsey, Maurice Hinchey, Chellie Pingree, Earl Blumenauer, Ben Ray Luján, Peter Welch, Steve Kagen, Eric Massa, and Martin Heinrich. After talking to a few Capitol Hill staffers and to food policy expert Jill Richardson (author of Recipe for America: Why Our Food System is Broken and What We Can Do to Fix It) it appears that they are concerned about the burdensome effect on small organic farms since there's a flat $500 registration fee per facility and they thought it should be adjusted and made lower.)


UPDATE: The House Overcame GOP Obstructionism And Passed The Food Safety Enhancement Act

Adopting a rule that allowed the bill to pass with a simple majority, with just a few vote changes from yesterday-- 3 Democrats and 4 Republicans gave up their opposition-- the bill passed 283-142, another progressive victory for consumer protection against the extremism of anti-social mania of proft-driven conservatives. The California E. coli Republicans, Brian Bilbray, Mary Bono Mack, Ken Calvert, David Dreier, Elton Gallegly, Dana Rohrabacher, Dan Lungren, Tom McClintock, and Buck McKeon, all voted against the bill again. President Obama commended the House on passage:

Today the House of Representatives passed H.R. 2749, the Food Safety Enhancement Act of 2009, legislation that will raise food safety standards, allow the FDA to issue mandatory recalls of harmful products, and enhance our oversight of imported food.

This action represents a major step forward in modernizing our food safety system and protecting Americans from foodborne illness. Those are the goals of the Food Safety Working Group I convened in March and charged with making recommendations to improve our food safety system. And that is why we announced a new rule to control Salmonella contamination in eggs and are working to reduce the presence of harmful pathogens such as E. coli in meat and produce; strengthen our capacity to trace the source of outbreaks; and update our emergency operations procedures.

I commend the House of Representatives for its action today and look forward to working with the Senate to enact critical food safety legislation.

"Recount" does remind us of the orgy of evil that was unleashed by the 2000 election outcome. But is there really anyone who's forgotten about that?

Yes, there's a real Ron Klain, seen here at right with Kevin
Spacey, who plays him in Recount. There's a conversation
between them on HBO's website, which has many such
features that look more interesting than the film itself.

It was a strange feeling sort-of-watching HBO Films' Recount, a recounting of the 2000 Florida presidential election recount drama, last night.

I only sort-of-watched because, to begin with, I had forgotten about it until Howie mentioned it while we were talking, which turned out to be about 50 minutes into the thing. So then I set the DVR to record the 1am (ET) replay, but I also sort-of-watched the rest of the 9pm showing. And then this morning I watched some of the beginning.

Of course it's not difficult to get into the plot, whose outlines remain all too familiar even after all these years. At the same time, there's always that problem when you're watching a fictionalized version of real events--and you have to assume it's fictionalized when the re-creation is being presented as anything other than a documentary--the problem being that you never quite know what's God's-honest-truth and what isn't. (Howie suggests that this is like watching CNN. I can't argue.)

So you watch, sort of mentally checking stuff off: oh yeah, the Palm Beach ballot, and the Crazy Woman (I'd just as soon not mention her name) playing fast and loose with election law, essentially making it up as she goes, and the respectable-looking gangs of thugs sent by the GOP recount command to intimidate the Miami-Dade County recount, and on and on.

You get a sort of different response when there's a character or detail you don't remember. Did this or something like it really happen? For example, with Kevin Spacey clearly cast as the star of the show, you sort of figure there must have been a Ron Klain, who had been Vice President Al Gore's chief of staff until he was forced out by the machinations of later-to-be-ousted-himself campaign director Tony Coelho, at which point Ron was brought back into the campaign in a humiliatingly lower position, and wound up being the Democratic point man on the recount. They wouldn't have made that all up. Would they?

As the thing unreels, you never quite figure out what the point of the exercise is, except maybe for people who are truly unfamiliar with these events, or want to test their recollection/understanding of them -- or perhaps to remind us of the evil that was to follow, the reign of terror that was ultimately unleashed by our very own election-fixing Supreme Court.

I guess what leaves me most uneasy is that the film stirs all this stuff up without giving us a clue as to what we're supposed to do with/about it all.

It should go without saying that in the very act of casting you're slanting the material, and by and large the process tends to favor the Republicans, at least when the process is controlled by people who are trying to be fair (in other words, not to be confused with, for example, ABC's patented far-right-wing faux-docu-hatchet-job unit), if only because casting basically normal people tends to whack off the extremities of a pack of vicious, slimy characters.

Laura Dern, for example, is an interesting choice for Krazy Katherine (oops, I let part of her name slip). As an out-there actress, she's willing to give us an intimation of not-too-brightness and even of not-too-saneness, but she still manages to suggest that this is, on balance, a more or less balanced individual. Of course the editorial decision not to have the makeup crew do even a partial let alone a full Katherine on the handsome Ms. Dern also unbalances the portrait in the direction of nonexistent balance.

Or there's the casting of the almost always interesting Tom Wilkinson as Jim Baker, the GOP jack-of-all-trades-slash-enforcer (and bosom buddy of the Republican presidential candidate's Poppy) sent in to do whatever had to be done to save Florida, and the election, for the party. At this point Wilkinson has Americanized himself so successfully that he didn't even need the vaguely Texan twang to hide his English origins. I suspect that most viewers had no idea that he is English. But we inveterate watchers of British TV on public television and cable know him as one of his home country's busiest actors, with a fascinating ability to create characters who seem to be likable except for a certain something that you can't dismiss (and that usually turns out to conceal serious personality disorders). I couldn't help thinking that Wilkinson's performance lent the wily Baker more dignity than he deserves.

In the end, I was mostly reminded of the basic truth about a difference between the major parties in modern U.S. history: Where Democrats often (not always, but often) attempt to get to the truth of a factual issue, Republicans (pretty much always) just want to win. Oh, Recount shows us plenty of Republicans who seem sincerely to believe that it's the Democrats who are trying to steal the election, but it seems clearly that they're either ideologically blinkered or just not very bright.

At one point, Spacey's Ron Klain laments that he just wants to find out who really won Florida. Of course we have no way of knowing whether such a person ever thought or said such a thing, but it's also quite clear that no such thing could ever have been thought or said by anyone on the GOP side.

No doubt the less ingenuous of those GOP-ers justify their unconcern-bordering-on-contempt for truth with reference to their possession of a "higher" truth that seems to be the birthright of the modern Loony Right, a delusion most fully incarnated in the otherwise-bewildering person of "Big Dick" Cheney, a man who has probably unleashed and enforced more lies than any individual on record, all of it presumably justified by his unshakable belief in the demented nerve firings ricocheting around his corroded brain.

In this regard, the pragmatic Jim Baker does stand apart from the modern-day GOP elite--he's of that older generation of Republicans personified by his pal George H. W. Bush, so resolutely repudiated by George W. And in this regard, it was probably sensible to put as interesting actor as Tom Wilkinson in the part. My quibble is that Wilkinson is probably too interesting an actor, and winds up lending the character more dimension than I suspect he in fact has.

I'm curious as to how other people have reacted to Reunion. As suggested, I found myself focusing most on the long-term effect of where we know the story is headed, and maybe that is the idea. When, at the end, after the Supreme Court has played fairy godmother to W., the poor sincere, stoogelike Republican counsel played by Bob Balaban (a famous liberal, isn't he?), blithers at the end that the shame of Bill Clinton is about to be erased, can the intended effect be anything but ironic?

We know all too well that what the Court election-fixers in fact unleashed on the country was a regime that, heedless of the thinness of its "victory," was about to unleash an assault on reason, decency, international comity, democracy, and honest government -- all wrapped in a mantle of near-sociopathic ineptitude -- without precedent in U.S. history.

The only thing is, is there anyone out there who had somehow managed to forget this lesson?

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