And the Winner Is...

Oh, sorry, nobody knows when we'll know.

2000 was a doozy of a year, wasn’t it? After narrowly escaping Y2K—the feared global computer glitch that briefly upstaged the Mayan calendar as the harbinger of the End of the World—we had that whole chad fiasco in Florida, with election cards coming back dimpled, dangling, and in some inexplicable cases, pregnant. (Were they surreptitiously setting the stage for the Men Can Be Moms Movement? I mean, if a ballot can get knocked up, anything’s possible!) It took thirty-six days and a Supreme Court intervention to settle the recount dispute that ultimately gave Dubya the password to the White House wi-fi.

(Also, anyone else find it hard to believe that was nearly a quarter of a century ago? Nod louder if you could; my hearing’s not so hot anymore.)

It seemed insane to be living in presidential limbo at the time, but already the snooze media are preparing people for another election night toss-up, this time due to early voting, printer errors, mail-in ballots, record turnout, recounts, state rules, “a cultural shift toward immediate gratification,” and climate change. (Just kidding; they actually didn’t even try to blame climate change! I feel like that could be significant.)

Fact-checkers are scrambling to get ahead of the fraud accusations, making sweeping declarations that sound a whole lot like a tired parent’s “because I said so.”

You can hear the dramatic sigh too, right?

A video that was filmed and widely circulated during the 2020 election cycle has been revived on social media. In it, a guy claiming to be an election worker holds a ballot cast for Trump up to the camera before ripping it in half and tossing it over his head. Even though that’s precisely, unquestionably what you see happening in the clip, fact-checkers are here to tell you that’s actually NOT [emphasis theirs] what you’re seeing after all. To be clear, they don’t claim the video is altered, or that it’s old, or that the guy isn’t in fact an election worker, or that those aren’t actual ballots. Their proclamation is simply that you didn’t see what you saw.

What does it show then, Lead Stories? A guy making homemade confetti? A political performance art exhibit? A magic trick gone wrong? Please, tell me what I just watched!

CBS News insists videos like this are “purposely designed to create doubt in an otherwise secure system” hahahahahaha. For starters, the phrase “otherwise secure system” literally means something that is secure in all other ways except the one being discussed, which is essentially an admission that human tampering does indeed happen. Secondly, maybe they missed a little story about Texas removing a million people from voter rolls, a lineup that included dead people, illegal residents, and convicted felons who are ineligible to vote. Or perhaps they’re unaware that California is suing one of its own cities over a charter adopted by local voters that would require voter ID, or that the Biden Harris DOJ is suing the state of Alabama for trying to remove non-citizens from voter rolls. Oh, and NPR calls non-citizen voting a “baseless conspiracy” in case you were wondering, so consider that fact officially checked.

You genuinely cannot make this stuff up.

“Of course, trust in election results depends on who wins,” the Connecticut Insider hilariously declared. “When Democrats win, Republicans don’t trust the results, and when Republicans win, Democrats don’t trust the results.”

CNN, you won’t be surprised to know, thinks this particular street runs only one way. “Questioning the accuracy of voter rolls has long been a hallmark of right-wing efforts to raise doubts about the integrity of elections and featured prominently in 2020 when allies of the former president pushed false claims that scores of fraudulently cast votes helped Joe Biden win the presidency,” they insisted, feigning temporary amnesia over the whole “Russian interference” witch hunt.

With just over a week to go before the highly anticipated and also temporally meaningless event known as Election Day, one thing is certain: We will likely not be popping any champagne corks or sniveling into our pillows on November 5.

How (not) confident are you in our election integrity? LMK in the comments.

p.s. Feel free to get your DAILY voting fix here. (I’m currently in first place! Squeeeee!) It takes ten seconds but unfortunately, you need a fakebook account to vote. Not my rules.

p.p.s. In utterly unrelated news, I had to share a little humblebrag. It seems yours truly got under a certain someone’s skin so deeply that he/she/xe/they joined substack and created a third-grade handle just to diss me! (I wonder if Jennahaspoopypants was taken?) Why does this delight me so?

I know you are but what am I?

This eager commenter follows just one person—me—and has no other posts, comments, or likes. #Winning