Pennsylvania's electors have cast the state's Electoral College votes for Joe Biden
Last edited Tue Dec 15, 2020, 07:10 PM - Edit history (3)
Source: Philadelphia Inquirer
Joe Biden just won Pennsylvania again. Twenty electors from across the state met in Harrisburg on Monday to officially cast all 20 of the state's Electoral College votes for Biden and for Vice President-elect Kamala Harris as President Donald Trump persists in his baseless and brazen attempts to subvert the will of the voters. "I hope you can see me smiling behind this mask," said state Democratic chair Nancy Patton Mills, who was elected president of the college.
Monday's meeting marked the moment when the official votes for president are cast by electors in states across the country. It's normally a procedural footnote, ceremonial and largely unseen. But this year, Trump's efforts to challenge Biden's election at every level put the day in the spotlight. "Maybe the only [Electoral College meeting] that got more attention was the first one," state Rep. Malcolm Kenyatta, an elector from North Philadelphia, said in reference to George Washington's election in 1789.
Each state has a certain number of electoral votes, equal to the number of lawmakers they have in Congress. Before Election Day, presidential campaigns and political parties select specific people to serve as their electors. Technically, when Americans across the country voted in the Nov. 3 election, their ballots were cast not for specific presidential candidates but for the electors chosen by those candidates. Whichever candidate wins sends those electors to Harrisburg. When each state's electors gather, they cast the actual votes for the candidate.
"Today you will follow the tradition of the first Electoral College that convened in Pennsylvania 231 years ago and cast your votes based on the outcome of that election, to carry out the will of the voters of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania," Secretary of State Kathy Boockvar, Pennsylvania's top elections official, said in opening remarks as she presided over Monday's meeting.
Read more: https://www.inquirer.com/politics/election/pennsylvania-electoral-college-vote-biden-trump-20201214.html
Adding some screenshots -
Elector swearing in -
Electoral College President Allegheny County's Nancy Patton Mills, after the voting was completed -
PA State Supreme Court Justice Max Baer after witnessing and certifying the final tally -
PA Secretary of State Kathy Boockvar at the conclusion of the session just prior to adjournment -
Editing to add in a pic of the ballot box "designed by Ben Franklin" according to the Electors (PA AG Josh Shapiro casting his ballot) -
= new reply since forum marked as read
and also streamed CSPAN (where I got screenshots on my little convertible laptop) and also streamed the Governor's live feed on my main laptop, where I grabbed a couple screenshots from that too (including when my City Council member was hand-signing the series of 6 copies of the vote certifications) -
That live stream from the Governor's office is just ending a presser about the state's "PENNIE" program (state health insurance as part of the ACA, where tomorrow is the deadline for people to sign up).
and after this year's nightmare of an election, I was determined to see this through (almost 3-D)! 
Hell... I was running the stream of Philly's canvassing on my little convertible 24/7 too. Would come down in the morning and look at what was going on (they were working 24/7 for the first couple days).
This is finally OVER!
after too much sturm und drang. 
The last circus performance will be January 6 when the "objections" happen (most likely with debates and votes) during the Joint Session of Congress, before TupPence is forced to read the final tally.
TY!
What a disappointment it was to hear our state went for such a blatantly horrible person as Trump in 2016. And what a relief enough of the electorate didn't make that same mistake again.
Now, if only Dems could take over our state legislature.
but are still dealing with the fallout from the 2011 gerrymandered districts. 
So we are going to have to be really vigilant when the redistricting process gets going again.
The original state legislative map had been thrown out at least once before the current one that we have - it was that bad. And that was when we had Corbett as governor and the State Supreme Court was majority-GOP.
NOW things are a bit different. We have a Democratic governor AND a Democratic-majority State Supreme Court. So nonsense like they put together in 2011 isn't going to pass muster this go-around. Remember it was the current PA State Supreme Court who un-gerrymandered our Congressional districts just ahead of the 2018 general election and took us from a gerrymandered split of 13(R) - 5(D) to 9(R) - 9(D).
I also know that Eric Holder's "National Democratic Redistricting Committee" has been working along with other orgs like "Fair Districts PA" for several years, so hopefully we can un-do the mess that we have right now. 
Thank you. 
I was really following that redistricting process and all the court cases, including all the different groups and entities (including the governor) that produced new Congressional maps for consideration and review, and in the end, the state Supreme Court drew the their own map with the revised districts. The SCOTUS refused to hear the case against that process brought to them by the PA GOP telling them "its a state matter".
And as a note - every time I see your account name I think of Snoopy hard at work!
Surprisingly, a (very low post count) DUer actually insinuated I was trying to pass as black by using Dark n Stormy Knight as my DU screen name. That it might be seen that way had never crossed my mind! My husband and I both (but especially I) have skin so white that a couple near us on a Cape May beach one time called over to ask if we were British, because they'd never seen anyone not from that sun-starved isle with such glaringly melanin-deficient skin!
Anyway, to geek out that line a bit:
It is perhaps the most infamous opening line in literary history. Seven words so ubiquitous in popular consciousness they may as well have no origin; they have existed, strung together as such, for as long as humans possessed the ability to read, and likely much longer than that. An opening line older than time itself. Consider this anecdote from a Chicago Tribune article by Susan Campbell concerning one Charles Schulz, creator of the Peanuts comic strip, featuring Charlie Brown and his semi-human dog companion, Snoopy. The latter character frequently attempts to write the proverbial Great American Novel, but he can only manage to write the same opening line over and over, like Jack Torrance spilling his mad failed-author ennui onto the page. Campbell relates:
Schulz said that he didn't know the phrase he appropriated for Snoopy's thwarted attempts at literature was specific to any one author; he used it only because it was a standard pot-boiler opener that was always out there.
In addition to its appearance in Peanuts, "It was a dark and stormy night" served as the opening line to Madeleine L'Engle's A Wrinkle In Time and Ray Bradbury's Let's All Kill Constance; some translations of The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas interpret its first sentence, "C’etait une nuit orageuse et sombre," as "It was a dark and stormy night," though literally translated, "stormy" precedes "dark"; furthermore, these seven words either opened, appeared elsewhere, or were satirized in numerous other books, comics, movies, TV shows, and even song lyrics. As such, this "standard pot-boiler opener," as Campbell referred to it, is a cliché now, and considered "the literary posterchild for bad story starters," as Writer's Digest writer Zachary Petit calls it. Any writer seriously using the seven words, "It was a dark and stormy night," in their fiction would receive instant rejection and outright ridicule.
But where exactly did this story-starter come from?
The line is most commonly associated with the novel Paul Clifford and its author Edward Bulwer-Lytton, who is credited with coining other popular phrases such as "the pen is mightier than the sword" and "the almighty dollar," among others. We'll talk more about Bulwer-Lytton in a moment, but first, it's important to acknowledge that while the author popularized "It was a dark and stormy night," he was not the first to use it. That honor goes to the esteemed 19th century writer Washington Irving in his 1809 satirical piece A History Of New York, a mock non-fiction book that "plays fast and loose with the facts, to uproarious effect," according to the blurb at Penguin-Random House. Irving does not use the line as a story opener, though it does appear as the first line of the fourth paragraph of the fifth chapter. He writes:
It was a dark and stormy night when the good Antony arrived at the creek (sagely denominated Haerlem river) which separates the island of Manna-hata from the mainland.
More here: https://litreactor.com/columns/the-maligned-history-of-it-was-a-dark-and-stormy-night
As for the gerrymandering and other PA topics; I often pay too little attention to local politics. Your posts help me keep up! So, thanks again.
I remember seeing the trailer when I had gone to see "Black Panther" in 2018 (A Wrinkle in Time released that year too in 2018). Have to put that on my watch list!
What's funny is that thanks to Peanuts, that phrase ended up becoming a meme before the term "meme" was used to describe things/prhases like that.
And to be fair, it wasn't until I retired when I had more time to delve more into monitoring local politics. When she was still around, my mother watched or listened to our City Council meetings on the radio (on Thursdays) every week and she was a CSPAN junky (making me into one too). Every once in awhile I'll tune to PCN (Pennsylvania Cable Network) on cable as well to see what the state legislature is doing, but my doing that is hit or miss.
This pandemic pretty much forced me to pay attention and gather news of what was/is going on in the state and locally and what was going to happen (e.g., when they started locking everything down) - if anything to get that info to my sisters, since they don't have the free time to stay up on it, and stuff literally changes daily and even hourly.
yesterday! TY, BRDS! 
Monday was the "big day" for every state, so all 50 were doing this same process (with state-determined variations) and some were being posted about.
I know I was following it here because we were one of the states being baselessly attacked.
