COVID-19

[hodad]

Expanding mail- in ballots (outlawed in France because of fraud) is not the recipe for secure elections (IMO).

I've said it before and will say it again: the 2020 election in my state was the most scrutinized in state history--scrutiny overseen by a Republican governor and SOS--and no evidence of any significant fraud was found--I'm not even sure if there were even any individual cases found. Arizona's 2020 results were likewise heavily scrutinized--in that case by a very partisan and conspiracy-minded outside group. And this group, for all their bias going in, found no evidence of the massive vote fraud they were anticipating.

It's wonderful that you display such consistency in citing something that happened in France in the '70s--your sticktuitiveness is on full display, and I suppose you are to be commended for your tenacity in refusing to let go of a data point from 50 years ago when more recent information would not support your opinion. Well done, John.

 

[JohnRoberts]

Thanks I try to be consistent when the fact don't change.

You are conflating two issues. The mail in vote fraud in France and law there is objective historical fact. If the times have changed since the 70s why don't the French use mail in voting now? (Rhetorical). There is always some small amount of voter fraud in every election. It needs to be held down below statistical significance.

At the risk of getting too esoteric about election policy the system is designed to instill confidence in the outcome to maintain stability for the federal government. Further the electoral college is crafted to make narrow victories appear more decisive (so voters will accept even close elections). It is difficult to properly grasp how smart our founders were.

I will throw you a bone. ex-president Trump is not helping voter confidence with his dogged insistence that the last election was stolen. There were shenanigans but they don't appear to be statistically significant. The actual elephant in the room regarding fairness of that election was the unilateral bias in media to underreport bad news about democrats, and over-report bad news about republicans.

Polls subsequent to the vote suggest that President Biden would have lost more than enough votes to throw the election over to ex-President Trump, if the Hunter laptop news was not suppressed (twitter banned the NY Post for reporting about the laptop). IMO that is what ex president Trump should be ranting about. I am more angry about that partisan news banning which IMO pretty clearly altered the election outcome.

Some don't think its a coincidence that Homeland security announced a "Disinformation Governance Board" (cough) within a week of Elon Musk buying Twitter to get the left's thumb off that social media flow. Any similarity to George Orwell's "Ministry of truth" is purely coincidental.

My apologies to the forum for this veer, but I feel this is very important especially now as we prepare for a mid term election only months away that experts (smarter than me) predict could be a red wave. I can't predict the future but suggest we need to be extremely diligent and alert to maintain vote integrity.

How to fix media is less obvious, I hope Musk has some success with his efforts to clean up Twitter. I might stop ignoring Twitter after that.

JR

 

[fallout]

I've said it before and will say it again: the 2020 election in my state was the most scrutinized in state history--scrutiny overseen by a Republican governor and SOS--and no evidence of any significant fraud was found

The government auditing the government is not exactly my idea of 'scrutiny'. Infosec is part of what I do for a living and audits simply don't work like that.

 

[hodad]

unilateral bias in media to underreport bad news about democrats, and over-report bad news about republicans.

2 posssibilities:
1. This is your bias causing you to perceive unilateral underreporting (Off the top of my head I could pretty easily come up with a dozen Trump scandals that I'd consider underreported. You might not see it that way.)
2. There was simply more scandal to report on the Republican side. Outside of Hunter Biden's laptop (the source, authenticity, and chain of custody of which still merit a great deal of skepticism), what else is there that was so terrible? Trump's children were involved in numerous questionable ventures, with $ totals well in excess of anything Hunter Biden is accused of, and they were working in the White House.

Polls subsequent to the vote suggest that President Biden would have lost more than enough votes to throw the election over to ex-President Trump

Wishes and fishes. I could say the same about the Comey folderol with Huma Abedin's laptop in 2016 (a move that was likely forced by Giuliani's allies in the NY FBI office--still waiting for Horowitz to "get around" to looking into that one)--but no one can say for sure what would've happened, October surprises are nothing new, and restricting voting access does nothing to fix any of it.

There were shenanigans

Outside of a handful of cases of individual voter fraud (which seem to skew heavily to your side, btw), whaddaya got? Nothing but some baseless suspicions?

I can tell you for a fact that Republican legislative responses have already had a negative impact on voting access (see Texas.) Stupid (or crafty--or craftily stupid) Republicans in my state have managed to cut "motor voter" voting registrations in half this year--along with numerous other restrictions to actual voting that we have yet to see the effects of.

*****
An honest Republican would admit:
Republicans are no longer capable of winning a majority vote in the US--and in growing numbers of states (mine included) they're struggling mightily to hang onto a bare majority of the vote in formerly safe red states. However, Republicans do well in low turnout elections. So the only winning strategy for Republicans is to suppress voting, to thwart access to the ballot box, and use their already gerrymander-aided legislative majorities to gerrymander even more brutally, diluting the voting power of Democrats as much as they possibly can (a la DeSantis.)

But Republicans won't admit that in public--heck, some of them can't even admit it to themselves.

 

[JohnRoberts]

Honest republicans?

Good luck in Nov.

JR

 

[scott2000]

Shut the Brewery down and the annoying ideological idiots will just meander to other parts of the forum with their frothing ol mouths spewing foolosophy and bile erywhere, lol. Did I just say that!

Now even more excited about the new DAOC

 

[shabtek]

Now even more excited about the new DAOC

is that the congresswomen from nyc?

...the electoral college is crafted to make narrow victories appear more decisive (so voters will accept even close elections).

JR

that statement smells funny

 

[scott2000]

is that the congresswomen from nyc?

lol...
Hadn't thought of that..
analag's prophetic statement just adds more excitement to his next thing imo..

 

[AnalogPackrat]

I see: a nefarious plan to improve access to free & fair elections. Freakin' Demonrats are the worst!

I remember when Democrats had actual concern for voting integrity and wanted more audits and scrutiny of voting machines and infrastructure. Now they run away from that.

And most countries in the world, including nearly all of Europe, Mexico, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Korea, Brazil, etc require ID to vote. It is the simplest, cheapest, least intrusive step to ensure election integrity. It isn't onerous or racist ID is required in the US to: open a bank account, apply for a job, drive on public roads, rent a house/apartment, buy a gun, obtain most gov benefits, etc. And no one complains about the requirement for those things.

Abusive "ballot harvesting" targeting nursing homes and assisted living facilities is immoral and should be illegal. Mail-in balloting should be the exception, not the rule. It should be reserved for those serving overseas and be strictly controlled. These are not racist ideas.

(On a less facetious not, the latest variants--one in the NY area, two in S. Africa--merit some concern. Apparently, having had Omicron BA1 does little or nothing to protect against the S. African variants, so that could be an issue.)

Let's all hide in our basements again.

 

[hodad]

Let's all hide in our basements again.

Brilliant response. Pat yourself on the back for your witty bon mot.

 

[AnalogPackrat]

Brilliant response. Pat yourself on the back for your witty bon mot.

I watched neighbors, work colleagues, and friends obediently hide for well over a year. Some have yet to recognize the evil that was done to them.

 

[JohnRoberts]

JohnRoberts said:
...the electoral college is crafted to make narrow victories appear more decisive (so voters will accept even close elections).

that statement smells funny

Our founders studied every form of government that predated our founding. To hold a "representative republic" together the citizens need to believe that the leaders are truly representing them. Recall that our break away from GB was blamed on taxation without representation.

A simple majority vote would not return more than a single digit win. The public would not be as confident about such a vote as how decisive the electoral college accounting appears.

There is more to the story as even hundreds of years ago our founders were worried about densely populated cities holding too much power over the frontier states, as they would with simple majority voting. This was before we had fly-over states, but the concept still has merit.

JR

PS: Of course the city mice don't agree and think the country mice should just shut up and let the city mice control everything. The electoral college is routinely attacked.

 

[hodad]

A simple majority vote would not return more than a single digit win.

"would not necessarily." In fact it's returned a win in the millions--for the losing candidate. That too, becomes quite the concern--especially when this imbalance of population vs. electoral votes consistently skews to one party's advantage. But I'm sure the founders didn't give a crap about that.

 

[Brian Roth]

I try to keep out of these discussions.....

I have lived in "flyover country" my entire life. I guess the folks in NYC and Cali, etc should decide everything because of their larger population? If so, I can see reasons why some more "radical" folks want to secede from the USA...I'm not one of those, FWIW.

Bri

 

[hodad]

I have lived in "flyover country" my entire life. I guess the folks in NYC and Cali, etc should decide everything because of their larger population? If so, I can see reasons why some more "radical" folks want to secede from the USA...I'm not one of those, FWIW.

I get that, but JR and Republicans always see exactly one side of the issue. When someone can lose the popular vote by 3 million yet wins the electoral college, don't you see why those 3 million folks would wonder why a Montanan's vote counts for so much more than theirs? And I would never paint you with this brush, but imagine how apoplectic the modern Republican party would feel if Dems were winning elections because of a handful of small states with lots of black and brown and gay people? This isn't about the wisdom of the founders or any originalist nonsense--it's only right as long as it works in their favor.
I see both sides of the argument myself, but I worry that the imbalance is growing too extreme. If Trump had eked out a win in 2020, he still would have lost by almost 7 million votes. 7 million. That's like 12 Wyomings' worth of people, and about 25 Wyomings' worth of 2020 voters.

 

[Brian Roth]

Sigh...I dug this hole for myself. Going along with this line of thought, the only way "out" is for the USA to split into two different countries....east/west coast and the middle states.

I am a libertarian that leans a bit to the left. I'd have to rethink living in that "middle states" country, but no idea where I'd go. I don't like the coasts. Even Florida is going off the hook these days.

Bri

 

[hodad]

You are conflating two issues. The mail in vote fraud

I disagree. In Georgia, thousands of absentee (ie, mailed in or dropped off) ballots were scrutinized by the Georgia Bureau of Investigation--down to signature matching. They found a handful of questionable signatures, and none of those turned out to be vote fraud. (If for some reason you're speaking about states that exclusively use vote-by-mail, then I guess we could discuss all the massive fraud in Oregon's election's since 1993--obviously, they've all been shams, I guess. )

Maybe I shouldn't have assumed you'd remember that aspect of the Georgia election audit (because why would you?), or maybe I shouldn't assume that I understood what you meant in the first place. Perhaps both. I have a feeling you'll fight tooth and nail to hang onto that France chestnut.

 

[AnalogPackrat]

The keys to all of this are really simple. First, the Federal Government should have remained small and with limited powers as originally intended. In a large country with a diversity of population, geography, industry, and challenges it is much better to have most decision-making done at state and local levels. Second, some states grew much larger due to concentrated population centers. The problem isn't the small states, it's the large ones.

Direct election of POTUS is a bad idea. We are "The United States of America" and the executive is elected by the states, not the popular vote. The intent is to prevent tyranny of the majority. POTUS must appeal to a wide range of the population of many states, not just a few dense population centers.

Next you'll be banging on about the Senate, I suppose.

 

[john12ax7]

The issue with the current electoral college is it has effectively done the reverse, and created a tyranny of a very small minority. POTUS needs to appeal to an even smaller segment of the population than even a simple majority would require. Only the votes of the privileged few in select swing states matter. The individual votes of most are effectively worthless.

 

[JohnRoberts]

Next you'll be banging on about the Senate, I suppose.

I can't read minds, but today's talking point will be about tearing down SCOTUS....

I guess I need to apologize to the forum for triggering this low political bloviation.

JR