Politics And Current Events

[dodint]

Nobody in line at my polling place at 8:30 AM. But I was #69 so somebody voted.

The wife and I were 85 and 86 at our polling place at 9:30am. But our polling place is really small and out of the way. My wife jokingly asked the guy manning the line if we were the youngest ones to come through so far and he said that we were.

[Gaucho]

Twitter users are calling out other Twitter users for still being on Twitter. Peak Twitter indeed.

[robbiestoupe]

Things I can't prove but are pretty confident about:
-Republicans killed off a not-insubstantial portion of their own base by pretending COVID wasn't an issue.
-Republicans are tossing their own ballots with these lawsuits. Likely under the notion that only Dems would file a mail-in ballot despite convenience being something everyone can get behind.

Hate to see it.

For me, the bolded wasn't what did me in. It was voting in Donald Trump as president

[tifosi77]

I can’t imagine the founding fathers wanting to invalidate a vote because of something like that but fascists gonna fascist for the power.

Sure. The Founding Fathers didn't care so much about that...... so long as they were land-owning white men.

The Founding Fathers created a system of government in which the vote of the people only accounted for one of the four vectors of federal power. The members of the other three silos were, in a very real sense, appointed by others. The hard work of the government choosing its own voters was accomplished via the setup of the system, not the mundane fiddling with the particulars after the fact.

[tifosi77]

The Pennsylvania secretary of state’s office has released the names of at least 7,000 voters whose ballots have been flagged for errors, but Levine said that number will grow through Election Day as more ballots arrive — and also because some counties have chosen not to review mail ballots, notify voters of errors or share the information with the state.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics ... p-lawsuit/

@NTP66 This is what my question was getting at the other day. If there's a problem with your mail ballot (e.g. an erroneous date) are you ever even notified or is the ballot simply scrubbed. "Fix the glitch", as it were.

[tifosi77]

They did, some interesting data points on there. For one, the majority of people getting their ballots rejected are old people (average age is 68).

It is kind of a funny look, though. Republicans try to flag entire counties with the population centers as 'rife with voter irregularities' (e.g. Democrat voting strongholds), and now there are swaths of ballots getting dumped within one of those counties that are demographically likely to skew Republican.

[tifosi77]

Can't wait for fraud claims when votes are still being counted on Friday because Republicans are making it difficult to count them.

It's the dude on the bicycle meme.

Nobody has really articulated a reasonable explanation for why mail-in early votes aren't actually counted early. In a lot of places, they not only can't be counted when they are received, they can't even be counted until after the election day in-person ballots. Maybe don't publish the results until the polls close, sure, that much I get. But to have this giant stack of ballots sitting around for weeks on end that can't even be counted first in line is goofy. Let the day-of voters be the ones that delay the final tabulation.

[shafnutz05]

Don’t think I’ve fully processed shad abandoning the gop.

If it’s gotten so bad that shad has crossed over, that’s really bad. It’s both encouraging and scary

Things deteriorated rapidly, what can I say.

[tifosi77]

It's never going to happen, and I'm fine with the way that it is. I'm just saying the states or the federal government could make it super easy so everyone has an ID to be able to show it for elections.

Government make something super easy? Pffft. If there was evidence of rampant voter fraud due to not having to show ID, I would consider supporting that. As it stands, it sounds like another thing to add an extra layer of difficulty.

Conceptually, there is no real reason to oppose voter ID, provided all the procedural hurdles are mitigated. In practice, there has been no real example of it in place that hasn't been clearly - in some cases openly - devised to inhibit a very specific type of voter participation.

[DigitalGypsy66]

Can't wait for fraud claims when votes are still being counted on Friday because Republicans are making it difficult to count them.

It's the dude on the bicycle meme.

Nobody has really articulated a reasonable explanation for why mail-in early votes aren't actually counted early. In a lot of places, they not only can't be counted when they are received, they can't even be counted until after the election day in-person ballots. Maybe don't publish the results until the polls close, sure, that much I get. But to have this giant stack of ballots sitting around for weeks on end that can't even be counted first in line is goofy. Let the day-of voters be the ones that delay the final tabulation.

For the last few elections, SC has used the touchscreen machines that print out your votes on a sheet. Then you load it into a machine that both scans your ballot and stores the physical copy for redundancy. In theory, these have already been tabulated and probably get dumped into the totals at 7:01PM (a minute after polls close here).

It's crazy how voting differs from state to state. It's like some states don't want to make it easy to vote??? (That's exactly what's happening)

[dodint]

That's exactly how I voted this morning. Given a blank piece of paper with no writing on it. Feed it into the machine. Pick my candidates. Paper comes out of the machine with writing on it. Feed that into a different machine.

[Viva la Ben]

Don’t think I’ve fully processed shad abandoning the gop.

If it’s gotten so bad that shad has crossed over, that’s really bad. It’s both encouraging and scary

Things deteriorated rapidly, what can I say.

Trading that moderate card for a radical one.
I am proud.

[tifosi77]

Things I can't prove but are pretty confident about:
-Republicans killed off a not-insubstantial portion of their own base by pretending COVID wasn't an issue.
-Republicans are tossing their own ballots with these lawsuits. Likely under the notion that only Dems would file a mail-in ballot despite convenience being something everyone can get behind.

Hate to see it.

For me, the bolded wasn't what did me in. It was voting in Donald Trump as president

I think he means literally killed them off, like they died because you can't possibly be expected to wear a mask all day long*.

This election will be something to watch in places like Florida and Arizona because of this. The results might not be all that different in terms of outcomes, but margins could be surprising.





* Unless you're something like, I don't know, a cardiac surgeon.

[count2infinity]

I still fill in my ballot with a pen. Feel like I’m in the 1800s.

I went around 11 and was #326 at my polling location. No clue if that’s high or low compared to normal.

[robbiestoupe]

We had a somewhat modern version of the Scantron at our polling place. Fill in your choice with a pen and they feed it into a machine to read your choices. I assume the machine is smart enough to warn if an oval wasn't completely filled or if multiple choices were made

[dodint]

Things I can't prove but are pretty confident about:
-Republicans killed off a not-insubstantial portion of their own base by pretending COVID wasn't an issue.
-Republicans are tossing their own ballots with these lawsuits. Likely under the notion that only Dems would file a mail-in ballot despite convenience being something everyone can get behind.

Hate to see it.

For me, the bolded wasn't what did me in. It was voting in Donald Trump as president

I think he means literally killed them off, like they died because you can't possibly be expected to wear a mask all day long*.

This election will be something to watch in places like Florida and Arizona because of this. The results might not be all that different in terms of outcomes, but margins could be surprising.





* Unless you're something like, I don't know, a cardiac surgeon.

Yes, my hunch was that the ~1.4 million surplus deaths or so most likely skewed Republican.

[Viva la Ben]

Our poll has been using scantrons since 2020 iirc.

[mikey]

I still fill in my ballot with a pen. Feel like I’m in the 1800s.

How long of a feather does that pen have...?

[faftorial]

This is the type of machine we use in my county:

Ours looked similar. I don't know, this is a third world county.

They use this method because they end of up with machine counted paper ballots which makes audits/recounts much easier.

[RonnieFranchise]

They need to be able to read a ballot face down. Maybe they do and the poll worker was wrong, but I don't really want anyone standing there reading my (or anyone's) ballot.

[count2infinity]

I still fill in my ballot with a pen. Feel like I’m in the 1800s.

How long of a feather does that pen have...?

Ask Mrs. Meow... she's seen it.

[NTP66]

Source of the post I still fill in my ballot with a pen. Feel like I’m in the 1800s.

Ours moved from electronics ballots to these ink paper ones a few years ago. Backwards.

[tifosi77]

I don't really have a problem with the paper ballots, or at least a method that generates a tangible paper trail.

I haven't voted in person in I don't even know how long, so we sort of by definition have paper ballots.

[Gaucho]

[NTP66]

This election wasn't bad because there were only 4 options on the ballot, but the others... rather just press the full Democrat button like I used to and call it a day.