My fellow Californians, let us begin with an intelligence test. Our great state has been voting since early October. Folks have been mailing in their ballots, dropping them off at collection sites and even showing up at in-person centers.
So raise your hand if you know — or even just assume — elections officials have been doing something with those ballots as they arrive, other than just throwing them in a pile. Congratulations, hand-raisers. You are now officially smarter than the entire U.S.
On Sunday, the lawyers for the DOJ managed to get a three-judge panel of the Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit to convene a rare emergency hearing because, OMG, people are actually voting and California is processing ballots! Even though it’s literally law that counties count ballots in a timely manner; even though it’s happened in every other election; even though the daily tallies of how many ballots are received are posted online by the secretary of State; even though there are live camera feeds of ballots being processed in Los Angeles — somehow the U.S. government didn’t know this normal election procedure was happening, it claimed. It wasn’t until late Friday, when DOJ lawyers read a filing by California DOJ lawyers laying out that L.A. is, like, actually opening mail-in ballots, that the U.S.
DOJ realized that ballots are being opened. About 600,000 so far in L.A. That seemed “absurd on its face,” argued California Deputy Solicitor Gen.
Armed with this previously unknowable information, Trump’s lawyers were begging the appeals court to take their flimsy, constitutionally questionable case away from the judge who had already promised to rule on their requests on Tuesday and immediately give them an injunction to further their election conspiracy claims. Most folks are aware of the background of this drama, but here’s the quick recap. President Trump for years has falsely but incessantly claimed that Democrats are colluding with undocumented people to help them sneak into the country in exchange for illegally voting in mass numbers for Democrats.
This is not happening, but the president is obsessed with this conspiracy, so much so that he is weaponizing the Department of Justice to attack states, California in particular, in a bid to prove his delusions correct, and perhaps as a bonus, undermine democracy. A few months ago, the DOJ came to the state of California and claimed it had a list of 190,000 people it believed were illegally registered to vote. That list has since dropped to 20,000.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
