It’s clear Trump will mount an all out assault on the election results if he loses and try to alter the counts or certification in multiple states that have strong Republican control of the process. Remember his comment to evangelicals that after this election “you won’t have to vote again”? I think the manipulation of the process will start with this election and cause chaos even if Harris clearly wins initially. The plan will be to cast doubt everywhere he can and delegitimize the result. He is clearly acting like he has a solid Plan B in place. The media should be highlighting this more so people will see it for what it is.
Earlier this summer I was at a party out in the country and ended up talking with someone from Arlington, VA. who had grown up in Baltimore; we were talking about architecture and neighborhoods/history there: politics.
‘How’d you end up in Arlington’? I asked.
“Government”, they said.
Been at DOJ ~25years they said—so I’m sure you can imagine that that led to one hell of a conversation. After about an hour or so -and completely unsolicited- they said: you know all these committees and conversations happening around the weaponization of/at DOJ? It’s true, there’s definitely weaponization.
Yes, Scott. I’m definitely concerned about that. And now the Georgia Board is basically setting up the fix. Talk about a nail biter. I hope all the great legal minds like Asha and Renato will sort things out for us helpless lay people. Meanwhile, GOTV.
In my humble New Hampshire opinion every state AG in the union should sue
GA as they tyrannically deny all of the other 49 states' voting eligible citizens their constitutional right to have our presidency decided in accordance with the constitution. Gosh darn, sue them NOW!
In Mayor Daley's Chicago (the original, not the attempted carbon copy) ballots were counted by hand. A partisan with a pencil stub hidden between fingers, could pass their hand over a ballot with the "wrong" selection thereby creating a stray mark which invalidated the ballot. I fear similar shenanigans in Georgia.
Hand counting ballots. Based on my description below, you do the math and tell me how the state of Georgia will do this.
We have (or rather had, before we got tabulating machines last year) a foolproof system in my little town. For about 350 voters, we double count the ballots - 3 to 4 teams of two people each, one D and one R. The D counts while the R records the count, then they switch and do it over. Their tallies have to match or they recount. They work in batches of around 50 ballots. It takes from 8 pm when the polls close to as late as 11 pm depending on what’s on the ballot. So, 3 hours x 6 ir 8 people to calculate the manhours. We do this as volunteers. Doubtless vote counters in Georgia would need to be paid.
How many voters are there in Georgia? How many vote counters? What’s the budget?
To answer my own question, assume 5 million voter ballots - about 14000 times the size of my town. Assuming 7 person hours for accurate hand counting per 350 ballots, my calculator neatly displays 100000 total person hours. How much do you assume the counters need to be paid? $15/hr? $1.5 M total for a political exercise on top of the sunk cost of existing tabulators? What about the cost of defending the hopefully forthcoming lawsuits? Does anyone in Georgia care about wasteful government spending?
Could someone with standing in Georgia seek a preliminary injunction to prevent these Election Board changes from taking effect until litigation and appeals are complete? ?ACLU? ?CREW?
Once a month I have lunch with a group of Army Security Agency veterans and to the man we were duly impressed with the sabotage of Hezbollah pagers and walkie-talkies and of course we expected the predictable Middle-East terrorist group press release that it killed women and children. Not that Hezbollah, Hamas and the others give the least damn about killing women and children, but they know it offends Western sensibilities, plays well on the evening news. And of course we are all well aware the operation violates multiple not-universally-agreed-to war crime agreements, agreements anyone in the intelligence community will tell you absolutely no one adheres to.
The so-called Laws of Land Warfare are a joke. All acts of war are in some degree indiscriminate. Was the mass rocket attack by Hezbollah and Iran not "Indiscriminate targeting of civilians?" Was October 6th not "indiscriminate targeting of civilians?" Certainly the use of unguided munitions in Gaza was "indiscriminate targeting of civilians." Carpet bombing of Vietnam was absolutely "indiscriminate." The fire bombing of Dresden and Tokyo was "indiscriminate." Seemed to us the sabotage of pagers and radios purchased for Hezbollah was as precise and discriminating as targeting ever gets. The very best you could ever hope to achieve.
The Laws of Land Warfare, the Munitions treaties, etc. only matter if you lose and the winner puts you on trial. Otherwise it's just both sides accusing each other of doing what in fact both sides are doing. And in the end, what act of war is not a crime to those on the receiving end? And who watching from the sidelines will not agree it's horrible when you kill an Al Qaeda leader by a drone strike on a wedding party they're attending? War is terrible, and more often than not the cause is the greed of a small group of men that already have more wealth than they can expend in ten lifetimes. But in some cases, like the Israel case, the threat is genuinely existential. And I guarantee you, if it's us or them, no treaties will get in the way of insuring the survival of the United States.
Being a digital literacy instructor, my mind went first to cybersecurity concerns rather than LOAC concerns when the pagers went off in Lebanon. I was concerned about the “how” and if it was something truly novel whether or not it could be let loose on the West. Things like Stuxnet, for example, are interesting cyber weapons that you can basically use once but if the impacted side can recover enough of the code they can reverse engineer it and send it back at you.
That’s why I wasn’t worried about LOAC. A line had been crossed and potentially a whole new imbalance of terror created. A supply chain attack adding physical explosives is still bad, though.
It’s clear Trump will mount an all out assault on the election results if he loses and try to alter the counts or certification in multiple states that have strong Republican control of the process. Remember his comment to evangelicals that after this election “you won’t have to vote again”? I think the manipulation of the process will start with this election and cause chaos even if Harris clearly wins initially. The plan will be to cast doubt everywhere he can and delegitimize the result. He is clearly acting like he has a solid Plan B in place. The media should be highlighting this more so people will see it for what it is.
I know ABC covered it and I saw it on MSNBC this morning
Earlier this summer I was at a party out in the country and ended up talking with someone from Arlington, VA. who had grown up in Baltimore; we were talking about architecture and neighborhoods/history there: politics.
‘How’d you end up in Arlington’? I asked.
“Government”, they said.
Been at DOJ ~25years they said—so I’m sure you can imagine that that led to one hell of a conversation. After about an hour or so -and completely unsolicited- they said: you know all these committees and conversations happening around the weaponization of/at DOJ? It’s true, there’s definitely weaponization.
Yes, Scott. I’m definitely concerned about that. And now the Georgia Board is basically setting up the fix. Talk about a nail biter. I hope all the great legal minds like Asha and Renato will sort things out for us helpless lay people. Meanwhile, GOTV.
“He is clearly acting like he has a solid Plan B in place.” Agree with this and surprised not to see more analysis of what that plan might be.
Looking forward to your take on Maddow's "From Russia with Lev" movie.
Kept remembering how you referred to them as Crabbe and Goyle. :-)
In my humble New Hampshire opinion every state AG in the union should sue
GA as they tyrannically deny all of the other 49 states' voting eligible citizens their constitutional right to have our presidency decided in accordance with the constitution. Gosh darn, sue them NOW!
In Mayor Daley's Chicago (the original, not the attempted carbon copy) ballots were counted by hand. A partisan with a pencil stub hidden between fingers, could pass their hand over a ballot with the "wrong" selection thereby creating a stray mark which invalidated the ballot. I fear similar shenanigans in Georgia.
Hand counting ballots. Based on my description below, you do the math and tell me how the state of Georgia will do this.
We have (or rather had, before we got tabulating machines last year) a foolproof system in my little town. For about 350 voters, we double count the ballots - 3 to 4 teams of two people each, one D and one R. The D counts while the R records the count, then they switch and do it over. Their tallies have to match or they recount. They work in batches of around 50 ballots. It takes from 8 pm when the polls close to as late as 11 pm depending on what’s on the ballot. So, 3 hours x 6 ir 8 people to calculate the manhours. We do this as volunteers. Doubtless vote counters in Georgia would need to be paid.
How many voters are there in Georgia? How many vote counters? What’s the budget?
To answer my own question, assume 5 million voter ballots - about 14000 times the size of my town. Assuming 7 person hours for accurate hand counting per 350 ballots, my calculator neatly displays 100000 total person hours. How much do you assume the counters need to be paid? $15/hr? $1.5 M total for a political exercise on top of the sunk cost of existing tabulators? What about the cost of defending the hopefully forthcoming lawsuits? Does anyone in Georgia care about wasteful government spending?
I just hope the tabulating machines are not the ones Ivanka Trump sold the patent to China: https://www.forbes.com/sites/tommybeer/2020/09/22/ivankas-trademark-requests-were-fast-tracked-in-china-after-trump-was-elected/
When it comes to today's GOP, the chaos is the point.
Could someone with standing in Georgia seek a preliminary injunction to prevent these Election Board changes from taking effect until litigation and appeals are complete? ?ACLU? ?CREW?
Once a month I have lunch with a group of Army Security Agency veterans and to the man we were duly impressed with the sabotage of Hezbollah pagers and walkie-talkies and of course we expected the predictable Middle-East terrorist group press release that it killed women and children. Not that Hezbollah, Hamas and the others give the least damn about killing women and children, but they know it offends Western sensibilities, plays well on the evening news. And of course we are all well aware the operation violates multiple not-universally-agreed-to war crime agreements, agreements anyone in the intelligence community will tell you absolutely no one adheres to.
The so-called Laws of Land Warfare are a joke. All acts of war are in some degree indiscriminate. Was the mass rocket attack by Hezbollah and Iran not "Indiscriminate targeting of civilians?" Was October 6th not "indiscriminate targeting of civilians?" Certainly the use of unguided munitions in Gaza was "indiscriminate targeting of civilians." Carpet bombing of Vietnam was absolutely "indiscriminate." The fire bombing of Dresden and Tokyo was "indiscriminate." Seemed to us the sabotage of pagers and radios purchased for Hezbollah was as precise and discriminating as targeting ever gets. The very best you could ever hope to achieve.
The Laws of Land Warfare, the Munitions treaties, etc. only matter if you lose and the winner puts you on trial. Otherwise it's just both sides accusing each other of doing what in fact both sides are doing. And in the end, what act of war is not a crime to those on the receiving end? And who watching from the sidelines will not agree it's horrible when you kill an Al Qaeda leader by a drone strike on a wedding party they're attending? War is terrible, and more often than not the cause is the greed of a small group of men that already have more wealth than they can expend in ten lifetimes. But in some cases, like the Israel case, the threat is genuinely existential. And I guarantee you, if it's us or them, no treaties will get in the way of insuring the survival of the United States.
Being a digital literacy instructor, my mind went first to cybersecurity concerns rather than LOAC concerns when the pagers went off in Lebanon. I was concerned about the “how” and if it was something truly novel whether or not it could be let loose on the West. Things like Stuxnet, for example, are interesting cyber weapons that you can basically use once but if the impacted side can recover enough of the code they can reverse engineer it and send it back at you.
That’s why I wasn’t worried about LOAC. A line had been crossed and potentially a whole new imbalance of terror created. A supply chain attack adding physical explosives is still bad, though.