Trump’s Endgame is Already Underway:
Media reports over the weekend highlighted the collapse of the Postal Service in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. While that might seem like a local story to you, it is not. Rather, it indicates the true scope of this President’s mendacity and commitment to maintaining power at all costs in November, and we must see it for the threat he truly has become.
Currently — due to budget cuts, resource-allocation choices, and intentional administrative sabotage. including a refusal to approve overtime, and new orders to leave mail unsorted or uncollected at distribution sites at the end of a shift — it is currently taking three weeks for letters and parcels to be delivered across the city. Some mail, of course, is simply being lost in the storm that has followed, and expectations are that the building backlog will further slow mail service in the city down to five weeks by the fall.
This is intentional, and it is happening at the direction of Louis DeJoy, the new Postmaster General — appointed on June 15, 2020. He is a Republican fundraiser and apparatchik, loyal to Trump. He is pictured at the top of the page. Get to know his face. He’s about to become a central player in the summer of 2020.
This second picture is more important:
It is from the Pennsylvania state website for voting rules, and it indicates that Absentee-Ballot Applications and Mail-In-Vote Applications must be RECEIVED by October 27, 2020, and further that completed ballots must be received by November 3.
Postmarks by those date are not enough.
The third and fourth pictures are what I found trying to figure out how one might request a mail-in ballot in Philadelphia. Pennsylvania. Note in picture three that the website for requesting a ballot is English-only. For Spanish, a paper application must be filled out. There is no indication for services provide to any other language.
In picture four, you see where you land when you click through to try and access an Absentee-Ballot application process in English. It doesn’t work, and it reroutes the applicant to a phone number or . . . the mail. So, apparently, even for English-speakers, there’s no easy way to email your Absentee-Ballot-Request form or your Mail-In-Ballot request form to the Philadelphia County Board of Elections.
Consider what that means in terms of timing.
In order to make sure your mail-in-ballot is received by the Philadelphia Board of Elections via mail by November 3, you need to allow for FOUR separate three-to-five week steps:
1. Three to five weeks for the Absentee-Ballot-Request / Vote-by-Mail form to travel from the Board of Elections to your home — after you call and request it.
2. Three to five weeks for the completed Absentee-Ballot-Request / Vote-by-Mail form to travel from your home to the Board of Elections for processing.
There will — of course — be processing time. Call it a week, though that is likely very hopeful.
3. Three to five weeks for your Official Absentee-Ballot or Vote-by-Mail Ballot to travel from the Board of Elections to your home after they have processed your request.
4. Then finally, three to five weeks for your Completed Absentee Ballot or Vote-by-Mail Ballot to be returned to the Board of Elections by November 3, 2020.
That is a total of between 13 and 21 weeks.
As of tomorrow — August 4, 2020 — we are 13 weeks from Election Day.
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Also recall this exchange from recent Congressional testimony by Attorney General Bill Barr. The questions are being posed by Arizona Democrat Greg Stanton.
REP STANTON: “Mr. Barr, the President has suggested that only votes counted on Election Day should be what matters. Meaning that if a voter cast a legal ballot on, or before, Election Day, that if that ballot is not counted on Election Day, it shouldn’t count at all. So I want to ask you again about your commitment to ensuring that every vote is counted: If, in this upcoming November election, the President asks you to intervene, and try to stop States from counting legal ballots after Election Day, will you do the right thing and refuse? Yes or no?
AG BARR: I will follow the law.
REP STANTON: You won’t say no?
AG BARR: I’ll follow the law.
REP STANTON: It’s very disappointing.
AG BARR: Well, well, if a State, if a State has a law that says it has to be counted on Election Day, that’s the law.
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Understand the play here — and understand this is happening around the country in varying forms and schemes. President Trump and his team fear a high-voter-turnout election, particularly in large urban areas in swing-states. The goal, therefore, is to tip those states from going Blue by hamstringing the cities, thereby capturing the state’s Electoral College Votes. In Pennsylvania, that’s 20 votes — equal to Ohio in importance. It is behind California (55), Texas (38), New York / Florida (both 29). Of those top four states, two are strongly Democrat and one is strongly Republican. Florida, Pennsylvania, and Ohio are all toss-ups, and each is facing its own sort of of chicanery to suppress Democratic votes.
If Trump is successful, he will win.
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Trump well understands that a loss in November not only removes him from power, but it exposes him to severe legal sanction in New York, where Manhattan District Attorney Cy Vance, Jr. just today filed court papers suggesting bank and insurance fraud. The bank-fraud charge alone carries a potential sentence of thirty years. See picture five.
To hold power at any cost, Trump has assembled a team that will serve his interests above the interests of the people. He has a newly appointed Postmaster General hamstringing the election by intentionally collapsing the postal service. He has an Attorney General who understands the politics and has indicated a willingness to use the law to destroy liberty. He has an entire wing of the national media fanning the flames of conspiracy theories around the dangers of mail-in voting, so even if he loses in this rigged game, he can try to hold onto power by dismissing the results of the vote.
Then, of course, there are are his ride-or-die co-conspirators in Congress and his international co-conspirator Vladimir Putin, who has already attacked voting system in all fifty states.
The very sobering reality — which can be seen in its entirely through the lens of a hiccough in the mail system of one Mid-Atlantic, East Coast city — is that we are already in the middle of an auto-coup d’é·tat.
The current President is already neck deep in plans to spoil the upcoming national election in his favor. Despite media obsession on his mental state, his Tweets, his buffoonery, he has recognized that the polls are real and that he is far, far behind.
So, like a the ruthless autocrat he is at his very core, Trump has decided that if he can’t change our minds, he must silence our voices — and he has all the help he needs to do so. We might not have been ready for it to come this early, but we are already at the end game.
Yes, we should still fight for the legal right to vote-by-mail, but this election is going to require an absolutely flood of people — pandemic, be damned — to the polls on November 3. And even then, who knows?
More and more, it becomes clear to me that all of this ends with tanks in front of the White House. The only question in my mind now, is which way their barrels will be pointing.
Onward.
