Good morning. 
Tuesday in Whitewater will be sunny with a high of sixty-two. Sunrise is 6:33 AM and sunset 4:43 PM, for 10h 10m 05s of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 92.8% of its visible disk illuminated.
Today is the one thousand four hundred fifty-sixth day.
On this day in 1943, five hundred aircraft of the U.S. 8th Air Force devastate Wilhelmshaven harbor in Germany.
Recommended for reading in full —
Jennifer Rubin writes Trump can declare whatever he wants, but it doesn’t make it so:
Team Trump, which can never manage to avoid tipping its hand, let on that President Trump would declare victory prematurely Tuesday night even if the race had not been called. It doesn’t matter what he says. Trump declared himself a “stable genius,” but that didn’t make it so. The same is true for elections; self-declaration of a phony victory would signal Trump believes his only avenue — if it exists at all — is to try to delegitimize votes counted after midnight. (For this reason, networks should seriously consider not covering Trump’s intentionally false declaration live.)
In this rush to claim victory, Trump has been spurred on by ahistoric and legally untenable arguments from phony originalists such as Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh, who seemed to suggest in a recent concurrence that states have an interest in declaring a winner the day of the election. This Cinderella theory (that ballots turn into pumpkins at midnight) is simply ludicrous, as are other legal pronouncements making the rounds.
….I asked a few legal gurus who are working on bipartisan or nonpartisan efforts to protect the integrity of the election if there is anything to the Cinderella theory. “There is absolutely no historical basis for the idea that all election officials must run a forced sprint to count ballots by any artificial deadline, whether it be midnight Eastern time, midnight local time, or any other time,” says David Becker, from the Center for Election Innovation & Research. “In fact, it’s rare that we know the president by election night.” He points out that “during the time of the founders, it was physically impossible to know the results of the election until weeks after, which is why the electoral college does not meet until six weeks after the election, and why every state does not certify election results until days or weeks after the polls close.” He adds: “In modern times, as we have members of the military voting from overseas, the importance of allowing their ballots to be received days after the election has become even more pronounced, and to require counting of valid ballots to be concluded by election night would disenfranchise hundreds of thousands of members of our armed forces, and their families.”
(Emphasis added.)
Julie Carrie Wong reports ‘Putin could only dream of it’: How Trump became the biggest source of disinformation in 2020:
But while the Trump re-election campaign may have failed to recapture the magic of 2016 when it comes to hacked emails, the president has taken Russia’s 2016 social media playbook and supercharged it with the power of the White House.
“I’m sure that there is some foreign influence stuff happening and we might know more about it later,” said Phillips. “But so much of the pollution is trickling down from the White House itself, and people have been absolutely overwhelmed with falsehoods and confusion over Covid and ballots … When people get overwhelmed, they either fight or flee. [Trump] is making it almost impossible for people not to get totally burned out and disgusted.”