"Texas’ top court denies a G.O.P. push to throw out over 120,000 votes; a federal case is pending.
A drive-through voting site in Houston, which is offering them for the first time this year.Credit…Go Nakamura for The New York Times
The Texas Supreme Court denied an effort by Republicans to throw out more than 120,000 votes that had already been cast at drive-through locations in Harris County, leaving Republicans’ only remaining option at the federal level.
The ruling from the court came without comment.
The effort to get rid of the votes from largely Democratic Harris County now hinges on a nearly identical effort at the federal level, where a judge has called an election-eve hearing for Monday.
The lawsuit contends that the 10 drive-through voting sites in Houston, the nation’s fourth-largest city, are operating illegally and are arranged in locations that favor Democrats.
The system was put in place for the first time this year by Chris Hollins, the Harris County clerk, with unanimous approval by county commissioners, after being tested in a pilot program over the summer.
More than 127,000 voters have cast ballots at the sites and the number could grow to more than 135,000 through Election Day on Tuesday, said Susan Hays, a lawyer for Harris County. She said county officials planned to vigorously challenge the suit, which she described as an act of “voter suppression.”
“It’s nuts,” she said. “Votes should count.”
Democrats were hopeful on Sunday that the decision from the Texas Supreme Court, which leans conservative, would bode well for their battle at the federal level.
The case will be heard Monday morning by Judge Andrew S. Hanen of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Texas who was appointed by President George W. Bush.
In a motion on Friday asking to intervene in the case, Democrats said it threatened to “throw Texas’ election into chaos by invalidating the votes of more than 100,000 eligible Texas voters who cast their ballots” at the drive-through sites. The motion was filed by the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and the campaign of M.J. Hegar, who is running for the U.S. Senate."
"2020 ELECTION
Trump lashes out after FBI announces investigation of Biden bus incident
“In my opinion, these patriots did nothing wrong,” he said in a tweet about supporters who surrounded a Biden campaign bus in Texas.
Nov. 1, 2020, 9:45 PM EST
President Donald Trump lashed out at the FBI on Sunday after it said it was investigating reports that a caravan of his supporters harassed a bus belonging to Joe Biden’s campaign.
“In my opinion, these patriots did nothing wrong,” Trump said in a tweet. “Instead, the FBI & Justice should be investigating the terrorists, anarchists, and agitators of ANTIFA, who run around burning down our Democrat run cities and hurting our people!”
The president also referred to the incident during rallies earlier Sunday. Video of the incident, which occurred Friday, showed Trump supporters surrounding the Biden campaign bus with their vehicles in Texas. The video showed two cars colliding, and the Biden campaign said the pro-Trump trucks tried to run the bus off the road as it traveled from San Antonio to Austin.
“You see the way our people, they — you know they were protecting his bus yesterday,” Trump said while addressing supporters in Michigan. “Because they’re nice. So his bus — they had hundreds of cars, Trump, Trump, Trump and the American flag. You see Trump and the American flag. Do you ever notice when you see the other side — I don’t even see much of the other side.”
Biden responded later Sunday afternoon during an event in Pennsylvania, noting that the president had also tweeted praise for the supporters involved.
“Folks, that’s not who we are,” Biden said. “We are so much better than this. We’re so much better than this. It’s not who we are.”
Caravans and car parades — made popular by pandemic social distancing requirements — have become a regular feature of the campaign trail, one particularly embraced by Trump supporters, but in recent weeks they’ve run up against early voting and other campaign activities, prompting voters to call the police."
© 2020 NBC UNIVERSAL
From politico 11/02/2020 @ 23:00
"President Donald Trump railed against the Supreme Court on Monday for its decision to allow an extended count of Pennsylvania mail-in ballots postmarked by Election Day, tweeting that doing so would lead to violent unrest in the country.
“The Supreme Court decision on voting in Pennsylvania is a VERY dangerous one,” Trump tweeted on Monday evening, only hours before Election Day. “It will allow rampant and unchecked cheating and will undermine our entire systems of laws. It will also induce violence in the streets. Something must be done!”
what if?
"
POLITICO
2020 ELECTIONS
Republicans publicly silent, privately disgusted by Trump’s election threats
After five years of perfecting the art of explaining how they “didn’t see the tweet," the response from establishment Republicans is shocking but not surprising
11/03/2020 04:30 AM EST
At rallies across the Midwest and Sun Belt swing states, President Donald Trump has been openly discussing murky schemes to prevent legitimate ballots from being counted, escalating threats to disenfranchise millions of American as the weeks-long voting season ends tonight and his pathway to reelection becomes increasingly narrow.
“The Election should end on Nov. 3, not weeks later!” the president said on Friday. He repeated the claim at an event in Dubuque, Iowa on Sunday, adding falsely, “That’s the way it’s been, and that’s the way it should be.”
Democrats have been clear in their condemnations of the president’s comments, which they consider the most worrisome of Trump’s four years in office, which were often marked by anti-democratic rhetoric.
“When Donald Trump says, ‘I think I deserve a third term, or I think the election should end on election night, that’s the way it’s always been,’ I don’t think he’s joking. I think we should take him deadly seriously,” said Democratic senator and top Joe Biden surrogate Chris Coons. He compared Trump’s statements to aspiring autocrats in young democracies that he dealt with when he was chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee’s Subcommittee on African Affairs. “We would rally the international community and say, ‘No, you should not do that. It’s not a good idea. That violates the norms of democracy.’”
But most Republicans, from critics to allies of Trump, have remained publicly silent. It’s not new for Trump’s party brethren to duck and cover when he says something troubling. But after five years of perfecting the art of explaining how they “didn’t see the tweet” — the much parodied talking point to which Republicans on Capitol Hill often resort — it is shocking but not surprising that they aren’t speaking up now, even when the integrity of America’s electoral system is under attack by their party’s leader.
Democratic Sen. Brian Schatz of Hawaii called Trump’s weeks-long campaign to discredit election results an “incompetent attempt at autocracy.”
“There are lots of reasons to believe that what Trump is talking about or contemplating cannot be accomplished,” said Schatz, who is outraged by the dearth of Republicans who have criticized the president’s false statement about when ballots are counted. “But if your plan includes congressional Republicans standing up to Trump, you need a new plan.”
Efforts to solicit on the record comment from a broad range of party leaders Monday were met with indifference.
Sen. Ben Sasse didn’t respond to a DM. Chris Christie didn’t return a text. A message to the spokesman for Sen. Josh Hawley, an up-and-comer in the party, went unanswered. Sen. Lindsey Graham didn’t return a call after POLITICO left a voicemail for him. (Graham’s outgoing message offered the option of sending a fax but a reporter did not avail himself of that method of communication.)
White House spokeswoman Alyssa Farah promised to call back but never did. Rudy Giuliani went silent, even though a reporter sweetened the deal by agreeing to hear him out on the Hunter Biden intrigue, a current Giuliani obsession. Karl Rove was kind enough to respond, but he was too busy to discuss the president’s comments sowing doubt and mistrust about the sanctity of the election process, because, he said, his “flight is getting ready to shut the door and pull away from the gate.”
Hogan Gidley, a spokesman for the Trump campaign, did respond. When asked about the president’s comments suggesting that votes shouldn’t be counted after Election Day, Gidley replied, “What’s the quote?” Told by a reporter, “Have you been following the news? There are dozens of them!” Gidley did not reply on the record.
As usual, Never Trump Republicans, who generally now back Biden, were willing to speak their minds.
“For months now the president has questioned the integrity of the election, and now at the 11th hour, he’s signaling prematurely that he’ll declare victory before the result is certain, setting the stage for further discord,” said Miles Taylor, the former chief of staff at the Department of Homeland Security who recently unmasked himself as Anonymous, the internal Trump critic who published a scathing op-ed in The New York Times. “I think it’s destructive to the democratic process. I think it could potentially lead to civil unrest and even violence in the country, and it’s wildly irresponsible for a president to do.”
‘Something must be done’: Trump lashes Supreme Court for ruling on Pennsylvania ballots
He is “disappointed” that his fellow Republicans are remaining quiet. “Right now Republican elected officials need to be saying that the president’s words are unacceptable and we need to patiently await the outcome of the vote,” Taylor said.
Michael Steele, the chairman of the Republican National Committee at the beginning of the Obama era, expressed similar concerns. “The president knows full well that not in the history of elections in this country have we ever certified the outcome of the election on election night because votes are allowed to continue to be processed after Election Day,” Steele said. “Election Day is just that, the day to vote. It is not the day that a winner is certified.”
Steele added that Trump “is fearful of the outcome because he has not made the case for his reelection to the American people so he’s trying to game the system against itself to his benefit. He’s poisoned people with this notion that the only way he loses is if the system is rigged. Well that’s just bullshit.”
Many Republicans insist they are disgusted by Trump’s threats, they just aren’t willing to say so publicly. Dozens of quietly anti-Trump members on Capitol Hill, or who left the Trump administration, usually in disgust, are willing to torch the president — but only under the cloak of anonymity.
“It’s despicable and un-American but not surprising,” said one senior Senate GOP aide. “They have never had any respect for the institutions of democracy that don’t benefit them. The beauty of federalism is that we leave it to the states to make their own rules and the idea that a president would overturn a state official’s decision to benefit them in an election is just kind of the antithesis of what Republicans used to believe in.”
He added, “It’s just one final F.U. to what Republicans used to believe in.”
Trump has been abetted not just by the silence of Republicans — his threats have been spread by top surrogates, including his sons, Eric and Don, and his daughter-in-law, Lara. She recently told voters in Scottsdale, Arizona, that mail-in balloting, which has been expanded in many places because of the coronavirus pandemic, and will likely create delays in ballot counting, was a Democratic plot to “rig the system.”
Other top campaign aides have joined the misinformation campaign. On Sunday, Jason Miller, a senior adviser, suggested that partial vote counts on Tuesday night should somehow determine the winner. “President Trump will be ahead on election night, probably getting 280 electoral [votes] — somewhere in that range, and then they’re going to try to steal it back after the election,” Miller said, suggesting that fully counting ballots is a Democratic plot.
This rhetoric has also seeped down into the Trump grassroots across the country. At recent Trump rallies in Pennsylvania, Nevada, and North Carolina, voters often took it as an article of faith that mail-in ballots tabulated after Tuesday were somehow fraudulent. Leaving a Trump rally Sunday night in Hickory, North Carolina, a group of supporters talked about how polls were rigged because they were commissioned by the media, and that vote-counting after Election Day would give Democrats a chance to pad their totals with thousands of fake votes.
As always with Trump, there is a debate among Republicans as to whether he should be taken seriously.
“I just can’t believe that he would say anything like that. It’s crazy,” said a former senior administration official. “I don’t know if it was an off the cuff remark that he often says that he hasn’t thought through or if it was a real strategic decision. … A lot of people ask me, ‘If he loses the election, will he try to stay in power?’ I don’t see any way that’s going to be possible. I think once an election is declared valid, he’s not going to have any option.”
Others insist that his rhetoric is not as troubling as it sounds. “There have been so many times where people have said, ‘Oh he said this, he’s going to strip away our freedoms!’ and it doesn’t happen that way,” said a former White House official. “It never happens that way, so this is just another one of those things.”
A current White House official also tried to downplay Trump’s steal-the-election rhetoric. “I don’t think it’s something that’s being seriously considered,” he insisted, perhaps not realizing how much work the word ‘seriously’ was doing in his statement.
Another White House official insisted it was typical Trumpian hyperbole. “POTUS will play by the rules,” he said. “He will play by the rules.”
But what if he doesn’t?
Schatz argued that there was no reason to believe Republican leaders would organize themselves to force Trump to stand down if he pushed things in a truly anti-democratic direction that went beyond legitimate legal challenges or election night hyperbole.
“In the ‘West Wing’ version of this it would be Kevin McCarthy, Mitch McConnell, and a couple of former presidents,” he said. “In reality there’s no one.”
When asked if there was a “West-Wing” like contingency plan for Republican leaders if Trump did something radical in the coming days, the senior Senate GOP aide was coy.
“I can’t really talk about that,” he said. “It’s not something I can really get into.”
But when pressed, he offered the following: “It’s all hypothetical, but if they do what Jason Miller was talking about you’ll see a lot of people” — he paused for a moment — “not agreeing.”
I shall continue to publish here, but take an about face focus, and still note, how the media measures up to policy,
As of yet Wednesday morning the presidential race is still undecided, although the Republicans succeeded to retain their Senate majority, and the Dems to their control of the House
"WASHINGTON — Counting continues in the 2020 presidential election on Wednesday after President Donald Trump won key battleground states like Florida, Ohio and others, while Joe Biden carried Minnesota and New Hampshire and leads in Arizona, NBC News projects.
No winner was called Tuesday night as Democrats failed to land the decisive early knockout blow they were hoping for and Republicans did not see the flood of new voters that the president had promised would show up on Election Day.
Still, Trump overperformed polls and expectations while a massive surge in mail-in ballots and rules restricting when officials could begin processing them delaying the vote counts, which will continue into in coming hours and days.
The race now appears to hinge on a familiar a set of places — Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania — the three historically Democratic states that put Trump in the White House four years ago when he narrowly won them.
But North Carolina, Georgia, Arizona and Nevada also remain too close to call, according to NBC News, and various combinations of any of them could determine the future of the country.
Trump had to win Florida to have any real shot at re-election, most analysts agree, while Biden has multiple paths to victory that do not include the state.
In the Electoral College, Biden has 224 votes while Trump has 213. It takes 270 to win the White House…
The Trump campaign is going to sue, in spite of Supreme Court precedent , in conjunction of Republican efforts to stop Pennsylvania mail in votes.
That is soooooo lame, even MC’ONELL has issues with it!
What precedent?
What is being done here has no precedent.
I managed to dig it up:
“WASHINGTON — In a pair of decisions welcomed by Democrats, the Supreme Court on Wednesday let election officials in two key battleground states, Pennsylvania and North Carolina, accept absentee ballots for several days after Election Day.”
This isn’t a question about absentee ballots.
This is a question about whether the system used to process tens of millions of votes was in any way reliable.
A couple hundred absentee ballots? Couple thousand? Hundred thousand? Couple million? Still not even close to a precedent for this.
The precedent is for an exception to regular voting procedures. Not an alternative.
Tens of millions of votes were trusted to…
The US postal service.
They don’t even like to handle money.
There are no “recount rules.” There are no established rules because there is no precedent. That is what I am trying to tell you. This was done, haphazardly, within a couple months, and radically overturned decades of actual precedent.
Dude! Mail in ballot states have been around for decades … it’s not a complicated process. You get a ballot sent to your address. You open the envelope, fill it out, put it into the enclosed prepaid envelope, sign your name on the back of it, and put it into the post office outgoing mail.
The people who receive the ballots check your signature against your name on the front of the letter, if it’s there and it matches, they open the envelope, take out the ballot inside that does not have your name on it, quickly check for write-in votes and then put the ballot through a scan-tron machine.
Trump is full of shit. This system has been perfected over decades.
You know, it’d be nice if you folks actually knew what you were talking about.
It’s not a corrupt system, it NEEDS to be implemented country wide because of Covid.
The ONLY problem with this system is whether the vote counting machines are being hacked by our own government.
Other than that, it’s a really good system.
I really meant procedure , then, an ad hoc procedure that the Supreme court delivered in response to the arisen issue. Untested, it has yet to become a precedent
It is a ruling which is becoming a possible precedent.
In reference to that, a woman got on the airwaves saying that she has found some non descript ballots , in some garbage or amother, and that proves Trump s assessment that some bogus ballots are the problem to the veracity of the whole system. That is concerting , because his off repeated tweets of how the thing can be rigged. But then, how does one know whether the woman was not some kind of paid operative?
In reference to that, a woman got on the airwaves saying that she has found some non descript ballots , in some garbage or amother, and that proves Trump s assessment that some bogus ballots are the problem to the veracity of the whole system. That is concerting , because his off repeated tweets of how the thing can be rigged. But then, how does one know whether the woman was not some kind of paid operative?
Sorry, duplicate
What if?
POLITICO
LIVE UPDATES: 2020 ELECTIONS
Mulvaney: ‘You can absolutely guarantee a peaceful transition of power’ if Trump loses
But Trump has previously refused to commit to upholding the core tenet of American democracy.
Mick Mulvaney, the former acting White House chief of staff, predicted Thursday that President Donald Trump would “absolutely” help facilitate a peaceful transition of power if Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden is ultimately declared the winner of the 2020 election.
“I recommend that he accept a peaceful transition of power, which I think he would do absolutely anyway,” Mulvaney said of Trump in an interview on CNBC.
“Look, the president is a fighter, there’s no question about it, and you’ll see him fighting down to the very last,” Mulvaney added, mentioning Trump’s threat in the hours after Election Day to challenge the race’s results in the Supreme Court.
But “at the end of that process, [if] Joe Biden’s the president, you can absolutely guarantee a peaceful transition of power,” Mulvaney said. “I just hope the same is true on the other side.”
Despite those remarks from Mulvaney — who served as the president’s top aide from January 2019 through March 2020 — Trump has previously refused to commit to a peaceful transition, citing his complaints about the expansion of mail-in voting amid the coronavirus pandemic.
Concerns about a potential handoff of presidential power have ramped up since Wednesday morning, when Trump prematurely declared that he had won the election, demanded that vote-counting be halted and described the early results as a “fraud on the American public.”
Trump is currently trailing Biden in the race to secure 270 electoral votes, by a margin of 264-214, and remaining contests in the key battlegrounds of Georgia, Nevada and Pennsylvania are too close to call.
Trump’s campaign has filed lawsuits to stop the counting of ballots in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Georgia, and it is contesting ballots in Nevada. The campaign also could appeal a decision to permit late-arriving absentee ballots in North Carolina that were mailed before the election deadline.
Additionally, the campaign has announced that it will request a recount in Wisconsin, and it could soon call for one in Michigan, as well.
© 2020 POLITICO LLC