One of the big reasons the whole “Stop the Steal” shitshow was able to build momentum in the immediate aftermath of the 2020 election was that, because the three “Blue Wall” states of Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin did not allow for the “pre-processing” of mail-in ballots prior to the morning of election day, the media’s decision desks were unable to call the states. This gave demented tyrant former President Trump room to claim that “big, massive dumps” of late-night ballots had falsely erased his leads in those states – the “Red Mirage” in which Trump-heavy day-of votes were reported before Biden-heavy mail-in votes, leading inexorably to the Capitol riot.

Later that month, Tim Alberta, now of the Atlantic but with Politico at the time wrote that, in Michigan at least, it was because Republicans wanted “to avoid the perception of aiding a system the president was attacking as illegitimate and not only were they skeptical of the Democrats’ concerns of a drawn-out count. But many Republicans didn’t believe the election would be terribly close to begin with. A summer’s worth of polling, conducted for them privately at the local and statewide level, indicated that Trump stood little chance of carrying Michigan a second time,” which, no knock on Alberta writing in the immediate aftermath, was complete horseshit. They had almost certainly did it on purpose with the express intent of giving Trump the room to create doubt.

And for them to start a riot at the TCF Center in Detroit that night, which NBC News on Tuesday concluded was most likely the work of indicted Trump co-conspirator shitbag Mike Roman.

Republicans had the votes in the Michigan state legislature to block bills allowing county clerks from precanvassing – which is not counting ballots but opening envelopes and otherwise prepping the ballots to be fed into the tabulators the minute the in-person polls close – until they didn’t.

(Arizona, Georgia, and Nevada do allow precanvassing and did in 2020, but they were simply literally too close to call for days after Biden took the lead in Pennsylvania and thus won.)

Pennsylvania and Wisconsin? Nope, still can’t precanvass in those states. Why? Well Rolling Stone reports that Trump personally called Republican leaders in Pennsylvania and told them to block it, according to a source. Rolling Stone does not say if Trump did the same in Wisconsin, though earlier this year a Dem state Senator strongly implied he did. “There’s been a concerted effort by folks in the Assembly and senators to try to get this calendar to the Senate, so we can put to rest complaints from conspiracy theorists. But just like in Washington, DC, former President Donald Trump has told Republicans not to fix anything so he can continue to spread his lies and complain when he loses,” Dem Mark Spreitzer told the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel back then.

The revelation of Trump not wanting to know who won on election night and going out of his way to make sure of it is buried down in Rolling Stone’s possibly more salient lede reporting that “According to four conservative attorneys and other sources who’ve spoken to the former president on this matter, Trump intends to declare – as soon as on Election Night – that the race is being ‘rigged’ or ‘stolen’ from him, by pointing to slow vote-counts of mail-in ballots in crucial battleground states as his evidence for supposed Democratic shenanigans afoot.” Sur-fucking-prise, right?

This was going to be in a different piece, but it’s relevant to the topic here:

This is a VERY rough scoreboard of where the mail-in ballots are at in Pennsylvania as of Monday (Election Day minus-22), data via Michael McDonald’s Election Project. The point being that far fewer Keystone Staters are voting absentee (“Party” column denotes registered affiliation) but overall more Republicans are, meaning that it’s much more likely the state can be called on election night and more likely that the fat bastard is wasting his time trying to fuck it up.