“Well, thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you very much. Please sit. Thank you. This is without question the latest news conference I’ve ever had. Thank you. I appreciate it very much. And I want to thank the American people for their tremendous support, millions and millions of people voted for us tonight. And a very sad group of people is trying to disenfranchise that group of people and we won’t stand for it. We will not stand for it.”

It’s Wednesday morning. The election is still up for grabs as I write, creating a post-Election Day void of painful proportions. A blue wave didn’t wash over the newly constructed wall around the White House, flush out the least competent president in American history and present the planet with President Joe, the guy who would make it all better.

Stephen Wertheim’s Tomorrow, The World examines a shift in elite U.S. foreign-policy thinking that took place in mid-1940. Why in that moment, a year and a half before the Japanese attacks on the Philippines, Hawaii, and other outposts, did it become popular in foreign-policy circles to advocate for U.S. military domination of the globe?

In school text book mythology, the United States was full of revoltingly backward creatures called isolationists at the time of World War I and right up through December 1941, after which the rational adult internationalists took command (or we’d all be speaking German and suffering through the rigged elections of fascistic yahoos, unlike this evening).

The big news is that the electronic pollbooks in Franklin County, Ohio (Columbus) provided by the vendor KnowInk crashed due to problems uploading data overnight, according to the Franklin County Board of Elections.

Thankfully all polling places had back-up paper pollbooks when I voted this morning. I was checked in the old-fashioned way.

There was some concern that paper sign-in would be slower, but due to record early voting the lines were nonexistent at the Near East side inner-city Ward 55 at mid-morning.

Election integrity activists, including myself, generally favor paper pollbooks over electronic “black box” pollbooks. For one, it is much easier to match your signature with a pen and paper than with a stylus, which might cause a challenge by election workers. Electronic pollbooks are easily hackable, can be programmed with incorrect information that only shows up Election Day, and often go down at inopportune times – like today.

“Premature declarations of elections outcome” is the hot-potato phrase being passed around by lawyers, political operatives and journalists. It sounds way too Trumpian, but if it were to happen from either Trump or Biden it could spell disaster this week and the weeks after.

For older activists, especially those who remember Woody Hayes calling for peace between anti-war protesters and the National Guard as they faced-offed on the Oval, it boggles the mind Tuesday’s outcome could potentially ignite a deranged civil war on our downtown streets where not even the ghost of Woody can save us.

Peaceful rallies at the Statehouse called for by local and national progressives are scheduled for Wednesday night and Saturday, and no matter Tuesday’s outcome, hopefully the gun-toting red hats won’t be itchin’ for a fight, but we know how they lust to be shootin’ them dangerous Antifas. 

Many readers will remember how Republicans rigged the elections in Florida in 2000. A violent mob prevented volunteers from completing the recount in contested southern counties.  As a result, the recount could not be completed in time to meet the deadline of December 20, 2020 for legally choosing the state’s Electoral College delegation. The Bush campaign sued and took the case, Bush v Gore, to the U.S. Supreme Court, which by an infamous 5-4 decision, handed the presidency to Bush.