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Author: ptheland   😊 😞
Number: of 48466 
Subject: The Army of Election Officials ...
Date: 10/30/2024 1:00 PM
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Ready to reject the vote

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/25/magazine/far-ri...

I've been talking about this from time to time. I'm glad to see it's been gathered together into a proper news article.

To better understand what this could mean for the country and for democracy in the months to come, I traveled to four battleground states and interviewed dozens of election officials, activists, lawyers and ordinary citizens, read through hundreds of pages of court transcripts and sat in on many hours of local meetings like the one in Washoe. What I found was that although the Stop the Steal movement of 2020 has evolved into the considerably more sophisticated “election integrity” movement of 2024, its success is still premised on persuading election administrators of two things that are not true: that widespread election fraud is a real and present threat to democracy and that they have not only the authority but also the legal duty to do something about it — that they must “do their duty” and deny certification.

I also found a growing number of election officials who seemed willing to do exactly that. For them, going so far as to block certification wasn’t a partisan gambit; it was a patriotic duty. Though it might technically be illegal, it obeyed a higher law.


Prepare yourself to deal with lots of uncertainty in the coming weeks.

--Peter
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Author: Lapsody 🐝  😊 😞
Number: of 48466 
Subject: Re: The Army of Election Officials ...
Date: 10/30/2024 1:11 PM
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Prepare yourself to deal with lots of uncertainty in the coming weeks.

I've been a thinkin the same thing. One thing we have going for us is the more militant part got to see that Trump didn't pardon the Oath Keeper or Proud Boy leaders/followers on advice of counsel. So they may think they will get strung out just like the others.
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Author: ges 🐝  😊 😞
Number: of 48466 
Subject: Re: The Army of Election Officials ...
Date: 10/30/2024 5:56 PM
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Ready to reject the vote

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/28/podcasts/the-da...

There's an interesting episode of the NYT "The Daily" podcast in which a reporter talks to the Chair of the Maricopa County, AZ, Republican Party.

The guy is obviously intelligent; an engineer who had his own aerospace related company. But when it comes to the reality of the 2020 election he is a total whackadoodle.

The reporter keeps knocking down his election conspiracy theories with facts, but he falls back on...he just knows in his gut that Trump won. And he has only the most absurd nonsense to support his 'gut'.

Then the reporter talks with other staffers in the GOP Phoenix office and they all express the same belief that the election was stolen.
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Author: ges 🐝  😊 😞
Number: of 48466 
Subject: Re: The Army of Election Officials ...
Date: 10/30/2024 5:59 PM
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As expected, AND AS HAD BEEN CAREFULLY EXPLAINED AND PREDICTED, the majority of votes cast on election day were counted first in most states, and Trump took the lead on election night. It was at that point, before midnight, that Trump Declared victory

And that is one of the reasons those AZ GOP precent workers just feel SURE that Trump really won. No amount of factual explaining will convince them otherwise.
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Author: albaby1 🐝 HONORARY
SHREWD
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Number: of 48466 
Subject: Re: The Army of Election Officials ...
Date: 10/30/2024 6:06 PM
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The reporter keeps knocking down his election conspiracy theories with facts, but he falls back on...he just knows in his gut that Trump won. And he has only the most absurd nonsense to support his 'gut'.

Again, it's the damage caused by Trump and his allies breaking the trust in the system.

Voters know that the system is fair because the candidates and the campaigns get to watch everything that happens. The way you keep Democrats from cheating is by letting the GOP see every part of the ballot-counting process; the same is true of Republicans. The system relies on the campaigns watching everything, observing for themselves that no cheating took place in the counting, and then accepting that no cheating took place.

If the campaign goes out and tells everyone that the other side cheated during the counting, though, then that eradicates that entire framework. The framework is set up so that each campaign's partisans get to watch the counting, and then they report back to the party and candidate that they saw the counting done fairly - and then the party and candidates communicate to their supporters that the counting was done fairly.

If the candidate falsely claims that the counting was done unfairly, that framework is destroyed. If Trump falsely claims he won, even though he didn't, his supporters are going to believe him. They're going to trust him rather than his political opponents. Since the system relies on the candidates being honest in communicating that the count was conducted fairly, there's no way to repair the damage if they're dishonest.
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