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[customerserviceguy]

5. There are a number of things

that made the election come out as it did. Remove one or maybe two of them, and the result is different. It's folly to blame any one of many reasons for what happened.

I remember travelling through rural northeastern Pennsylvania the weekend before the election. We were driving to the wedding of the son of close friends, and we went from Bethlehem, PA, where our room was, to the wedding site at Blue Mountain, at a ski resort that rented out its grounds and catering facilities for events. We passed through town after town, where people displayed Trump/Pence signs on their front lawns, in full view of both their neighbors and the tourists passing through. We saw only one Hillary/Kaine sign, right in a town, and several Johnson signs. We had a strange sense of foreboding as we made that trip, and it came to fruition the following Tuesday.

While some can argue that Stein and Johnson "stole" votes from Hillary, I have to conclude that those votes were for "none of the above" and would have gone to any third-party candidate available on the ballot if neither of them had been there.

Russian hacking had an influence, too, but only because Hillary had been so severely damaged by decades of allegations that led to heavy mistrust among the lightly informed.

Our goal is to make sure that 2016 is not repeated in 2020.