Jan. 6 Committee Obtains Draft Trump-Era Order Laying Out Plan To Seize Voting Machines | Talking Points Memo

Do better than this.

I’m with you. She is a willing participant in the destruction of our democracy.

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Hey, I was reading about this stuff this morning and saw some information that speaks to this. It seems Tish James, the state AG, is pursuing a civil case into the variable property valuations, while Alvin Bragg, the Manhattan (technically “New York County”) AG is investigating it as a criminal matter. The hurdle there is higher, because to make it fly you have to somehow prove that Trump knowingly and willfully did that for his own financial advantage. So has he ever admitted it? Will someone testify to that? Can it be proven otherwise? So that moved me toward a slightly better understanding of that facet and I thought you’d be interested.

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Awesome! Thanks, Matt.

ETA: The Atlanta DA’s grand jury over DT’s attempted Georgia election fraud is gonna be LIT if she manages to get one seated.

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Yep. This is the one I want to see break first.

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Since Trump had already fired Chris Krebs for declaring the election secure and Antrim County Michigan had acknowledged and explained the error, he would have had a hard time convincing people that voting machines needed to be seized. Dominion would have torched his ass.

I would expect the Secret Service has been taping every utterance in the Oval office since audio tape was invented. And that they seriously upgraded after 1974 so that they catch even fly farts.

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Mail in ballots are the answer, not more machines. In Colorado almost all ballots are sent out by mail and returned by mail or into drop boxes.

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In Virginia many of the “spoiled” ballots that can’t be scanned are still counted. They’re counted by hand as long as the voter’s intention is clear. The decision to include or exclude every hand counted ballot is done by a committee that includes Republicans, Democrats, and Independents when they’re available. Very few ballots are excluded, and the decision to exclude any of them is not taken lightly.

ETA: you are correct in stating that hand counting ballots is tedious. It’s doable, but it’s not easy.

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Also true in Wisconsin. When I was doing the ballot scan for mail-ins in Wisconsin, a failed ballot would be run through the machine several times. After continued failures, the ballot would put aside to be manually tabulated. I think out of the 1600 or so that I scanned, there were fewer than 20 that required manual attention.

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That’s progress, moving along from “some of my best friends are negroes”.

OK, we all knew he wanted to do this and was talked out of it by one or 2 sane voices in the WH, but honestly, isn’t the fact that he didn’t do it a point of defense for him?

Hell, if there’s that much corruption in the electoral system, it could be done with paper ballots, too: just have millions of fake pre-voted ballots ready to replace the real ones. Or just fake the count and don’t even bother actually counting the ballots. You know, like Vladimir does, and his buddies in Belarus.

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Duh. Worked for Biden.

What are you talking about? At 50¢ a pop, we’d be able to retire the public debt within a year and never have to pay interest on government loans ever again. (Yeah, I know the math doesn’t work, but the concept is valid)

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Sorry for the late reply, but yes, we’ve had that app for years. Unfortunately it relies on poll workers updating the info, and when they are busy, they often don’t bother. It’s good to get a general sense of where to go or at least when the busy times are. Being able to vote at any location is great, we just need more locations during early voting!

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One of the things I learned when I attending a meeting that had one the St. Louis County BOE commissioners do a presentation on out new voting machines was that it had been very hard to get Republican poll workers to go to North St. Louis County, no problem with getting Dems.
The other thing I notices when I was playing around with the app is to actually see where the polling places were located. It was interesting to see where in some parts of the county they were clustered, whereas in other parts of the county they were spaced out. It got me wondering why. Well then it hit me my assigned polling places, the only place I’ve ever voted at has never changed or been moved. Whereas some precincts were located in public schools, and with school shootings, tightening up school security became the priority. So in the next precinct over from me they moved the polling place from an elementary school to across the street to a senior living center. Made it easy for the seniors until COVID. Then they moved it back to the school.
I may have said this but I use the app to see the wait times at my polling place, and my polling place has the most available parking of any of the other polling places near me. So in reality I use it as a guestimate.

There’s a big voting center near us that has been in what used to be a double-decker indoor mall and is now a community college campus. I can’t tell you how many hours I have spent waiting in lines there to vote. Now it’s in the city’s new development office building, a super green structure where they recycle toilet water (and have those signs like at the zoo where they explain in detail the process). Unfortunately the line is generally half parking garage stairwell and half standing in the courtyard admiring the native plantings. I’ve got to say that if you have to stand in line two hours or more here, indoors with air conditioning beats standing in the sun when it’s in the 90s. On Election Day there are precinct polling stations all over, and it’s not a far walk although I don’t think I could do it now. The last couple of years I’ve tried to vote in places where the line is going to be mostly outside. I think it was a 2020 election where the location near us was an 1930s elementary school where the line doubled back through all the hallways before you voted in the cafeteria (the school was remote due to Covid). No thank you. I stood in line elsewhere.

The longest line I ever had to stand in was at my assigned polling place, our local community center, in 2008. The room on the 2nd floor where we vote in is in the middle of a hallway. So we snaked past that room, down the length of the hallway, turned the corner, went into a room with two doorways, came out the second doorway, snaked up the short length of hallway to get to the room with the machines. The worst part of all this, the line did keep moving, was some guy called his girlfriend to get him some McDonalds.
During COVID they moved the polling place to the first floor, into one of the gyms. The line was out the door, but since the gym door was just a few feet from the outside door, it wasn’t that long of a line to wait in. By then we had all paper ballots and the tables had screens, and all the tables were spread out.
The elementary school I mentioned previously was where I went to school, I don’t know where they set the voting booths since they didn’t do that when I attended school there.
It was just fun to see where all the polling places where with the app.
(my sister lives in Austin and some of the polling places are in grocery stores, now that interesting)

I think the last time I voted in a grocery store, it was some inconsequential run-off for school board or something, quite a long time ago now. I squeaked in at the last possible moment and the only other voter there, relieved she had squeaked in too, was telling the poll-workers that she was on her way to a family get-together, and that “if there’s one thing my family does, it’s vote!”.

My husband pointed out that it was Lucy Baines Johnson, lol.

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