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Comment by minimuffins | Hacker News Reader

If you really have anxiety about this I recommend not engaging with any new software at all and just wake up tomorrow and see who won.

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Tomorrow? More like December, if we're lucky.

And that's the source of anxiety, at least for me.

Wish it were that cut and dried, but — depends on the earliest callable swing states.

It's pretty unlikely there'll be a definitive result by morning.

Over/under on at least one state simply ordering the count halted and all uncounted ballots destroyed?

No.

Unless they already have a "must be counted by" time that's tonight/early tomorrow morning, I'd say that won't happen.

What's going to happen if someone does just that, though, rules be damned?

Three years of litigation and someone barely involved getting a misdemeanor plea bargain?

Hopefully criminal charges would be filed against the responsible parties (destroying ballots is a felony, as I understand it). If none are charged, consider the US a defunct superpower. We don't possess a huge population (relative to the globe) and if the rule of law has failed so dramatically we will lose whatever remains of our political standing within the world.

But I still think it's unlikely that this will happen. At least on a statewide level. I could see some voting precincts doing something completely moronic like this.

This did happen recently in Florida; see Brenda Snipes.

Reading her Wikipedia page is interesting. Broward County is not the place to live if you want your vote reliably counted.

Then the matter will very likely go to the Supreme Court.

This is a distracting and unhelpful comment. The rules (despite attempts to persuade us otherwise) are well-established and not nearly so easy to deviate from, even in this tumultuous time.

Well, the lawsuit has been announced: https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/524404-trump-says-hell...

The rules are what the supreme court says they are, which is why the appointment of Barrett was rushed.

Only if PA really is the state that decides the election and the vote is too close to be obvious there. Any permutation where it isn’t that close and we’ll probably know tomorrow.

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