This goes beyond mere dog whistle.
…and I couldn’t find another more subject appropriate article to get my licks in at Trump this morning.
Sorry.
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Maybe Iowa and Nevada would like to consider moving up to the 18th century concept of, you know, voting?
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The lion is King of the Jungle.
EXACTLY!
Caucus’s favor older retired people. How is a single mother or the working poor supposed to take time out of their already busy lives to show up to a caucus? But frankly that kinda the point for many caucus supporters, it negates the needs and will of younger/poorer/workers in favor of older/wealthier retirees who have the time to spend on such things.
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Right behind caucusing in general. The era of the caucus is over. All that remains is how much damage clinging to caucuses will cause.
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Eh, I think caucusing itself is behind gradual ‘let’s see who won in X state before we let Y state vote!’ primary systems and the Electoral College.
If, by “conspiracy theorists,” you mean the Branch Bernardians, I’m sure you know what they’ll say.
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That that’s just wacowhacko?
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Oh, FFS.
Because by all means, let’s let the GRU decide who would win.
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Every ballot goes out with a unique return envelope that has a bar code generated just for that voter. The ballot has to be returned in that envelope and the envelope is scanned, then the name and signature on the envelope is matched against records on file. Once that has been verified, the ballot itself (which is anonymous) is taken out by other folks and scanned separately for actual vote counting.
It is true that hackers could influence the system by getting into the registration database and adding thousands of fake registrations with fake names and signatures but those ballots would still go out by mail and would raise flags if thousands went to a couple of addresses.
There is also email/sms integration, so I know when my ballot has been sent out to me, I know when my completed ballot has been received, and I know when it has been verified and tabulated. Duplicate ballots would raise red flags as well because people would get notices that their vote has been counted when they haven’t really returned the ballot yet and hopefully notify elections.
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Thank you for explaining that. Pretty damn good method. It should go national.
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Then let’s throw out the whole fucking anti-Democratic Caucus and just force them to go to ballot voting.
I’m totally on board with the fact that the telephonic call-in is hackable.
But FFS, how long do we have to let Iowa have a tiny subset of their tiny amount of voters have a disparate impact on how we select the nominee.
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IIRC, the Iowa caucuses are basically rooms full of people. They go stand in the corner of their favorite candidate and a count is taken. Voters for the loser go to their second choice and so on until one winner emerges. That name is then sent to the state party, which dispenses it to the media. As others have noted, it’s geared towards people who have nothing to do but stand around a gymnasium all night. In Iowa, where the population doesn’t reflect the national electorate, and the caucus voters don’t represent the Iowa electorate.
My soapbox. Rolling primaries with regions randomly selected 8 years in advance so everyone knows where their organizations need to focus. Do the Southwest first, then the Northeast, then the South, etc. Next time around it might be the Northwest, CA and HI, the Southwest, etc. Give the entire country a chance to reflect their values on the candidates they want running. Repubes don’t want to go along? Fuck 'em. One obnoxious state or other has a law that says they have to be first? Fuck 'em. Let’s get this thing dragged into the 21st century.
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But the Jungle is where those dark skinned people come from…
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…and that that vote was freely cast with no coercion. That is an under-appreciated risk in vote by mail systems. Peoples votes can be monitored by others - abusive spouses, overbearing employers. Assisted living facilities would be ripe for abuse.
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Your airline frequent flyer account has more security mechanisms than a virtual caucus would be able to build out in the time available.
So much has to be done - and debated - before a viable system could even be prototyped.
For example - as noted - how is validity established - and what information will be willingly shared to make the process function -
Remember
any human can make a mistake - - to really F-things up you need a computer!
Is this confirmed? It seems too stupid even for the Trumpsters.
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I’m sorry. There’s an accusation that the DNC had undue control over state caucuses? And that changing them will give the DNC less power so the DNC opposes it? I think that misses the mark. The caucuses tend to be the place where the most passionate (and raucous) supporters (rather than the majority of supporters) have the power.
I’m just saying that the DNC is working to rig things one way or another, so clearly they crunched the numbers, and realized that expanding the voter base there would harm their preferred candidate(s).