David Kurtz
A TPM reader in DC:
I’m a civil servant. Joe Biden’s victory feels like a war-time liberation.
Here’s what you’re experiencing:
From North Carolina:
Walking to the Farmer’s market in Durham NC and we hear screaming and cheers from 2 blocks away. I start crying because I know what it means. Everyone wants to hug but everyone is staying COVID happy. ♥️♥️♥️
From Buffalo, NY:
At Long Last
Send us your reactions and accounts of the celebrations where you are. And thank you. We couldn’t have made it through the last four years without you. You stood tall. You persevered. There is much work to do now. Celebrate now. Get busy tomorrow. Cheers!
A regular TPM reader emails in today with her account of assisting her elderly mother with voting. It’s not an extraordinary story. That’s what makes it’s so annoying. It’s just one hurdle after another, many of them caused by the pandemic, that would deter all but the most committed from voting. It shouldn’t be this way. But it reflects a system where universal voting isn’t the ideal, the goal, or the lodestar.
Hi you all, I wrote to you a few months ago about my experience working in a grocery store during the pandemic. Now I’d like to share with you my experience trying to help my mother vote in this election.
Don’t Study Court Reform To Death
Kicking an issue to a fancy commission is a notorious method for taking it off the table and putting it out of play with little political cost. That can be handy! But if you want the issue in play, Joe Biden’s plan for a blue ribbon commission on reforming the federal courts is a bad sign of where he’s headed.
Tierney Sneed on the Supreme Court’s alarming handling of a key Pennsylvania voting law case last night
Two weeks out from the election, the CDC announced today that excess deaths in the U.S. during the pandemic are bumping up against 300,000:
All of our ongoing coverage of Trump’s deeply ironic positive test here. Ironic, but still a legitimate crisis.
I missed this post-debate assessment yesterday from David Sanger of the New York Times:
But what worried American intelligence and homeland security officials, who have been assuring the public for months now that an accurate, secure vote could happen, was that Mr. Trump’s rant about a fraudulent vote may have been intended for more than just a domestic audience.
They have been worried for some time that his warnings are a signal to outside powers — chiefly the Russians — for their disinformation campaigns, which have seized on his baseless theme that the mail-in ballots are ridden with fraud. But what concerns them the most is that over the next 34 days, the country may begin to see disruptive cyberoperations, especially ransomware, intended to create just enough chaos to prove the president’s point.