Election Month?
By Hank Silverberg
On November 3rd at about 8 p.m. on the east coast, millions of Americans will sit down in front of a TV or scan the internet looking for the election results.
They will start coming in significant numbers around 9 p.m., and news networks will start predicting which candidate has won which state. It's happened that way since the late 1950's when TV came of age. With a few exceptions, Americans have gone to bed on election night knowing who has won the presidency.
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| (Courtesy Library of Congress) |
In 1948, the Chicago Tribune jumped the gun to meet a printing deadline and declared Republican Thomas Dewey the winner before a significant number of votes came in from the west. That produced one of the most notorious journalism errors in history. But by the next morning, the actual returns gave victory to Harry Truman.
In 2000, a close election between George W. Bush and Al Gore combined with trouble counting ballots in Florida held up a clear decision until December. Debate over hanging chads on paper ballots went all the way to the Supreme Court before Bush was declared the winner.
THIS YEAR COULD BE MUCH WORSE.
Here is a very likely scenario which has given me and many other politicos and journalists nightmares.
The options on how people vote have expanded greatly, partially because of the Coronavirus pandemic and partly to increase participation in the political process.
Millions of Americans will vote in person early before election day, millions will vote the traditional way on November 3rd, and millions more will use "absentee" or "mail-in" ballots.
By law, NONE of those votes can actually be counted until the polls close in the jurisdictions where the vote was cast.
In-person votes, those done on election day or before at early polling stations, will get counted as fast as possible the night of November 3rd. But it could be days or even weeks before the millions of mail-in votes are counted, whether they arrived at the Board of Elections in September or at the last minute on November 3rd. They have always been counted this way, but in smaller numbers, and unless the race was exceptionally close, they usually made no difference in the election outcome.
So, by midnight in the east on November 3rd, the networks will be using their fancy 3-D, holographic maps to show you who is ahead in each state, but it won't really give us an indication who won. All those mail-in ballots, most likely tens of millions of them, will not have been counted. That feeds right into the myth that Donald J. Trump is pushing as he campaigns--that some how the mail-in votes will be fraudulent and take away his victory. And indeed, some polling out now may make it seem that way to a lot of people on election night.
A few months ago, polls indicated 73% of the public was confident that mail-in voting was safe and their votes would be counted fairly. But the President's on-going attacks have eroded that confidence, particularly among his base--Republicans totally loyal to Trump.
A recent poll by NBC News found 73% of Republicans now believing mail-in votes will not be counted accurately. That makes it more likely that those voters will go to the polls in person on
Then, as the mail-in votes are counted over the next few days or weeks, the tide could turn to Biden since more Democrats had voted by mail. The result, Trump's likely accusations of a rigged election, will gain traction.
States control voting rules and counting. But it's likely court challenges will follow, making the Bush- Gore case of 2000 look like child's play.
We could be sitting down to Thanksgiving or maybe celebrating New Year's Eve without knowing who the next president will be.
Let's hope this scenario is just a good plot for my next novel rather than reality.
And then there is this:
You may have heard that President Trump and some members of his administration have been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize for 2021 for their role in brokering a normalization of relations between the U.A.E. and Israel, and a subsequent deal between Israel and Bahrain. The deals will be signed this week at the White House. The U.S. played a broker role in those agreements, but the credit really belongs to the United Arab Emirates, Israel and Bahrain.
https://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2020/09/09/world/europe/ap-eu-norway-trump-nobel.html
A far right-wing, anti-immigrant Norwegian lawmaker released a letter to the Nobel Committee in which he says he was nominating Trump along with the others for the prestigious prize because of those deals.
Here's the angle you won't hear from Trump or his people: A letter like the one sent by the Norwegian legislator doesn't mean Trump necessarily is being considered for the Nobel Peace Prize. It's just one person's request. It happened last year too and never went anywhere. The Nobel Committee never discusses "nominees." It only announces a winner when it has been decided. So the word "nominated" is really false. There could be hundreds of letters suggesting people to be considered for the Peace Prize. Those actually considered for the prize are never divulged. So this so-called "nomination" may not go anywhere past the Norwegian's letter.
As for the agreements: They ARE good news. But they are not "peace deals," as the Trump administration describes them. U.A.E. and Bahrain, long-time U.S. allies in the Mid-East, have NEVER been at war with Israel. The formal agreements are just making a long-standing unofficial relationship between Israel and the two Persian Gulf countries, formal.
https://apnews.com/c0c15a16cc09d1f8d23f1492bc0f114d
The agreements officially eliminate a ban on business deals between those two Arab countries and Israel. U.A.E. and Bahrain consider
Like many other Trump business deals, it has the potential to go south quickly. All it would take is one new spark in the highly flammable kindling box of Middle East politics.
Here's a story you may have missed:
I found a story on-line that should send shivers down your spine, especially six months into the worldwide pandemic.
Scientists are warning world leaders that deforestation and loss of biodiversity could increase the number of deadly pandemics for humans.
A United Nations summit will be held on this issue next month in New York. The report to the U. N. says almost a third of all emerging diseases have their origin in remote regions devastated by deforestation, mining and the exploitation of wild animals. A spill- over in diseases from animals to humans is becoming more common.
The report predicts that as many as five or six new epidemics a year could soon affect Earth's human population.
Among the sources of such pandemics, illegal logging and mines associated with the trade of so-called "bushmeat" and exotic pets.
Tens of millions of hectares of rainforest and other wild environments are being bulldozed and used for cattle or mining. All
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| (Aztec drawing of measles outbreak) |
You may remember, it was the use of chimpanzees as "bushmeat" in West Africa the late part of the 20th century that first spread the HIV virus, which has since killed more than 10 million people.
In the past, outbreaks of such diseases remained isolated to the local population, but the increase in global travel has helped such viruses spread worldwide.
When I read this story, I was immediately reminded of the massive eradication of the Indigenous people of North and South America in the 16th and 17th centuries. As many as 30 million died after they were exposed to diseases like smallpox, measles, cholera, and bubonic plague brought over by European explorers.
Of Note:
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| (I took this picture of the statue six years ago. It's now gone) |
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/charlottesville-removes-confederate-statue-at-ready/
This particular statue had been there for 111 years. But the debate is far from over. The Charlottesville City Council has voted to remove nearby statues of Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson as well, but that decision is still being challenged in court.
(Your comments and suggestions are welcome)
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