What a wild thing to have happened, just as Democrats are busy setting the stage for a fervent “Election Fraud is Real Revival Rally” – the bazillion dollar Powerball drawing didn’t happen last night!

Frequent lottery players know the drill: Powerball drawings are held every Monday, Wednesday, and Saturday at 10:59 p.m. ET. But that wasn’t the case Monday night, as the country waited on the winning numbers for the highest-ever $1.9 billion jackpot.

Wait, whut?! How can this be? Death, taxes, Lotto, and Powerball drawings are always on time and inevitable “set your watch” events. When the marquee number is as YUGE as it was last night, the whole country is watching (in fact the world, as Ebola called from Germany, “Did you get tickets yet?”) with bated breath. The moment arrives and…pfft.

…“Currently, one participating lottery is still processing its sales and play data,” the Multi-State Lottery Association said in a statement late Monday night. “Powerball requires all 48 participating lotteries to submit their sales and play data prior to the winning numbers being selected. Once Powerball receives the outstanding submission, the drawing can proceed.”

They’re tight-lipped about who’s at fault, too.

…Multi-State Lottery Association officials declined to name the state where the delay was taking place, telling the Associated Press, “It’s against our policy.”

“Somebody is still counting” sounds vaguely familiar, no? Not that we weren’t already hearing that as a precursor to warn us off of thinking there’s any election malarkey or shenanigans afoot.

The people who were updating a COVID death tracker every single minute for 2 years now want you to believe that there's no way to count all votes on one day every 2 years.

— Rising serpent 🇺🇸 (@rising_serpent) November 8, 2022

For all the alleged racist voter suppression Republican legislatures have indulged in, it seems a tad strange that the result would be record voter turnouts obliging overburdened, math-challenged Democratic election officials to count even slower. The logic escapes me, but that’s true of most anything a Democrat yammers as their court-of-last-resort exasperated explanation for “THAT’S HOW IT WORKS.”

…In a speech last week in Washington about threats to democracy, President Biden took time to celebrate strong early voting numbers, while acknowledging the results might not be known right away.

“We’re seeing record turnout all over the country, and that’s good,” Biden said. “We want Americans to vote. We want every American’s voice to be heard. Now we have to move the process forward.”

“We know that more and more ballots are cast in early voting or by mail in America, and we know that many states don’t start counting those ballots until after the polls close on Nov. 8,” he added. “That means, in some cases, we won’t know the winner of the election for a few days — until after a few days after the election. It takes time to count all legitimate ballots in a legal and orderly manner.”

“It’s always been important for citizens in a democracy to be informed and engaged,” Biden said, before acknowledging Tuesday’s election will be the first since the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol. “Now it’s important for citizens to be patient as well. That’s how this is supposed to work.“

This obnoxious guy always telling us how things are supposed to work, when he being the king of nothing working is one of the great ironies of life, drives me insane. After two years and the truly miserable state of the country, it’s also pretty frickin’ annoying. Again, how it works is “Republicans questioning the pace of ballot counting” is bad…

…In 2020, President Donald Trump proclaimed that the lack of final results on election night could be an indicator of something nefarious, using it to falsely assert that the election was stolen: “We don’t want them to find any more ballots at 4 o’clock in the morning and add them to the list.”

There was no evidence of any widespread voter fraud in the 2020 presidential election, a claim backed up by officials in Trump’s own administration, including attorney general William Barr. Cases alleging fraud brought by Trump and his allies were rejected from courts nationwide, all the way up to the U.S. Supreme Court.

On Monday morning, the campaign of Pennsylvania U.S. Senate candidate John Fetterman sent out a memo warning voters to “buckle up for a long week.”

“We should all be prepared for a process that takes several days before all eligible votes are properly counted and the results are clear,” wrote Fetterman campaign manager Brendan McPhillips.

…and Fester Fetterman is a righteous reasonable dude compared to them. That’s how this works.

…Republicans in particular have pointed to perceived delays in knowing results as a reason to be suspicious about the integrity of elections.

“We’ve got to get our elections reformed so that every Arizonan, whether they be Democrat, Independent, or Republican, when they go to bed on Election Night they know the winner and they’re satisfied that it was a fair election. We don’t have that right now,” Kari Lake, the Trump-endorsed Republican candidate for governor in Arizona, said in August on Twitter.

It’s pretty hard to take officials who complain about people "undermining faith" in our democratic system seriously at the same time they’re asking us to accept absurdly long vote counts as a new norm. https://t.co/dlAabghTRE

— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) November 8, 2022

Predictably, like clockwork, the machines in Arizona are melting down as I write. Whoever runs the state’s voting and election apparatus shouldn’t be elected dogcatcher. Who might that be again? Anybody heard from Katie Hobbs yet?

Maricopa County's Recorder Stephen Richer and Chairman of the County Board of Supervisors Bill Gates confirm an incredible *20%* of polling places are experiencing problems with machines tabulating votes.

This is manufactured chaos. Stay in line. Vote in person. pic.twitter.com/xTNg35zI8T

— Charlie Kirk (@charliekirk11) November 8, 2022

Because, like the public school systems infested with social theories vice focused subject studies, the election system in certain parts of this country has been allowed to morph into a leisurely, “We’ll get to it when we get to it” vice a one-day, result-oriented exercise (And oooh, don’t they just hate that Kari Lake person? *snicker*). I won’t feed conspiracy theories because I don’t have to – these Dems shovel the fertilizer on it themselves.

What's that?

DOMINION you say…? https://t.co/rdofZnacGL

— Beege 🎃 (@WelbornBeege) November 8, 2022

Common sense and integrity would tell one that working like that needs a serious overhaul, as it’s truly not working at all. To Dems, OTOH, gridlock leading to chaos is a feature, not a bug.

Here in our NW corner of the Redneck Riviera/FL Panhandle, polls close at 7 p.m. CST, and we’re in the know by 9, sometimes sooner.

That’s how it works here, beautifully.

I have my Powerball tickets out, too. Just in case.

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