[Lanny_McDonald]

Originally Posted by Azure

I've kinda been sitting back and watching the situation unfold. I firmly believe that every candidate of every election whether Presidential or at a local level has the legal right to contest the election from a legal perspective if they have evidence of any issues, or if they feel like the count is close enough to warrant either a recount or a closer look. This is an extremely important part of the process and needs to be protected.

There must be evidence. Trump and his cadre of lawyers have not been able to produce any evidence whatsoever, so never should have been able to launch suit. All they have done is undermine the public confidence in the electoral system, which was ultimately the goal of Donald Trump. He doesn't care about institutions of government or maintenance of the public trust. Trump only cares about Trump and his personal interests. There is no defense for what Trump is doing. Undermining our democratic systems should never be acceptable and only who participates in such action is a criminal.

I also believe that every election has a certain amount of fraudulent ballots. Why wouldn't it? There are idiots out there looking to take advantage of every situation.

Because there are systems in place to prevent such fraud. It is why there is voter registration, signature verification, and voter role validation. The idea that a lot of people vote multiple times is a fallacy. The idea that there is wide spread fraud is the delusion of damaged minds. There have been attempts and they have been caught. What was dangerous about this election was you had the president of the country encouraging people to commit voter fraud, which was designed to overwhelm workers who have to verify ballots and slow the counting process - mission accomplished. This fraud was designed to bring the election process into question. As like every other attempt, this was sniffed out and was caught.

I think over the years the existent of said ballots has been properly dealt with, and more or less resolved from a legal perspective. Elections have been happening for many years, and regardless of what comes up, things have always taken proper course over time. That could be a few days, or maybe months. It is actually remarkable that blatant fraud has never really influenced the election to the point where one candidate was given hundreds of thousands of votes in a fraudulent manner thereby declaring him a winner.

There are safeguards in the system. Every time a new scheme is devised a new counter measure is put in place. The election system is well safeguarded to prevent fraud from the ballot perspective. The one area that is sketchy is counting, and usually only once the human element is introduced into the mix. As soon as lawyers get involved the subjectivity and bias of the human being is injected into the mix and that is when things get scary and we have the potential for a Bush/Gore debacle.

I think what Trump is doing is more than concerning. Writing upper case tweets talking about massive blatant fraud without evidence is completely insane.

I'm glad we can agree on that. Trump is mentally deficient and what he is doing is intentionally undermining the democratic process that we must trust to select our government. This is yet another in a long list of his criminal behavior that too many people turn a blind eye toward.

Every time the legal process of a contested election has run its course, only minor discrepancies were found. There has never been that level of fraud, nor do I think anyone could manage to pull it off. The thing about tightly contested states where the supposed fraud is happening is that people from both parties are heavily involved, so hiding what amounts to insane level of fraudulent behavior would take some crazy high level planning and execution. From what I understand the Dominion voting machines are 'offline' and can't communicate from one to the next, much less from state to state. So even if someone managed to get access to them, stick a USB stick in, rewrite the code they would only be changing a few thousand votes. I'd also imagine that those machines get audited quite often, and we really have never heard of any issues.

This depends on the system. Some voting machines are networked. It's how they get updated and how they report data. They run on a small isolated local network and not a member of or connected to a larger network where they are part of the larger voting system. They are networked, and subject to cyber attack, but safeguards are in place to prevent this access. The weakness of the system is they have weak security mechanisms in place if you have physical access to a system. The good thing is that as soon as a malfunction is noted the machine is identified, taken out of use, and fully audited. Lots of safeguards in place, but these systems are still vulnerable. Just like any computing system, there is not such thing as a secure system.

I think the whole Russiagate bull#### didn't help, and everyone who was involved in pushing that blatant lie for the last 4 years can thank themselves for playing a part in what we have now. You can't contest election results by pumping a load of BS, and then turn around and not expect the other side to do exactly the same thing. If you still think it wasn't a load of BS, I highly suggest looking up what Matt Taibbi has said about it. I'm not going to bother arguing about it. I believe Taibbi has done his research and after the last 4 years he is one of the few I actually trust on this subject.

Except it wasn't bull####. The entire intelligence community was in agreement and showed evidence that Russia ran a psyops program to affect the outcome of the 2016 election, and it was done so in favor of one candidate. Mueller referenced this in his report. The problem for Mueller was he was not able to or willing to connect the dots and make a clear determination of collusion. He fell back to the "too incompetent to commit collusion" argument, but did clearly state there was Russian involvement in swaying the result.

At the end of the day I think the results of the election and the highest vote total ever by any candidate in the history of the US is a bit of a guise considering the Democrats lost quite a few seats in the House, and there is a very good chance the Republicans get a majority in 2 years. I also find it interesting that there is a strong push from within the Democrat ranks by getting rid of Pelosi as Speaker, as if to suggest that Pelosi is a reason the Democrats lost a lot of votes in the House. Not sure I agree with that. I think AOC is the reason the Democrats lost a lot of votes in the House.

Pelosi is a problem. She's too old and is too entrenched in the system. Bust so is Schumer and so is McConnell. The list of people in congress that are too old or too stupid for office is very long and proud. Sadly, AOC isn't one of them. She's young and she is damn smart. She harbors some views that scare the crap out of the corporations that own all the old guard, so she is painted as an enemy of the people. This is how Washington works. AOC will be washed out of the system quick enough, and we'll have more moronic ideologues like Matt Gaetz and Marjorie Taylor Greene left in office; people with no idea how to govern and will only contribute to the gridlock which exists. This is exactly what the corporations and the tp 1% want, and why the sheeple are willing to continually vote against their best interests.

At the end of the day I think Trump is corrupt and evil, but I also think he understood better than any other candidate what social media can do to the narrative. Which brings out the question about future candidates? Given the power of social media and how quickly something can be said and then retweeted 100k times until everyone thinks it is true, is the current political climate the reality we will continue to have?

Because I think it is.

Trumpism is here to stay. Just because Trump loses does not mean that Trumpism is dead. Just the opposite. He work the beast and it fornicated to its heart's content over the past four years, and now we have a massive problem on our hands. The fringe element is not accepted as part of the system and now we have to deal with the extremes in our governance process. This is a step backward and we just lost about 80 to 100 years of progress. The issues we thought were dead and buried will now have to be re-argued and new court cases brought forward and decided by an imbalanced and politically motivated court. Our system of governance was attacked and deeply wounded by Trump and Trumpism. This will be an on-going battle to try and get back to the place we were when Obama left office. This will take years to correct.

At the end of the day I agree with Mark Cuban, who I hope runs for President as an independent.

I hope to God Mark Cuban stays where he is. Government is massively different from business and vice versa. You cannot enter government with a business mindset, because business does not have the same transparency requirements that government does. Business does not have to operate within the constraints of the constitution. Mark Cuban is a smart business guy, but he is a maverick (just like his basketball team), and he bucks the rules. We just suffered through a "business guy who bucks the rules" and he brought the country to its knees. We don't need another one.