Trumpardy!

Well, outraged reader, what happened there then?

Wednesday this week was a watershed. The 6th of January marked the date on which the electoral college votes would be counted and certified by Congress. The President had previously mentioned that if the votes were certified, he'd stand by the outcome, but he expected his Republican buddies to object and do what they could to stop that from happening. Now, according to Wikipedia, the 1887 Electoral Count Act aims to minimize Congressional involvement in election disputes, but it seems that Donald didn't read that far.

Up until the 6th of January, this election had been by turns either hilarious or mildly frightening. Now, I come from a country where there's famously no written constitution, but written procedure has done very little to help this election go smoothly. Taking a step back, there's a huge amount of complexity in the election process here: the primaries to choose the presidential candidates are voted on by the public in ways which are unique to each state, but then the winning candidate hand-picks their vice-president. The states each set entirely their own rules for the general election, which is broadly the basis for the legal challenges that have been raised since November. The popular vote then translates into an electoral college which makes individual voters even less powerful than in the UK's first-past-the-post system - swings of a few tens of thousands of votes in just a handful of states could have given this election to Trump.

In the year 2000 I found myself screaming "JUST COUNT THE VOTES!" at my TV when, the day after the election, Florida couldn't decide whether dimpled or hanging chads actually counted or not. This idea that somehow you can just get the lawyers in if you don't like the result of the election is utterly alien to me, and not something I can ever remember happening in the UK or even the rest of Europe. American readers, in the UK it really is as simple as this: the ballot boxes for a given parliamentary seat are all shipped to a single building where they're counted by hand in the presence of independent election officials. The results are announced only when all the votes have been counted by an independent returning officer. And that's it. Oh, and it's one country so everything is the same everywhere. There is an awful lot less to go wrong with this than in the US, where heterogeneity, partially-reported results, and distributed counts which are certified by partisan officials muddy the waters and open the door for needless challenges at multiple levels, all of which undermines public confidence in the process.

Then finally we have the process of certifying the election result itself.

There's no nice way to say this - on Wednesday the president incited an angry mob to turn over the outcome of a free and fair democratic election. This makes the admittedly still heinous crime of lying to the tune of "£350m a week for the NHS" look like a parking ticket. The only good news is that the mechanisms of democracy here just about managed to resist. For a while there, this was genuinely scary: at the point the TV commentators started debating whether the military would do what the President told them, or instead choose to uphold the constitution, I've got to admit it got a bit much for me.

This is a rapidly developing situation which is subject to change, but in this commentator's opinion, something positive may come out of Wednesday: it more-or-less makes the prospect of Trump running again and winning in 2024 a folly.

Obviously the events of Wednesday received widespread live TV coverage. ABC delayed their normal 7pm weekday quiz show, Jeopardy!, until 8pm, but they were determined to cut over on the dot. US TV is famous for cutting abruptly at inappropriate moments, but George Stephanopoulos, ABC's erstwhile political anchor (a sort of cross between David Dimbleby and Dan Walker) had barely finished his sentence when the Jeopardy! music cheerfully opened up! This was literally the day's laugh-out-loud moment - nothing stops Jeopardy!!

Takeout Thursday took an unusual turn this week; we didn't actually order it! On leaving the house to pick up Helen from her volunteering stint at Friends of Palo Alto Libraries on Thursday, I was met on the porch by this bag that had recently been left there by a friendly Doordasher. The only problem was... nothing there to indicate who this was for. The number on the receipt is actually the Doordash customer services number!

So, we got to learn what queso blanco is (basically macaroni cheese without the macaroni, used as a dip for the chips) and enjoyed the burrito bowl which we didn't order. Helen, of course, picked the coriander out of her teeth and made various faces. It's not what we would have chosen, but hey, free food!

So now we're counting the days until the inauguration on the 20th of January, when I hear there's an argument booked for Nicola Sturgeon and a certain outgoing President. Here's hoping that Prestwick Airport has just slightly better security than the Capitol building!