The Trump scam
What is going on with American politics?
On
November 3rd there was an election, to decide who will be president for
the next four years; also to elect a bunch of other senior federal
politicians.
Joe Biden (Democrat) won by a landslide. The
American system is weird. Each state has a number of people to send to
the "Electoral college" which consists of 538 people. In most states,
it's "winner takes all", and whichever party has the most votes, all the
electors for the college are for that party. Biden got 306 votes in the
Electoral college, Trump got 232. You'd think that would be the end of
it, but not quite.
There is also the "popular vote". This doesn't matter, constitutionally, but Biden got 81 million votes to Trump's 74 million.
All
the polls leading up to the election were for a Biden win, so it was no
surprise that he won. But there are states which, if they had gone the
other way, would have given the election to Trump. In this case, that
was Arizona, Michigan, Minnesota, Pennsylvania, Nevada, Wisconsin and
Georgia.
So Trump refused to believe that he had lost (or
pretended to). And started up court cases alleging fraud. After some 50
cases had been dismissed, because in every case, allegations were made
but no evidence was shown.
Then the guy in charge of election
security, Mr Krebs, went public and explained that the election security
for the 2020 election was the best ever. Naturally, Trump didn't like
that and fired him.
So what are the allegations?
1. The
Dominion counting machines have been corrupted. No evidence for this has
been shown. And in Georgia, the votes were recounted by hand, and gave
the same result (with a 0.1% difference, not enough to change the
result).
2. If you stopped counting before all the votes were
counted, Trump was ahead in a few states. But so what? You have to count
ALL the votes, and when that was completed, Trump had lost. Trump
himself puts great emphasis on this issue.
3. The rules were
changed to allow more people to vote by mail, because of Covid. There
was a challenge that claimed that the rule change was illegal. Challenge
dismissed.
4. And finally, the state of Texas brought a case to
the Supreme Court (Scotus) against election procedures in Georgia,
Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. The plan was, toss out all the
votes in that election, and let the (Republican) state senate appoint
the electors. So those states would vote Trump instead of Biden.
The
Scotus said "This isn't any of Texas's business" and dismissed the case
without even looking at the evidence. But I looked at the evidence.
They
did a calculation that claimed that in each of the states, the odds of
Biden winning were 15,000,000,000,000,000 to one against, meaning that
it's pretty much impossible. But as ever in mathematical proofs, you
have to look at the assumptions behind the figures, and in this case,
the assumptions were that voting patterns would be the same as in 2016.
And
that's a daft assumption. We KNOW that there was no pandemic in 2016,
and that in 2020 the pandemic affected voting in at least two ways. 1)
Trump fumbled the response, and 2) People would have a stronger
preference for not voting in person. And the people who were being
realistic about the pandemic (the Democrats) were more likely that the
Republicans to vote by mail.
Bottom line - if we could assume that each election should be like the previous one, there's no point in having elections.
So, now that Scotus has tossed the lawsuit, will Trump give up? I don't think so.
So
far, Trump has made a quarter billion dollars out of donations by Trump
fans to fight the election results. That's a good bundle of cash, so
why would he stop now?
The scam will continue, I think. Trump
supporters will continue to self-fleece, especially if Trump continues
to hold out the hope of reversing the election results.
But then
it gets worse. There is talk in Texas of seceding from the USA, an idea
that worked really badly in 1863. And even if there is no civil war, if
half the US states (the Republican states) split off from the Democrat
states, then the division of America becomes set in stone, to the
delight of Americas enemies everywhere. When Russia set out to help
Trump win in 2016, they couldn't have imagined such a huge result.