Free Press Election Reporting

t can happen four ways.

But one thing is clear: No viable democracy can endure 14 full days ruled by a deranged madman who’s just instigated an armed fascist coup attempt.

Reports from long-time staff and close personal associates working within the White House indicate that Trump is dangerously “out of his mind” and “has lost it.”

Trump has access to nuclear codes that could end all human life on Earth.

As a fear-mongering fascist, he’s just incited the storming of the House and Senate, an armed assault aimed at the processing of the Electoral College votes for president.

At least one person was shot dead while invading the Congress. Three others died under varied circumstances. Countless more who rioted without masks were certainly infected with Trump’s virus, and will soon pour into hospitals that can’t handle them.

Trump could easily instigate further such coup attempts, especially by creating a fake “Reichstag Fire” disaster.

n his infamous one-hour shakedown of Georgia’s Secretary of State, wise-guy Donald Trump TWICE calls himself a “schmuck.” It’s a gross undershot.

You may be hearing clips of that conversation. But no American should miss the whole mobster rant that Trump has clearly aimed at us all.

Sounding like a Godfather hit man, Trump verbally derides himself for having supported Brian Kemp, the KKK-style governor who stripped the state’s voter rolls in 2018 to defeat Stacy Kemp. (Trump trashes her too.)

But Kemp won’t hand Trump Georgia’s electoral votes. Nor will Secretary of State Ken Raffensperger, himself a bigly vote purger.

Kemp and Raffensperger did all they could to prevent Georgians of youth and color from voting this fall. The huge lines marring the January 5 runoffs for US Senate have underscored their strategy of making it as hard as possible for “undesirables” to cast a ballot in Georgia.

But the Prez needs about 12,000 votes to steal the Peach State’s Electoral College delegation. He treats them all like cheap chips from the Don’s bankrupt casinos.

he whole world is watching Georgia’s US Senate runoff elections. Set to finish January 5th, the elections will decide who controls the balance of power in the pivotal next US Congress.

With them comes a “hidden” down-ballot Georgia Public Service Commission race that hovers over America’s last two big nuke reactors … and that could upend the whole Senatorial outcome.

Hundreds of millions of dollars are pouring into the state. Every nanosecond of radio/TV time has been bought and overpaid for.

The preliminary battles have raged over voter registration and turnout, precinct closures, misinformation about where people can vote, intimidation of citizens waiting in line during early voting, rejection of “flawed” ballots, and much more.

But they all pale before one issue: will there be a fair and accurate vote count?

The answer depends on whether grassroots citizen groups can muster the expertise, the staff, and the clout to make sure ballots are correctly marked, properly scanned, and accurately counted — and then rightly recounted.

It’s a decisive undertaking.

Following Donald Trump’s triumph in the 2016 election, Ohio writer Jef Benedetti asked a disturbing but not impossible question: What if the two major political parties were colluding to keep power at the top while keeping the rest of the country divided? What if the divisive Trump administration was intentionally manufactured?

Benedetti captures all of this in a political thriller called The Exercise. You might want to read the non-fiction book Disloyal by Michael Cohen at the same time.

The story is set in Philadelphia, with intrigue, sex, murder, and power struggles aplenty. Part of The Exercise outlines how the two major parties select highly emotional so-called “wedge issues” to control the voting masses.

When the book was released a few years back, Benedetti stated: “The press in general is the only reliable conduit of information about our government for the citizenry and others living in the U.S. Benedetti points out that it is no coincidence “a story like The Exercise therefore could have had only one hero: a reporter.”

Being a careful proofreader, I provided some volunteer assistance to Mayor Pete:

---------- Forwarded message ---------
From: Pete Buttigieg <info@wintheera.com>
Date: Wed, Dec 16, 2020
Subject: Thank you

If Donald Trump ever does leave the White House, we can in large part thank paper ballots.

Trump’s desperate assault on 2020’s popular vote has drawn justifiable contempt. But had this election predominantly been conducted on the computerized touchscreen machines that have dominated our electoral process since Florida in 2000, Trump could well be headed for a stolen second term.

Hand-marked and hand-counted paper ballots have long been at the core of the U.S.’s rising election protection movement. They were largely scorned after the disastrous 2000 campaign, when badly designed “butterfly ballots” and “hanging chads” undermined Florida’s election, giving George W. Bush an Electoral College victory despite losing the nationwide popular vote

High-profile hackers’ mockery of the machines has also helped to damage their credibility. For example, one professor hacked a “secure” touchscreen and got it to play the University of Michigan fight song.

Smedley Butler won’t be around next year to save us.

       The former Marine Corps general was offered a ton of money in 1933 to murder newly-elected president Franklin Roosevelt and stage a fascist coup.

Armed with the then-huge sum of $3 million, infamous billionaires funded a “Banker’s Plot” with 500,000 armed thugs set to erect a corporate dictatorship atop FDR’s grave.

Butler had led US troops throughout Latin America during the “Dollar Diplomacy” 1920s. He crushed grassroots uprisings and installed brutal dictators. America’s richest barons now wanted him to do the same thing here.

But they chose the wrong guy. In shocking Congressional hearings, Butler blew the whistle on (until then) US history’s best-funded attempted coup. “War,” he warned, “is a racket.”

The super-rich plotters hotly denied Butler’s account. None of them went to prison.

Butler won’t be around next year to expose the Trump coup attempt, already in progress. He won’t have to. It’s already visible for all to see.

But can we stop it?

See Trump flail.

He dreams the Supremes will hand him the presidency. (They could.)

Or that a closed session of Congress will flip him the Electoral College. (It could.)

Each would be a coup against American democracy. Because no matter how loud he screams ELECTION THEFT, Trump lost the 2020 popular vote by more than six million. Only two US incumbents — Hoover and Carter — have lost by more.

The reasons are threefold: paper ballots, Millennials, and what passes for “socialism” in this country.

Paper ballots accounted for as much as 90% of the 2020 totals.

If those votes had been cast on easily-hacked electronic voting machines, Trump could’ve won in a landslide.

The paper ballots came mostly by mail, because COVID made voting in person unsafe.

But the demand for hand-cast/hand-counted paper ballots has been at the core of the Election Protection movement since Florida 2000. Getting a paper ballot to all registered voters is now the gold standard for our democratic elections.

You did it! You flexed your electoral muscles and made history. Marijuana voters – all 13+ million of you, along with your legions of supporters – passed a full range of ballot issues and elected or reelected pro cannabis candidates. Let’s take a look:

Overall Vote. According to Bloomberg, as of 11/27/20, a record 156.7 million votes had been counted, with 4 million more to go. If these numbers hold, over 160 million voters or roughly 70% of the citizen voting population will have turned out for the 2020 election. Comparatively, that’s 38 million more than the 2018 midterms. At 82%, the highest voter turnout belongs to Colorado, undeniably a stoner state, and while only 53% of Ohioans cast ballots in 2018, 67% went to the polls in 2020.

Mostly quiet on the midwestern front.

The usual Republican lie was put forward in Akron. The Akron police warned the public about robocalls telling them the voting lines were too long today and they should wait to vote until Wednesday, according to a See Say 2020 post. The FBI is reportedly investigating the robocalls, according to USA Today.

Also, the perennial election official problem of simply not having the proper paper backup ballots happened when voting machines stopped working in Reynoldsburg, Ohio, someone posted on See Say 2020.

My wife and I found it a little more difficult than expected to vote on paper in Columbus’ 55 Ward precinct. First, paper wasn’t offered as an option, and when we asked for a paper ballot, their initial impulse was to give us a provisional ballot. One of the poll judges thought we were breaking the rules until another one interceded and explained that we were allowed to fill out a paper ballot and feed it into the digital scanner. Also, the pollworker writing down our names managed to spell both of them wrong.