Happy Election Day! Conspiracy Theorists, Start Your Engines!
Time for wackadoos and would-be vote suppressors to make their final sprint!
It’s Election Day, so time for a round of who’s trying to fuck around! Margins could be tight, which means extra room for fudgeclowns.
In order to scream STOP THE COUNT and try to claim victory, Trump has to at least get ahead for at least half a minute. If that never happens, he will whine “RIGGED.” And if there aren’t results by midnight, it’s probably because votes are being ZAPPED BY SPACE LASERS! You know the drill. OR, maybe untapped pockets of angry white men will surprise everybody and last-minute carry him over the finish line legitimately! Nervous chuckle.
Anyway, let’s check in on today’s biggest “who’s trying to fuck around” stories!
First, to Pennsylvania, where lawyers for a certain alleged illegal immigrant whose name rhymes with Schmeelon were in court on Monday, trying to explain how that million-dollar-giveaway for signing a PAC’s “First and Second Amendment” petition was not actually a GIVEAWAY giveaway, but a rigged contest to help him hire spokesmodels, or something.
Musk had told assembled idiots on October 19 at Trump’s Harrisburg rally: “We're going to be awarding a million dollars randomly to people who have signed the petition every day from now until the election.” But that wasn’t a promise, it was just him doing free speech, your honor! His lawyer Chris Gober told the judge: “The $1 million recipients are not chosen by chance. We know exactly who will be announced as the $1 million recipient today and tomorrow.” Well, that would explain why Elon’s winners just happened to be in the audience every time there was a “drawing” like “I Dream of Jeannie.”
What’s more, Gober claimed, Monday and Tuesday’s million-dollar winners will come from Arizona and Michigan, so the point is moot and the Philadelphia DA can’t sue Elon in Pennsylvania. The giveaway isn’t a giveaway, it’s more like a beauty pageant, with a salary, and the winners are forced to sign NDAs, you see. Isn’t that so much better? This was Elon’s third-best idea, after stuffing underpaid sub-sub-sub contractors into the back of a van with a shitty app, then threatening to strand them, and buying a trollsite to make it a white-supremacy playground.
Late Monday, a judge ruled Elon’s non-giveaway not-lottery giveaway could continue, for no reason given.
Also in PA, there’s the eerie missing ballots of Erie! In Erie County, nearly 20,000 voters didn’t get their absentee ballots in the mail. Now as of Friday a judge has ordered the Board of Elections to offer new absentee ballots to voters who didn’t get them, and stay open for longer office hours until Election Day to receive them. Down in Georgia, though, their state supreme court went the opposite way, ruling that 3,000 absentee voters in Democrat-leaning Cobb County whose ballots were mailed late then got them late or haven’t gotten them at all, have to either get their ballots in by 7 p.m. election night or vote in person. And if you’re homebound, well, tough shit!
Online, disinformation is throbbing, especially in QAnon circles on Musk’s trash website, and craphole platforms like Gab, with videos claiming BALLOT DUMPS, BALLOT MULES, “Our Food Is About To Be Poisoned With NEW ‘Transgenic Edible Vaccines’” and KAMALA WILL MAKE YOU PAY FOR IT!
Is tHaT a mAn sTeALiNg bALlots?!
“Shoot him dead and figure it out later. Remember 2020 !!!” Heaved a user on Gab. (It was a postal worker delivering ballots to the elections office.) If it’s a video of somebody in a mail truck or standing near a ballot drop box, the QAnon Scooby Doos are on it!
Yep, all flavors of lies are floating around about Georgia and other states. HAITIANS ARE GOING TO VOTE MULTIPLE TIMES, EAT A DOG SANDWICH AND VOTE SOME MORE! MACHINES ARE CHANGING VOTES LIKE MAGIC! Michigan has more votes than PEOPLE?! JUST ASKING QUESTIONS!! Are you shocked to find out that these videos and lies are being pushed by Russian state trolls? Little gifts from Uncle Vlad!
And there’s plenty of domestic fuckery afoot too! Republican-led Texas, Florida, and Missouri are trying to block Justice Department federal monitors. Whatever might they have in mind?
There’s the fake electors of the indicted and un-indicted variety, surely hot-to-trot for mischief to get into. Could some of them pitch a fit and refuse to certify county elections based on made-up fraud claims? Maybe!
The good news is the Electoral Count Act of 2022 prohibits states’ Electoral College votes being submitted by anybody but a state’s officials. But could fake electors rouse other kinds of rabble, bring bogus lawsuits, try some monkeyshines nobody’s even thought of yet? We shall see!
Will any of these last-minute tactics or Musk and Vlad’s online troll army make an actual difference? Who will be crowned the fairest pollster of them all? How soon will we know who won? We can only bite our nails and wait and see!
Let’s give the last word to Philadelphia DA Larry Krasner, who’s got some almost-curse words and a threat of cuffs and jailtime for bullies pulling nonsense.
F AROUND AND FIND OUT! Pennsylvania (and Georgia, and the other swing states) beat Trump’s lies in 2020, and they are ready to do it again!
Personally, I'm more than done with this "conspiracy theorist" BS, which gives them a benefit of a doubt.
Address them as "pathological liars," and we're getting somewhere.
The polling place in my small Missouri town was swamped this morning.
Have no idea if that's good or bad because Missouri.