Don't be ridiculous. Of course you didn't
The more Donald Trump keeps nattering on about the rigged elections -- and you know who is doing it, wink-wink -- even Republicans are getting tired of it, because in a whole bunch of swing states, it's actually Republicans who are in charge of running elections and tallying votes, and they for some reason don't like Trump accusing them of being in the tank for Hillary Clinton. As usual, Trump doesn't even seem to be on speaking terms with his vice presidential candidate: Sunday, on NBC's "Meet the Press," Mike Pence reassuringly insisted that he and Trump "will absolutely accept the result of the election.” Then a little while later, Trump himself sent out a tweet suggesting his veep nominee is either a dupe of the crooked media or perhaps a secret Hillary supporter himself:
He was at it again Monday morning, too:
As the Boston Globe reported Saturday, some Trump supporters are definitely looking forward to protecting the integrity of the vote, by which they mean making sure only the right-looking people vote. Steve Webb, an Ohio carpenter, is looking forward to making sure of it:
I’ll look for . . . well, it’s called racial profiling. Mexicans. Syrians. People who can’t speak American,” he said. “I’m going to go right up behind them. I’ll do everything legally. I want to see if they are accountable. I’m not going to do anything illegal. I’m going to make them a little bit nervous.”
Yeah, the "going up right behind them" part is already illegal, dickhead. Incidentally, right in this goober's home state, the secretary of state of Ohio is a Republican, Jon A. Husted, who doesn't see all the dirty dirty fraud Trump voters are so certain of. Then again, he's part of the establishment, now isn't he?
“We have made it easy to vote and hard to cheat,” Mr. Husted said Sunday in an interview. “We are going to run a good, clean election in Ohio, like we always do.”
Yes, that would be the same John Husted who refused to follow a court order telling him to restore early voting, because, he argued, expanded voting hours that let certain people vote early would be terribly "confusing."
Husted also said it's “wrong and engaging in irresponsible rhetoric” to suggest the vote will be anything but fair, which pretty much gives up his game: he's clearly in the tank for Hillary.
The New York Times also notes,
American elections are, unlike those in many democracies, largely decentralized, rendering the possibility of large-scale fraud extraordinarily unlikely. Further, the balloting in many of the hardest-fought states will be overseen by Republican officials, individuals who would be highly unlikely to consent to helping Mrs. Clinton rig the vote.
Chris Ashby, a Republican election lawyer, said Mr. Trump’s attacks on the electoral process were unprecedented and risked creating a fiasco on Election Day. Mr. Ashby also said that Mr. Trump was “destabilizing” the election by encouraging his supporters to deputize themselves as amateur poll monitors, outside the bounds of the law.
“That’s going to create a disturbance and, played out in polling places across the country, it has the potential to destabilize the election,” Mr. Ashby said, “which is very, very dangerous.”
But isn't that exactly what you'd expect from the crooked New York Times? It sounds like the Times and the Republicans plan to gang up on Trump supporters to keep them from exercising their God-given right to intimidate the wrong people -- and as Trump constantly reminds us, EVERYONE knows who they are -- from rigging the election, which is the only way Trump can lose. Besides, independent observers of the political scene who happen to work as Trump surrogates are pretty sure voting fraud really is rampant:
Newt Gingrich, a former speaker of the House, and Rudolph W. Giuliani, a former mayor of New York, both advisers to Mr. Trump, used TV interviews on Sunday to suggest that Democrats tended to cheat in elections, accusing them of counting votes from dead people.
And Senator Jeff Sessions of Alabama, Mr. Trump’s closest congressional supporter and a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, has warned that “they are attempting to rig this election.”
You know, Them. You want more proof that the election is rigged? Speaker of the House Paul Ryan issued a statement through a spokeswoman saying, "Our democracy relies on confidence in election results, and the speaker is fully confident the states will carry out this election with integrity," which can only be read as a tacit denial of all the proof Donald Trump has offered of voter fraud, which is that you just plain know it's happening all the time. By Those People, who are working as the hired muscle for Those Other People.
Fortunately, Trump campaign manager Kellyanne Conway was briefly released from her underground pen in Trump Tower Monday so she could go on TV -- right about when Trump was tweeting about how everyone knows about "widespread voter fraud" -- and explain that Trump wasn't talking about voter fraud at all; he only meant biased media coverage:
“Anybody who reads the newspaper online or in print or has a remote control probably has recognized that in many ways, the fix is in for Mrs. Clinton when it comes to the mainstream media,” Conway told CNN’s Jason Carroll outside Trump Tower.
After stating that the country has been done a disservice by the media in regards to getting a chance to hear the issues when it comes to Trump, Carroll pressed her on Trump’s own rhetoric about widespread voter fraud. Conway demurred when discussing that, saying the campaign would only look into actual cases when they occurred, but wasn’t claiming it was an actual issue.
Like, apart from what the candidate says in every speech and several times a day on Twitter. And so the Trump Train rattles onward, with virtually no evidence that anyone in the campaign is actually talking to anyone else. Besides, isn't this all just a distraction from Benghazi?
[ NYT / Boston Globe / Mediaite via Joe.My.God ]
Came in yesterday. USPS is a mess in my neighborhood. Regular carrier retired, and they're playing catch-up, I think. Pretty sure that after two days of no delivery, I got two deliveries yesterday, the second being after 7PM. Anyway, the ballot is in hand, time to go through the 272-page voter guide.
That's good. I was just about to come post to you that my friend, who still didn't get hers, actually called and they said they're still actually mailing them out. Those propositions! We need a separate California Wonkette thread to figure them all out.