Indecision 2020 continued

Guess I'm doing another entry about the election.
I'm watching trump whine about how he was winning and now he's not and it must be because of the corruption.

Not that he can cite any evidence of corruption.
He thinks they should have stopped counting ballots as soon as it looked like he was winning.

Let's review a bit, here, though.
For months he's been urging his followers not to vote by mail.
Now he says "In all cases these mail in ballots are one sided. It's amazing how they're all so one sided."
Seriously? After telling your flock not to vote by mail, you're really that surprised that most of them didn't vote by mail?

OK, let's review a bit here:
1. Democrats (mostly) expand voting choices so people don't have to crowd together at the polls during a pandemic
2. Republicans try to block them, knowing that the easier it is to vote, the more votes the Democrats would get. They know the majority doesn't want them, so their only recourse is voter suppression. It's been their tactic for a few decades now.
3. Attempts to block mail in voting (mostly) fail. DeJoy begins sabotaging the post office - removing sorting machines, banning overtime, etc., in a move widely called out as an attempt to slow down mail to interfere with the election. He is ordered to restore sorting machines but the damage had already been done.
4. Republicans pass laws in many states forbidding counting of mail-in ballots before the polls close.
5. Republicans sue Pennsylvania, who, along with several other states, have stated they will consider a ballot postmarked by november 3rd to be valid, even if, in the now slowed down post office, it takes several days to get to the election office. They lose their case, as even the packed supreme court can't find any reason why that would be unconstitutional.
6. November 3rd, as polls close, and votes begin to be counted. In-person votes were mostly counted first. Then, they began counting the mailed in votes. Two days later, ballots are still arriving, and being counted. The trump administration tries to get the supreme court to stop the counting, but so far they are not doing so.
7. Trump declares himself victor, and his followers don't understand why that doesn't work. Early results (from in-person voting) seem to indicate he'll win. Many people - myself included, a few posts ago - accept that this is likely the case.
8. But, as the voting continues, they get to all the mailed ballots. Starting with the ones that arrived by election day. As these ballots are counted, the votes begin to swing the other way, indicating Biden has a chance at winning. Many pundits had already warned that this would happen and, it seems obvious in hindsight.
9. These are the ballots that trump is pretending to not understand where they came from or why they would heavily favor Biden (maybe he really doesn't understand. It's possible that he's just stupid, not lying.) His followers eat it up of course.

And that brings us to today's press briefing, which I'm gonna go finish watching now that I've got that out of my system.

Indecision 2020 continued, part 2

OK, continuing the rest of the speech:

Repeating, repeatedly, his absolute astonishment that the mailed ballots heavily favor Biden instead of him.

Then he goes on to say that the law is that every ballot must be received by election day. Kind of betrays his reasons for the attack on the post office, if he actually thought that. It's not even spin, though, it's just an outright lie.
Oregon, interestingly, with its 100% mail in voting, does have such a law, but most states do not. The date it's mailed is the important date, just like when you file your taxes. (I guess he wouldn't know about that, either, though.)

He goes on to claim there is widespread voter fraud with mailed in ballots, despite the fact that nobody's ever been able to find any.

"Tens of millions of unsolicited ballots without any verification whatsoever" - straight up lie. No such thing.
"I told everybody this would happen." And yet it didn't.
"They refused to include any requirement to verify signatures" - uh, no, no they didn't.
"Unprecedented in American history" - except, you know, the states that have been doing it for decades. Oregon started doing it 40 years ago, and has been doing 100% mail in voting 20 years ago.

"No attempt to even determine if they're eligible to vote" - this is a lie. Everyone has to register to get a ballot, and ID and US citizenship status and local residency are all checked in every state.
"They have no idea. They're just taking numbers and writing down things and doing very bad things and we have a lot of information coming and litigation that's shake even you people up." If anyone can parse that, let me know. I'm not sure how to make sense of it and I had to listen to it four times to get it down verbatim.

They've got ballots coming in three days after the election (the election that was two days ago? How does he think that works?) "You don't have post marks. You don't have identification..." - both just flat out lies.


"These were legal observers who were supposed to be there..."
No, actually, to be a legal poll watcher actually requires going through a process, not just dressing up in your best tacticool gear, grabbing your gun, and demanding entrance to the counting locations in answer to trump's tweet.

A lot of people, from both parties as well as independents, did go through the process and were in the room legally, rather than just outside screaming threats.

"unexpected delays" - it takes time. "Nobody knew were they came from" - just because you don't know doesn't mean nobody did. I guarantee there are people who know exactly where every ballot comes from.

"Illegal votes being cast after election day" - well, great that you don't want that, because there weren't any. He is lying again. "Thou shalt not bear false witness" - that used to mean something to the people who are now followers of trump. (Heh, just kidding, a lot of them have always been hypocrites. Even when I was in high school being taught creationism it relied mostly on flat-out lies)

"He's claiming states, and I'm claiming states..." That's not how it works, dumbass. I've pointed out before, you can't just call dibs. There is a process, and it involves counting ballots. And the counting process involves one candidate being up for a while, then another, and back and forth sometimes. You can't just declare an end to it when you're ahead.

He has a lifetime of privilege and being given everything he wants without ever having to think hard or work for anything or ever having to face the consequences of any of his decisions. That explains why he thinks he can just have another term because he thought he was going to.
I don't know what his followers excuse for believing him is, though.

Sometimes my common rants bleed over into my writing...

#4: "You're telling us we're arguing over how big of a share of nothing we'll be getting?"

Tonight the cumulative word count is now 5,104. which is about where I should have been on the 3rd.
Since it's the fifth, I should be at 8,335 words by now, so I'm a little behind schedule. Maybe I can catch up this weekend. If not, I'm honestly not going to stress about it. Worse case scenario, I finish one Yagmar novella this month instead of two.

Either way, December is for marketing/publishing Yellow Tape and Coffee and doing final edits to Thoughtless to get ready for querying it in January.