I wouldn't laugh until it's over. Remember that Gore lost when the US Supreme Court decided to stop the recounts in Florida. Later work proved that if the recounts had used the same standard across the state, Gore would have won. Gore had only asked for selective recounts, which was later proven to be a defective strategy. But the Florida Supreme Court either had or was about to impose state-wide standards in a state-wide recount, which would have clinched it for Gore. Then overnight the US Supreme Court ruled and blocked the Florida Supreme Court.
Trump dreams of similar achievement. This was a huge incentive to get the Supreme Court filled with the last of his 3 appointments.
This is how developer/con-man/mobster trump has always worked. Pull every lever, including lawyers guns and money, until desired result achieved. I wouldn't be surprised if Trump has spent more time in the company of lawyers than any other profession.
We hope it won't work this time. But hope is not a plan. My plan is to participate in a demonstration on Saturday.
I've been thinking this is the inevitable result of an anti-democratic system like the Electoral College. One party works out a superior strategy to take advantage of the anti-democratic features, and can therefore win with smaller and smaller minority (and therefore less need to satisfy actual voters). (Original strategy: appeal to slaveholders. Current strategy: appeal to racists and bigots.) This lets them win with smaller and smaller national minorities instead of majorities. But success breeds ideology as well. Soon, nothing matters, but winning. Republicans don't care if black votes are counted, etc. The system makes them feel more and more like blacks, gays, liberals, aren't even human, as rationalization for a system that marginalizes their votes. Thus, the anti-democratic system was created by thugs and proceeds to reproduce thuggery.
This is not to say that all people in Red States, or even members of Republican Party, are thugs. Most are merely sheep following their local thugs, in principle not different from Democrats, where sheep also follow thugs. However, there is an extra advantage gained among those leading thugs on the Republican side (which used to be the Democratic side before 1948, but the parties switched roles 1948-1968 in these regards...because principled Democrats like Hubert Humphrey kicked the racists out) through racism and bigotry, so when it is even tolerated, it becomes crucial to reproduction of their continued success. It is not so much tolerated in cities, which explains the nationwide red/blue division, which is really urban/rural, not even large/small states...but the admixture of urbanity differs among those categories, and therefore the racist-bigot-edge emerges from them. Once again, it has nothing to do with small-stateness, or rural-ness per se, but that is where leading racist thugs and bigots can best get away with their thuggery and yet still be followed by masses, because other masses don't so much appear on their doorstep to stop it. In short: people based organization is more difficult where there is lower density of people. And where there is organization fallure, or democratic failure, rationalizing ideologies emerge from them.
The establishment itself is divided between resource-wealth owners, like Kochs, who want to keep the oil fracking no matter what, and process-wealth-exploiters, like Silicon Valley and Wall Street, who would be happy to have carbon tax, etc. Trump has been making US more and more a pariah state, which is not good for Silicon Valley or much of Wall Street.
Sadly there is little division within the establishment in many areas like empire. Changes there cannot be made merely by voting for President (they don't make it that easy), though having a reactionary President makes improvement all but impossible (only through total collapse, which could destroy the world, but many believe in this path anyway).
Sadly many in the "left-wing" see this as meaning the parties are the identical, therefore no point in voting for either. This includes a lot of people I used to respect and a few I still do with some reservations.
Here are some examples:
Glenn Greenwald since leaving The Intercept last week has been furiously writing how horrible the Democrats are. Rarely mentions Trump.
Matt Taibbi has long been doing what Greenwald is now doing. (Greenwald's editors at The Intercept were able to edit him to look lefty, but in reality Greenwald is libertarian. We can only guess about Taibbi.)
Moon-of-Alabama (Bernard H., a German citizen) admits he is somewhat on the pro-Trump side because he believes the Democratic Party is more efficient at running empire, and he wants empire to collapse. One of his recent articles blasted the slow vote counting. I tried to counter his remarks in a level headed reply and was tempted to end my monthly donation.
On the good side, I've started supporting the new media operation of David Sirota, former Bernie manager. He split from Bernie after Bernie quit the race, and like me doesn't like a lot of things about many Democrats, but still votes Democratic and strongly hopes for a Biden win. Sirota wrote a great article on all the methods Republicans used to weaken democracy in the now "battleground" states.
Florida might have gone for Biden as well, if it were not for a appeals court decision on September 11 2020 that upheld the authority of the state to require ex-felons to pay off all fines and charges before getting their right to vote back. A lower court had ruled that this requirement amounted to a poll tax (it does, IMO, in no other case can your vote be taken away, regardless of unpaid fines etc). Bloomberg and others have famously been trying to pay off those fines, but facing fierce opposition (and possibly lawsuits) from Republicans. At most, Bloomberg paid off costs for 30,000 ex-felons (and possibly only 10,000), but there are 775,000 ex-felons in Florida. It was, at most, a tip of the iceberg.
A country which elected it's Chief Executive and Head of State through a more democratic means would become a better country. A country which had a more democratic legislature (e.g., no highly undemocratic Senate) would also become a better country. A country whose leader doesn't succeed primarily by exploiting these anti-democratic features to stoke further division can become a better country. It may be constitutional, and I may never see it change in my lifetime, but it is not good when Presidents are elected with a minority popular vote because of the Electoral College. It means a system to prevent democracy is working to its fullest extent.
When the vote is fully counted everywhere, with no exceptions, the anti-democratic effect of the Electoral College is minimized. That is because in the reverse situation, where some votes aren't counted, is the one where the Electoral College system is most pathological. We saw a perfect illustration of this in 2000, where the failure to count Florida's vote accurately, a minute percentage error in the Florida count meant that the Electoral College decision differed from a large popular majority, whereas with no error in Florida they would have been the same. A national majoritarian system could give the correct result with far less precision. If all we needed to know was whether Biden or Trump had the largest plurality of the popular vote, that could have been fairly well established on Tuesday Night, then with increasing precision afterwards. There has never been much doubt where it would go either,, Trump would never have been elected in the first place under such a system, his whole sexist-racist-bigot-billionaire-thug schtick only works because of it. He isn't popular in the city he comes from, and nearly any other big city, where those antics have grown stale. He succeeded only because of alienation and division.
People who live in small states should want to have the Electoral College system replaced, because of its corrupting influences. Undemocratic power corrupts undemocratically. They are also the ones who are going to need to oppose the system before it can be changed. But I'm not holding my breath until then. There are other big problems possibly more amenable to change. Including the full counting of every election.
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