https://www.newsmax.com/siddinerstein/election-challenge/2020/11/20/id/998038/It's 'Halftime' in the Election Challenge Game
illustration of the word vote as a sign with a person stealing the letter o
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By Sid Dinerstein
Friday, 20 November 2020 12:38 PM
"It's not the people who vote that count. Those who count the vote decide everything." That quote, attributed to Josef Stalin, may or may not be accurate. But it sure is being tested in the United States today. My own personal related quote is: "People who love their country would rather lose than cheat. People who hate their country would rather cheat than lose."
Again, America is staring at the unenviable abyss where chunks of the electorate think that the recent presidential election has significant elements of fraud.
Today we are at Halftime; exactly halfway between November 3rd's Election Day and December 14th's Elector Day. That's right. On December 14th 50 states are expected to submit certified election counts, and the electors will submit their votes. We will truly have a president-elect.
Between Election Day and Elector Day we will continue to have recounts, lawsuits, appeals and, who knows, many earth-shattering surprises. So where are we now and what can we expect in the next three weeks? Right now there are recounts in Georgia and selected counties. There are lawsuits requesting recounts in other states and counties; most notably Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Wayne County (Detroit).
I will try to explain some of the key issues that are generating these lawsuits and recounts. Let's start with the voting machines themselves. There are unprecedented allegations from the Trump team that voting machines were intentionally programmed to allow falsified votes. An accusation of this magnitude cannot be made lightly. And any court that will entertain these allegations will demand an extremely high level of incontrovertible evidence. As well they should.
If even a smidgen of these accusations is true, our country will be shaken to its constitutional foundations. I am not arguing either side. I am saying that if this issue winds up in a courtroom our country will be taking Court TV to an unthinkable level. I would also add that while the state courts tend to have a plurality of Democrat-appointed judges, the federal courts are quite different. As I detailed in a prior Newsmax article, "Mighty Mitch" McConnell has added more than 200 conservative judges to the federal appeals courts. Add to that the six right-of-center Supreme Court justices and you begin to see the possibilities for extraordinary decisions in the near future.
The second major issue involves the practice of ballot harvesting. What is that, you ask. Ballot harvesting is the process of collecting mail-in ballots. Those ballots are then submitted with votes for a particular candidate, often cast by someone other than the original ballot recipient. Is it legal? Yes, in some states. No, in others. Is it ethical? Not at all. It involves someone lacking the interest in casting a vote to allow that vote to be cast by someone with their own interest, often someone paid to "harvest" those ballots. Got it?
And then you will also notice that lawsuits demand that those ballots have their signatures compared to the original recipient's signature. This is a major legal battle. After all, nonmatching signatures are prima facia proof of fraud.
A close relative of ballot harvesting is bullet voting. Bullet voting is the act of only voting for one race on the entire ballot; in this case, Joe Biden. So, for example, if Joe Biden got 100,000 bullet votes in Georgia (true) and President Trump got fewer than 1,000 bullet votes in Georgia (also true), you might conclude that Joe Biden got 100,000 "assembly line" votes by third parties marking harvested ballots in a hurry. True? The judges will decide. (Joe Biden got a total of 400,000 bullet votes in the combined battleground states).
Last subject for today: Since I referred to this period as Halftime, the assumption is that December 14th is Game Over. A question arises. Is there the possibility of "Overtime?" Believe it or not, the answer is yes. Overtime exists if neither candidate gets 270 Electoral votes. How can that happen? There are basically two ways. The first, and most common, is to have more than two major candidates. That is not the case in this election.
The other way is to have electoral votes not submitted, or not certified, thereby preventing either candidate from securing 270 electoral votes. I don't know if that ever happened before, but it is basically what the Trump team is looking for now. And what does Overtime look like? It looks like a vote in the House of Representatives. Don't panic! It's not a vote of all the representatives, with its current Democrat majority. No, it's a vote of the state delegations in the House of Representatives, of which the Republicans have at least 26 out of fifty. In other words, if it's overtime, Trump wins.
I could go on for a long time, but I won't. My next article will be post-Elector Day. We'll all know much more by then. As for now, I hope I shed more light than heat on the current process. We have a nation at stake.
Sid Dinerstein is a former chairman of the Palm Beach County Republican Party. He founded JBS Associates, a 600-person financial service company, and currently combines politics and business with Niger Innis in Inclusive Elections LLC, a firm that brings urban electorate voters to the GOP. He is the author of "Adults Only: For Those Who Love Their Country More Than Their Party." Read Sid Dinerstein's Reports — More Here.
