This blog likely will appear around five days before election day, a week or so after the final debate. But I doubt things will change much. The only thing holding me back from writing “As Trump Loses” rather than “If Trump Loses” is the memory of 1948 and the inappropriate banner headline of the Chicago newspaper that read “Dewey defeats Truman.”

I was a year out of high school then, but the minimum voting age still was 21. I voted (absentee) in 1952 for the first time — for Gen. Dwight D. “Ike” Eisenhower in his first victory over Adlai Stevenson. Never a doubt of my voting for a Republican that time around. I was still in the U.S. Army and had stood honor guard at San Francisco Airport for Gen. Douglas MacArthur after he was relieved of his Far East Command (Korea) by President Truman. (The voting age finally was lowered to 18 in 1971.)

Somewhere I have at least one little campaign button for FDR’s second term in office. He was on the fall ballot in 1936, running for the second of his four terms as I was entering second grade. He died in the spring of 1945, when I was a high school sophomore.

Women’s Suffrage, the 19th Amendment, was ratified a century ago, Aug. 28, 1920, when my great-grandmother Fannie Camfield was 66 years old. Born Nov. 15, 1853, she was my friend here in Port Townsend for 20 years. She died here in 1951 at age 98, having been able to vote for only 30 years. She was a school girl when Abraham Lincoln took office.

IT APPEARS THAT ELECTION OF A PRESIDENT might be taken out of the hands of the people and somehow delivered to Donald via a stacked judiciary — although it’s unclear whether he’ll first work via courts in such states as Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Florida. The U.S. Supreme Court will have a 6-3 conservative advantage as the U.S. Senate hastily confirmed its newest justice before election day — as planned.

Meanwhile, the Republican Party under Trump has come up with some new ways to disenfranchise innocent low-income voters and create general chaos in the historic one-person-one-vote system they have dented with varying degrees of success in the past.

The giveaway to the dirty little methods of Trump supporters is centered around voters’ drop boxes at the moment. This latest ploy is designed to back up as “fraudulent” charges by Trump necessitating personal appearance via long lines for individuals likely to vote for Joe Biden. Trump first changed management of the U.S. Postal Service shortly before Election Day, slowing up mail deliveries — at the very least casting great suspicion on mail service undoubtedly to be hard pressed by the coronavirus pandemic.

So here we are 100 years after women such as my great-grandmother, grandmothers, etc. actually got the vote. How have voting rights progressed over the past century?

Oct. 24: “An appeals court ruled Friday that Texas cannot limit its mail-in ballot drop-off boxes to one per county regardless of population. The court unanimously sided with the lower court's ruling. It said having one drop off box per county could increase the spread of COVID-19 and impeded on voting rights. Shortly after the ruling, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott said he plans to appeal it to the state's supreme court — potentially preventing extra ballot boxes from being deployed. Under Abbott's policy, Harris County — home to Houston and 2.3 million registered voters — would have the same number of ballot drop boxes as rural Loving County, with just 121 voters. Democratic Travis County, which includes the city of Austin, also would be dropped from four drop boxes to one.

Trump won Texas by nine percentage points in 2016.

“President Trump has repeatedly criticized mail-in ballots as corrupt, without any evidence.”— https://news.yahoo.com/texas-appeals-court-says-state-215442630.html

In some areas single drop boxes are serving as many square miles as comprise smaller states elsewhere. There also have been illegal drop boxes put in place in California by the GOP, Republican photographers snapping photos of individuals allegedly dropping more than one ballot into a box — and one can only be suspicious of occasional drop-box fires in liberal neighborhoods. All such things will be boosted in court by Donald in support of the chaos he has been seeking to create, cultivate — then cite.

GENERALLY SPEAKING — “Donald Trump tanked the strong economy he inherited from the Obama-Biden administration by continually discounting and attacking warnings from the scientific and medical experts working around the clock to save lives . . . Now new coronavirus cases are surging and layoffs are rising.” — Joe Biden, Oct. 19.