2020 US election - The fat lady is warming up in the wings

[Labster]

A co-worker shared a sort-of joke with me this morning that I'm half-worried might end up a "ha ha only serious" kind of thing, speculating that if/when the courts do not give him the election for being a good boy, Trump's next step will be to go to the state governments to get the names of all voters registered Democrat so that he can have them sued/arrested for engaging in a conspiracy to deny him his rightful second term.  In any other year I'd call that obvious exaggeration, but Trump's just enough of an eogmaniacal lunatic that I can imagine him doing just such a thing.

The political parties already have all of this information.  I already have an electronic copy every voter record in my county, saved on a SQLite file on my hard drive.  It is really not hard to get this information at all, though keeping it up to date is a challenge.

Anyway, the recounts.  No American election has ever had the outcome change on a recount with a margin of over ten thousand.  There would have to be some sort of systematic error, like a voting machine malfunction (intentional or not).  So far, the statistics don't really show evidence for that.  There are biases in mail ballots versus in-person ballots, but we expected those after Trump made it an issue in the campaign.  By doing that, he made any patterns of systematic error or fraud harder to detect, because you can't use previous elections as a baseline.

That's a "why is the sky green?" question - it's possible to answer the question, but it's proceeding from a false premise.

I've seen green skies at sunset, it's pretty cool.  ★★★★★ Would recommend.

And in the meantime, the President-elect is not getting daily presidential briefings and his staff are not being allowed to take part in the transition activities that must take place before the country can be governed effectively, leaving the USA as a whole in a weakened position globally.

This is, to be frank, a non-issue.  Biden has already talked to foreign leaders; I'm sure if there was something he really needed to know Merkel or Johnson would have filled him in.  Biden has so much experience and so many contacts that he can put together a team without extra help from the government.  His campaign coffers are full, so he doesn't need the government budget.  He can safely ignore resistance from the White House for the next few weeks, except to send a few lawyers out where needed.

Honestly, I think Biden's team expected this to happen.  They seem to be going full steam ahead without waiting for transition offices.  If I were them, I would have made up lists of people to dismiss months if not years ago.

Now, I know that seems somewhere between a myth and joke at this point, and I hope it is too, I'd really hope the US electoral system is not a third-world country level of shoddy.

I've heard the comparison to hypothetical third-world countries a lot lately.  There are so many homeless on the street, and America is not a third-world country!  All of this voter fraud like a third-world country.  We can't get the coronavirus here, America is not a third-world country.  Look around you, people.  I see sectarian divisions, ethnic tensions escalating into violence, disputed elections, rampant viral epidemics, worsening pollution, people still trying to recover their livelihoods years after natural disasters, companies and billionaires that buy laws, and working people ending up homeless when they get sick.  If we're not a third-world country, then what on Earth are we?  Enough with the American exceptionalism!