Part Thirteen – El Dia de los Muertos

Republican Corruption: By claiming that Trumpus is leading in the polls and repeating his claims that he can only lose through foul play, conservative media are setting the stage for potential violence. Trumpus Jr. has called for “every able-bodied man and woman to join Army for Trump’s election security operation.” A private mercenary group, Atlas Aegis, has recruited former soldiers to watch polling places in Minnesota. Police pepper-sprayed Black people at a peaceful rally in North Carolina, literally preventing them from voting. Armed thugs threatened a Biden campaign bus, forcing cancellation of an event in Texas, and Trumpus praised them. Michigan’s Attorney General proclaimed a ban on guns at polling places, but sheriffs and police announced that they would refuse to enforce it. A caravan of Trumpus supporters temporarily blocked people from voting in Southern California. As if they needed any more encouragement, Trumpus bellowed:

That’s why they’re talking about the 25th Amendment, right? Three weeks. Three weeks in, Joe’s shot! Let’s go, Kamala, you ready? Most liberal person in the Senate. She makes Bernie Sanders look like a serious conservative.

Brett Kavanaugh handed down an opinion shamelessly justifying voter suppression and setting a precedent for the Supreme Court to intervene in a disputed election. The Republicans claim to have an army of lawyers on election day who already have over 300 lawsuits underway in 44 states to try to stop the counting of mail-in ballots.

Polling, the good news: Women are trending strongly to the left, contributing to the largest gender gap since they began to vote a hundred years ago. The bad news: Partially due to the Democrats’ incomprehensible refusal to fully value them, Latino men continue to trend more conservative, and Biden’s average lead among Latinos in Florida is 9 points lower than Hillary Clinton’s was at this time four years ago.

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Early voting, the good news: 95 million people have already voted, the majority of them Democrats. Over a quarter of them appear to be new or infrequent voters. Blacks and younger people are turning out in higher numbers than in 2016.

The bad news: We have no idea how many of those votes are being rejected. But we do know what Greg Palast has been telling us. Nearly seventeen million Americans – one in twelve of all previously registered voters – have been purged from the voter rolls, and many of them have never been informed of the fact. What we’ll never know is how many people have stood or will stand in line for hours only to be surprised to learn that they will not be allowed to vote:

In total, no less than 5,872,857 ballots were cast and never counted in 2016. In addition, a minimum of 1,982,071 voters were blocked from casting their ballots. That is a total of 7,854,928 votes and voters left uncounted.

According to the US Civil Rights Commission, the chance your vote will be disqualified as “spoiled” is 900 percent more likely if you’re Black than if you’re white. As I’ve been arguing from my series on that election, the only way we’ll be able to gauge the extent of the voter suppression and the computer fraud is to carefully study the discrepancy between the official results and the exit polls.

Exit polls are the State Department’s own “gold standard” used to measure the honesty of – and in several cases – decertify elections in other countries, such as Nicaragua and Uganda. Our own Agency for International Development (a well-known front for the CIA) has stated: “A discrepancy between the aggregated choices reported by voters and the official results may suggest, but not prove, that results have been tampered with.” Indeed.

George W. Bush was never elected President. In 2000, exit polls gave Al Gore the win in Florida. In 2004 they gave John Kerry the win in Ohio, but its Secretary of State had complete control of the electronic voting machines and almost certainly flipped the vote, giving the election to Bush. Do you remember how exit polls showed Kerry with a huge lead that mysteriously evaporated in the evening – after the polls closed? Do you remember how, at almost exactly the same moment, the U.S. refused to recognize the legitimacy of the Ukrainian election – because of the exit polls?

So how, asks Palast, could these professinal statisticians with decades of experience get exit polls so wrong? Answer: they didn’t. The polls in Florida in 2000 were accurate. That’s because exit pollsters can only ask, “How did you vote?” What they don’t ask, and can’t, is, “Was your vote counted?”

Wisconsin, by the way, uses machines that have been banned in California precisely because they are easy to tamper with. Other machines come with special “ballot protection” software to prevent this sort of thing. But in 2004, Ohio Secretary of State Ken Blackwell gave specific instructions to disable that software.

In 2016 exit polls were conducted in 28 states. In 23 of them the discrepancies between the exit polls and the vote count favored Trump. In 13 of them those discrepancies exceeded the margin of error.  

In a week or two, we may have to recall that Edison Research, the company that conducts exit polling for the mainstream media, has admitted that it massages its exit poll data once official vote counts have been released to align the exit poll numbers with the electronic vote totals. Indeed, the whole argument about vote flipping is possible only because researchers have been able to post those exit polls before Edison can change them.

May this not be necessary. May this election be a step back from the precipice of irreversible climate change. May Biden win so early and by such a wide margin – despite the millions of Democratic votes that will not be counted – that neither right-wing mobs, nor right-wing lawyers, nor the Supreme Court can contest the results. And, despite his own history, may he respond to the real needs of suffering people. It could happen, all of it.

If it doesn’t happen, check the exit poll discrepancies where Republicans control the vote counting apparatus. Watch how quickly the Democrats blame their own left wing. Watch how the pollsters blame their mistakes on “hidden Trump voters.” Notice how soon the New York Times recommends that next time, the Democrats should move further to the center. And check your belief in the myth of American innocence.

In the meantime, check how the last-minute, high-rolling gamblers are betting, and what Trumpus’ “liaison for Christian policy,” Pastor Frank Amedia is predicting:

God has heard the prayer of repentance from this nation and God’s people. He told us the other night while we we’re praying, five plus five…‘If we just add 5 percentage points to every state, to every senator, and to the president, and take away five from the opposition, from those who are not pro-life, who are not lined up with the kingdom of God, that’s 10. Ten is the fullness of God, five plus five.

He also predicts that if Biden wins (moo it be so),

Wait until animalism (sic) becomes acceptable and somebody can marry a cow and have perverse sex with them. You think I’m laughing. That’s what’s going to come.