2) One of the reasons that democracy was able to survive 2020 was that there were Republicans like Richer who refused to go along with "If Trump says two plus two is five it's five." The Trumpists are working hard to make sure they're all purged by 2024. What happens then?
The gaslighting will continue until the morale collapses.
No observers of elections, most notably the post-2000 Carter Baker report writers, defend the integrity of the American elections. They are considered a worldwide joke and have been since Daley and LBJ stuffed the ballot boxes of Chicago and Houston for JFK.
For glib propagandists from coastal inc. to act like the coercion, chain of custody violations, harvesting, pay for ballot, lack of audit trail, ID and verification issues, and various other flaws in our absentee ballot system are not a far worse problem for democracy than Trump's Queens bred vulgarity is just sad and dishonest.
The same writers who have no problem exposing billions in PPP fraud in a system with extensive kyc, aml procedures, 2 factor authentication and real ID, somehow turn mute with the thought a no ID, live ballot, zero chain of custody system could be hacked with billions in unregulated funds flowing into elections in
Here is the thing. Perhaps the lack of interest by the coastal navel gazers in ballot integrity would be credible IF they hadn't spent 4 years lapping up the Russia collusion hoax, Kavanaugh pulling the train, Quid pro Joe Ukraine corruption ( with gas tycoon turned artist Hunter).
But hey, all your efforts did rid us of those mean tweets and get us massive inflation, dead marines and hundreds of hostages in Afghanistan, Covid monomania, and an armed capitol helmed by a dementia patient. So there's that to tell your grandchildren.
You think it's Trump's vulgarity that leads people to view him as a threat to democracy? I thought his constant unsupported claims of election theft alongside actual evidence that he *was* working to steal the election himself -- Eastman memos, his browbeating state election officials, browbeating Pence, his *constant* gaslighting, etc. -- were the biggest threats. I mean, he's a dick, but that's not a noticeable threat to democracy.
The fact Minnesota sends live ballots in the mail without any pre-verification of ID, address, or registration status is a vastly greater threat to democracy than Trump bloviating about being "robbed". Stacey Abrams, Hillary Clinton and dozens of Democrats have bloviated in a similar manner to similar effect. The Minnesota rules (as just one example) are specifically designed to make voter fraud unprosecutable. It is not surprising the illegal harvesting, pay for ballot, zero chain of custody enforcement, and simply raw fraud have flourished. The Dems are not dumb and they know the fraud goes on. In their internal caucuses, they now have 3 factor authentication and address verification before voting. For real.
Now there's a good example of what Jonathan called the "firehose of falsehood" technique. Bad timing, though, claiming that it's just about "bad tweets" right when a tape comes out of Trump justifying the "Hang Mike Pence" chant.
You are correct. The article is not a serious discussion of ballot integrity issues. Like most modern journalism, it is simply low cost, bad therapy to make mediocre intellects feel superior to *dumb Trumpers*. Guffaw guffaw. Five seconds of Google research would land you on dozens of efforts by Democrats to address ballot integrity concerns. But like 1984, these people go down the memory hole once it becomes apparent their argument might support Trump's concerns
Trump's stolen-election gaslighting is truly deplorable. Although I voted for Trump, MAGA friends accused me of succumbing to Stockholm syndrome when I told them I've seen no proof that enough fraudulent votes were tallied in any state carried by Biden to have changed the outcome there, even if all of them were cast for him, let alone proof that the net effect of fraudulent voting put Biden over the top. Indeed, proving the latter would be well-nigh impossible. The occurrence of vote fraud could be proved in various ways -- e.g., by showing that people came to polling places after others had voted in their names and were allowed to vote after producing proof of ID, or that more mail ballots were tallied than distributed. But determining how such detected fraudulent voting affected an outcome would be another matter; it would require ascertaining who each fraudulent vote was cast for, which would surely be infeasible.
One of the perverse consequences of Trump's gaslighting is that it distracts attention from bona fide election-integrity issues, concerning which I'd like to raise a couple of questions:
If, in a two-party system, Party A persistently espouses measures tending to minimize opportunity for vote fraud, vote buying, improper influence, voting by non-citizens, etc. (voter ID requirements; restrictions on ballot harvesting; purging the registration rolls of dead voters, names with fake addresses or P.O. box numbers, and names of people who are registered to vote in multiple states; distributing mail ballots only to people who request them; requiring mail ballots to be enclosed in signed "security" envelopes marked with the last four digits of the voter's SSN, checking the numbers, and comparing the signatures with signatures on driver's licenses or other documents on record; keeping vote drop-boxes under continual surveillance while they are unlocked; etc.) and Party B persistently opposes such measures would it not be reasonable to assume that the leaders of both parties believe that, to the extent it occurs, such illicit practices will generally be of more benefit to Party B's candidates?
And would it not also be reasonable to assume that this implicit cross-party consensus is correct?
I have no problem with requiring state-issued ID in order to vote. It's reasonable to ask someone who cares enough to vote to ensure that they have a valid ID.
There are other issues you mentioned that I think are less helpful or even counter-productive.
1) Matching signatures. We are increasingly less likely to sign anything on paper (or otherwise) in the current day and age. The last document I signed was my driver's license form several years ago. My signature is horrifically inconsistent (though obviously there are some consistent features). Also, there are people who suffer various kinds of trauma (physical or mental) which can literally completely change their signature. I suppose one could argue in those cases they should go get their ID updated. The other issue I have with signature matching is that it's done by a bunch of people and there will naturally be both variance among individuals, and it provides yet another method by which a person can attempt to influence the results: since one party is over-represented in mail-in ballots, the other party can decide to maximize the number of ballots that are disqualified through requiring signature matches based in degree of match. If we're going to use a system to determine if the "real" person who should have provided the ballot is that person, then we need something other than a signature. Time to get more creative.
2) Does one party really oppose removing dead people from the voter polls? I don't see a defensible reason to avoid removing dead voters. I don't see how it can even *be* an issue. Plus, it seems comparatively *trivial* to compare a record of who voted (which we have) with death certificates to determine how big a problem this actually *is*. This feels more like a rhetorical / political "issue" that's not an issue of any kind in reality. I've been wrong before though.
3) Regarding PO Boxes: isn't it already required to have a *real* address, and NOT a PO Box? Also, it seems comparatively trivial to discover fake addresses on registrations; USPS can do such things fairly easily, save in instances where there's no technical "street" address. As I understand it, in those cases, the voter must provide a detailed description of their address (whatever that means), and cannot use a PO box. Seems like an incredibly small number of votes in that case though.
4) Harvesting -- I vacillate on this. On the one hand, I think laws against harvesting are likely to hurt the honest people without stopping fraud in the least. If you're willing to commit voter fraud, not being allowed to harvest ballots isn't going to stop you. That said, I think laws to protect voters make sense. What I don't understand is why ballot harvesting is required at all. We have a universal postal system, do we not? That was certainly the plan. I believe if you choose to live outside the postal system, it's on you to get your own ballot in, and don't have much objection to you having to go to some county office, show your ID, and hand them your ballot. I believe if you choose to or are forced to vote by mail, getting your ballot mailed in time to be at least postmarked by election day is not unreasonable, the same way someone needs to make sure they have an opportunity to vote in person on election day. Your "election day" is simply a few days earlier. Long story short, I think laws restricting ballot harvesting to certain organizations (say, the USPS among others) are not necessarily a bad thing. But I also don't think they are likely to have a huge impact on fraud. Rather, they will simply result in more people forgetting to mail in ballots or otherwise not vote. Given that mail in ballots tend to favor one party, I can understand why one party wants to limit that as much as possible, and the other wants to make it as permissible as possible. I don't think either party is working for the best of the election system as a whole in this.
I'm generally in favor of providing proper security to ensure the validity of the voting process. I simply am not convinced that we have some giant problem. I think that is mostly gaslighting until someone can show that it was done at some large scale using these techniques in recent times.
1) I concede that signature matching is problematic for all the reasons you mention, of which the most important, IMO, is the subjectivity problem.
You say we need to come up with some other way of ensuring that mail ballots are sent to the right people. My conclusion is different: distribution of mail ballots should be restricted. They should not be sent, willy nilly, to every address in the voter registration rolls, one per each and every registered voter, as was done in some states for last year's national election. Such "universal" distribution of mail ballots largely nullifies the advantages of secret-ballot elections. When all but a few voters go to the polls and cast their votes in seclusion, opportunity for vote buying or voter coercion is nil, as a would-be vote buyer or arm-twister would be unable to ascertain whether promises to vote for a certain candidate in exchange for payment or to avert retaliation are kept. When ballots are mailed to everyone on the rolls at their addresses of record, however (as is done in Hawaii, Washington, Colorado, Oregon, and Utah, all but the last of which are deep blue) and ballot harvesting is allowed, vote buying and coercive influence become feasible again, as buyers and arm-twisters can collect and deliver ballots from their payees or patsies after making sure they're marked in the desired way.
2) and 3) According to a 2012 study by the nonpartisan Pew Center for the States, more than 1.8 million dead people were listed in US voter registration rolls, approximately 2.75 million were registered in more than one state, and approximately 24 million registrations -- one in every eight -- were invalid or significantly inaccurate.
According to a study by the Government Accountability Institute, more than 30 percent of the votes cast in Rhode Island in the 2016 national election were from people with no social security number or driver's license number on record.
In its 2001 report, the bipartisan National Commission on Federal Election Reform noted that the National Voter Registration Act of 1993 (aka "the motor voter law") had made it more difficult to purge invalid entries from voter registration rolls. State and local elections officials testified to the Commission that voter lists were consequently swollen with larger numbers of named voters who had moved, died, or were no longer eligible to vote in the jurisdiction where they were registered and that duplicate registration was also common. The report also noted that a number of local jurisdictions had compared their voter lists to census numbers and found that they had thousands, sometimes tens of thousands, more registered voters than people. Yet proposals to purge the rolls of invalid entries were controversial. As the Commission put it, "the issue of voter lists now has well-drawn battle lines," with "some" protesting that such purging was a strategem to suppress minority voting. You can check if you want, but I'm pretty sure the motor-voter law was pushed primarily by Democrats and likewise that most of the opponents of roll-purging were Democrats.
4) Ballot harvesting. In addition to the potential for vote buying and coercive influence by ballot harvesters in states with liberal distribution of mail ballots, there is also the possibility of illicit tampering by the harvesters -- who, instead of faithfully delivering collected ballots to to a post office or drop-box, could first steam open security envelopes, extract and examine the enclosed ballots, replace and deliver those marked for the "right" candidate, and either simply discard ballots marked for the "wrong" candidate or replace them with blank ballots (which are not difficult to produce by copying) marked for the "right" candidate. This is not just a far-fetched figment of my febrile imagination. https://nypost.com/2020/08/29/political-insider-explains-voter-fraud-with-mail-in-ballots/
1) Admirable guy.
2) One of the reasons that democracy was able to survive 2020 was that there were Republicans like Richer who refused to go along with "If Trump says two plus two is five it's five." The Trumpists are working hard to make sure they're all purged by 2024. What happens then?
The gaslighting will continue until the morale collapses.
No observers of elections, most notably the post-2000 Carter Baker report writers, defend the integrity of the American elections. They are considered a worldwide joke and have been since Daley and LBJ stuffed the ballot boxes of Chicago and Houston for JFK.
For glib propagandists from coastal inc. to act like the coercion, chain of custody violations, harvesting, pay for ballot, lack of audit trail, ID and verification issues, and various other flaws in our absentee ballot system are not a far worse problem for democracy than Trump's Queens bred vulgarity is just sad and dishonest.
The same writers who have no problem exposing billions in PPP fraud in a system with extensive kyc, aml procedures, 2 factor authentication and real ID, somehow turn mute with the thought a no ID, live ballot, zero chain of custody system could be hacked with billions in unregulated funds flowing into elections in
Here is the thing. Perhaps the lack of interest by the coastal navel gazers in ballot integrity would be credible IF they hadn't spent 4 years lapping up the Russia collusion hoax, Kavanaugh pulling the train, Quid pro Joe Ukraine corruption ( with gas tycoon turned artist Hunter).
But hey, all your efforts did rid us of those mean tweets and get us massive inflation, dead marines and hundreds of hostages in Afghanistan, Covid monomania, and an armed capitol helmed by a dementia patient. So there's that to tell your grandchildren.
You think it's Trump's vulgarity that leads people to view him as a threat to democracy? I thought his constant unsupported claims of election theft alongside actual evidence that he *was* working to steal the election himself -- Eastman memos, his browbeating state election officials, browbeating Pence, his *constant* gaslighting, etc. -- were the biggest threats. I mean, he's a dick, but that's not a noticeable threat to democracy.
The fact Minnesota sends live ballots in the mail without any pre-verification of ID, address, or registration status is a vastly greater threat to democracy than Trump bloviating about being "robbed". Stacey Abrams, Hillary Clinton and dozens of Democrats have bloviated in a similar manner to similar effect. The Minnesota rules (as just one example) are specifically designed to make voter fraud unprosecutable. It is not surprising the illegal harvesting, pay for ballot, zero chain of custody enforcement, and simply raw fraud have flourished. The Dems are not dumb and they know the fraud goes on. In their internal caucuses, they now have 3 factor authentication and address verification before voting. For real.
Now there's a good example of what Jonathan called the "firehose of falsehood" technique. Bad timing, though, claiming that it's just about "bad tweets" right when a tape comes out of Trump justifying the "Hang Mike Pence" chant.
☝🏼this person is exactly the kind of partisan clown the article is about. Well done!
Says someone who apparently believes that puerile namecalling can be a worthwhile contribution to public discourse.
Imagine using “puerile name calling” as a counter argument in defense of Trump. 🙄
I wasn't defending Trump. I was rebuking you.
You are correct. The article is not a serious discussion of ballot integrity issues. Like most modern journalism, it is simply low cost, bad therapy to make mediocre intellects feel superior to *dumb Trumpers*. Guffaw guffaw. Five seconds of Google research would land you on dozens of efforts by Democrats to address ballot integrity concerns. But like 1984, these people go down the memory hole once it becomes apparent their argument might support Trump's concerns
Just another well-written, “reasonable,” attempt at gaslighting the public about the 2020 election. Please save your breath.
Trump's stolen-election gaslighting is truly deplorable. Although I voted for Trump, MAGA friends accused me of succumbing to Stockholm syndrome when I told them I've seen no proof that enough fraudulent votes were tallied in any state carried by Biden to have changed the outcome there, even if all of them were cast for him, let alone proof that the net effect of fraudulent voting put Biden over the top. Indeed, proving the latter would be well-nigh impossible. The occurrence of vote fraud could be proved in various ways -- e.g., by showing that people came to polling places after others had voted in their names and were allowed to vote after producing proof of ID, or that more mail ballots were tallied than distributed. But determining how such detected fraudulent voting affected an outcome would be another matter; it would require ascertaining who each fraudulent vote was cast for, which would surely be infeasible.
One of the perverse consequences of Trump's gaslighting is that it distracts attention from bona fide election-integrity issues, concerning which I'd like to raise a couple of questions:
If, in a two-party system, Party A persistently espouses measures tending to minimize opportunity for vote fraud, vote buying, improper influence, voting by non-citizens, etc. (voter ID requirements; restrictions on ballot harvesting; purging the registration rolls of dead voters, names with fake addresses or P.O. box numbers, and names of people who are registered to vote in multiple states; distributing mail ballots only to people who request them; requiring mail ballots to be enclosed in signed "security" envelopes marked with the last four digits of the voter's SSN, checking the numbers, and comparing the signatures with signatures on driver's licenses or other documents on record; keeping vote drop-boxes under continual surveillance while they are unlocked; etc.) and Party B persistently opposes such measures would it not be reasonable to assume that the leaders of both parties believe that, to the extent it occurs, such illicit practices will generally be of more benefit to Party B's candidates?
And would it not also be reasonable to assume that this implicit cross-party consensus is correct?
I have no problem with requiring state-issued ID in order to vote. It's reasonable to ask someone who cares enough to vote to ensure that they have a valid ID.
There are other issues you mentioned that I think are less helpful or even counter-productive.
1) Matching signatures. We are increasingly less likely to sign anything on paper (or otherwise) in the current day and age. The last document I signed was my driver's license form several years ago. My signature is horrifically inconsistent (though obviously there are some consistent features). Also, there are people who suffer various kinds of trauma (physical or mental) which can literally completely change their signature. I suppose one could argue in those cases they should go get their ID updated. The other issue I have with signature matching is that it's done by a bunch of people and there will naturally be both variance among individuals, and it provides yet another method by which a person can attempt to influence the results: since one party is over-represented in mail-in ballots, the other party can decide to maximize the number of ballots that are disqualified through requiring signature matches based in degree of match. If we're going to use a system to determine if the "real" person who should have provided the ballot is that person, then we need something other than a signature. Time to get more creative.
2) Does one party really oppose removing dead people from the voter polls? I don't see a defensible reason to avoid removing dead voters. I don't see how it can even *be* an issue. Plus, it seems comparatively *trivial* to compare a record of who voted (which we have) with death certificates to determine how big a problem this actually *is*. This feels more like a rhetorical / political "issue" that's not an issue of any kind in reality. I've been wrong before though.
3) Regarding PO Boxes: isn't it already required to have a *real* address, and NOT a PO Box? Also, it seems comparatively trivial to discover fake addresses on registrations; USPS can do such things fairly easily, save in instances where there's no technical "street" address. As I understand it, in those cases, the voter must provide a detailed description of their address (whatever that means), and cannot use a PO box. Seems like an incredibly small number of votes in that case though.
4) Harvesting -- I vacillate on this. On the one hand, I think laws against harvesting are likely to hurt the honest people without stopping fraud in the least. If you're willing to commit voter fraud, not being allowed to harvest ballots isn't going to stop you. That said, I think laws to protect voters make sense. What I don't understand is why ballot harvesting is required at all. We have a universal postal system, do we not? That was certainly the plan. I believe if you choose to live outside the postal system, it's on you to get your own ballot in, and don't have much objection to you having to go to some county office, show your ID, and hand them your ballot. I believe if you choose to or are forced to vote by mail, getting your ballot mailed in time to be at least postmarked by election day is not unreasonable, the same way someone needs to make sure they have an opportunity to vote in person on election day. Your "election day" is simply a few days earlier. Long story short, I think laws restricting ballot harvesting to certain organizations (say, the USPS among others) are not necessarily a bad thing. But I also don't think they are likely to have a huge impact on fraud. Rather, they will simply result in more people forgetting to mail in ballots or otherwise not vote. Given that mail in ballots tend to favor one party, I can understand why one party wants to limit that as much as possible, and the other wants to make it as permissible as possible. I don't think either party is working for the best of the election system as a whole in this.
I'm generally in favor of providing proper security to ensure the validity of the voting process. I simply am not convinced that we have some giant problem. I think that is mostly gaslighting until someone can show that it was done at some large scale using these techniques in recent times.
1) I concede that signature matching is problematic for all the reasons you mention, of which the most important, IMO, is the subjectivity problem.
You say we need to come up with some other way of ensuring that mail ballots are sent to the right people. My conclusion is different: distribution of mail ballots should be restricted. They should not be sent, willy nilly, to every address in the voter registration rolls, one per each and every registered voter, as was done in some states for last year's national election. Such "universal" distribution of mail ballots largely nullifies the advantages of secret-ballot elections. When all but a few voters go to the polls and cast their votes in seclusion, opportunity for vote buying or voter coercion is nil, as a would-be vote buyer or arm-twister would be unable to ascertain whether promises to vote for a certain candidate in exchange for payment or to avert retaliation are kept. When ballots are mailed to everyone on the rolls at their addresses of record, however (as is done in Hawaii, Washington, Colorado, Oregon, and Utah, all but the last of which are deep blue) and ballot harvesting is allowed, vote buying and coercive influence become feasible again, as buyers and arm-twisters can collect and deliver ballots from their payees or patsies after making sure they're marked in the desired way.
2) and 3) According to a 2012 study by the nonpartisan Pew Center for the States, more than 1.8 million dead people were listed in US voter registration rolls, approximately 2.75 million were registered in more than one state, and approximately 24 million registrations -- one in every eight -- were invalid or significantly inaccurate.
According to a study by the Government Accountability Institute, more than 30 percent of the votes cast in Rhode Island in the 2016 national election were from people with no social security number or driver's license number on record.
In its 2001 report, the bipartisan National Commission on Federal Election Reform noted that the National Voter Registration Act of 1993 (aka "the motor voter law") had made it more difficult to purge invalid entries from voter registration rolls. State and local elections officials testified to the Commission that voter lists were consequently swollen with larger numbers of named voters who had moved, died, or were no longer eligible to vote in the jurisdiction where they were registered and that duplicate registration was also common. The report also noted that a number of local jurisdictions had compared their voter lists to census numbers and found that they had thousands, sometimes tens of thousands, more registered voters than people. Yet proposals to purge the rolls of invalid entries were controversial. As the Commission put it, "the issue of voter lists now has well-drawn battle lines," with "some" protesting that such purging was a strategem to suppress minority voting. You can check if you want, but I'm pretty sure the motor-voter law was pushed primarily by Democrats and likewise that most of the opponents of roll-purging were Democrats.
4) Ballot harvesting. In addition to the potential for vote buying and coercive influence by ballot harvesters in states with liberal distribution of mail ballots, there is also the possibility of illicit tampering by the harvesters -- who, instead of faithfully delivering collected ballots to to a post office or drop-box, could first steam open security envelopes, extract and examine the enclosed ballots, replace and deliver those marked for the "right" candidate, and either simply discard ballots marked for the "wrong" candidate or replace them with blank ballots (which are not difficult to produce by copying) marked for the "right" candidate. This is not just a far-fetched figment of my febrile imagination. https://nypost.com/2020/08/29/political-insider-explains-voter-fraud-with-mail-in-ballots/
Have Democrats opposed voter ID requirements? Yes, indeed! https://thehill.com/video/in-the-news/202804-biden-fight-back-against-voter-id-efforts
"his libertarian commitment to LGBT equality".
Any specifics on the meaning of "LGBT equality"?
Or is it "bigotry" to seek such specifics?