I suggest you volunteer to be a hand count tabulator at your HOA or some other relatively small election.
Hand tabulating is very difficult and time consuming. And tabulators looking at the same ballots can come up with different results.
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And how do you hack a vote tabulator if it is not connected to the Internet or any Network?
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But is has to be notarized and sent to the precinct of your address on record.
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But they addressed that. Each precinct can only have 1,500 voters. Then they can count faster.
That creates a headache for counties to divide up the present precincts.
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Hand counting is still going to be a horrendous headache because ballots frequently have multiple contests on them.
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even if the president has a reasonable factual predicate for believing that that those instruments of the electoral process are vulnerable to malicious interference by foreign governments
Name anything that isn’t vulnerable to malevolent people.
That’s not a justification for eliminating state jurisdictions and leaving every conspiracy theory up to the federal government to endorse and promote. Why would they deny any?
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And I presume they say the way to pay for this additional expense is “mor tax cuts”?
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This is the very definition of BIG GOVERNMENT.
Each state can determine what’s best for its own people. The federal government cannot. Granted, it doesn’t want to, because it has a different goal than each state.
The vote count is never completed on election night.
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Well, first, you sneak across the border. We have really shitty border control, according to Republicans, so start there. Then, it’s a simple matter of logging in, and… changing some numbers.
Be sure to save changes, then… walk back out. Or blend in and join the Republican Party. Free drugs and all the sex you can stand.
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Is it normal to have a proposed executive order just handed to the press?
And did you notice the date on there is April 2025?
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Right up there with an apathetic and/or poorly informed voter pool. People heard what they wanted to hear and just took things at face value.
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Meanwhile:
"(a threat) one that apparently led the justice to appear at the event remotely instead of in-person as planned.
In rare remarks, Justice Thomas told a crowd of lawyers and students gathered at American University’s law school that he had hoped to attend the event but that a security risk had forced him to alter his plans, according to a recording of the event obtained by The New York Times."
How dare Thomas show concern for others’ civility when he has none for his own.
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Umm, rural areas, which are most of the US, are very different.
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I’ve encountered things along the lines of “well, Germany hand-counts its ballots for elections, and they usually have results the same night, so why can’t we?”
Here is what a ballot looks like for a federal (Bundestag) election in Germany. You have two votes. One goes to your local preferred representative by name, and the winner for your district gets a seat. The other goes to one of the parties, and the parties can then seat additional delegates based on how many of those 2nd votes they get.
In California, ballots usually look more like this.
That’s an example that I found online, but it’s pretty much the norm. In fact, that’s a pretty short one, as those things go. After all, you’re typically choosing a presidential candidate and a senator and a rep, and state senators and assembly members, and judges, and county officials, and several statewide offices, and a couple of bond issues, and however many propositions there are to vote on, and…
So yeah, machine tabulating is pretty clearly the way to go there. With appropriate cross-checks and statistical audits, and the verifiable paper trail, of course.
ETA: The other thing that all the “well I just don’t trust these computer thing-a-ma-jigs” arguments typically miss is this: What happens when the hand-tabulator person records a vote? Hash-marks on scrolls of parchment paper? Or do the precinct results maybe get entered into a … gasp … computer system?
If so, congratulations. You just moved the problem. (And made it more expensive.)
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Yes, but voting locations may have more than one precinct. At least that’s the way it works in Ohio.
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The ‘emergency’ here is a little different. The ‘emergency’ is Congress. Congress just refused to pass legislation that would have accomplished exactly what this executive order tries to do. Most brazen attempt to redefine ‘emergency’ yet.
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Possibly. If your intent is to get it shot down in the court of public opinion before its psycho proponents can get it off the ground. Because it’s not going to fly. Bear in mind this was drafted before it was attempted as legislation that just crashed and burned.
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Israel just struck Iran. Smoke 'em if you got 'em.
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"The power of the presidency is so vast that it is probably a good thing, in retrospect, that only a very few people in this country understood the gravity of Richard Nixon’s mental condition during his last year in the White House. There were moments in that year when even his closest friends and advisers were convinced that the president of the United States was so crazy with rage and booze and suicidal despair that he was only two martinis away from losing his grip entirely and suddenly locking himself in his office long enough to make that single telephone call that would have launched enough missiles and bombers to blow the whole world off its axis or at least kill 100 million people.
. . . But it was mainly a matter of luck that Nixon’s mental disintegration was so obvious and so crippling that by the time he came face to face with his final option, he was no longer able to even recognize it. When the going got tough, the politician who worshiped toughness above all else turned into a whimpering, gin-soaked vegetable… But it is still worth wondering how long it would have taken Haig and Kissinger to convince all those SAC generals out in Omaha to disregard a Doomsday phone call from the president of the United States because a handful of civilians in the White House said he was crazy.
Ah… but we are wandering off into wild speculation again, so let’s chop it off right here. We were talking about the vast powers of the presidency and all the treacherous currents surrounding it…"
— Hunter S Thompson
from: Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’76
Rolling Stone, June 3, 1976
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‘Acts of war unauthorized by Congress’: Trump’s congressional critics denounce Iran strikes
One of the first Democrats to respond to the strikes, Sen. Ruben Gallego (D-Ariz.), condemned the attack on social media, writing that “we can support the democracy movement and the Iranian people without sending our troops to die.”
In a Saturday morning video announcing the strike, Trump warned “the lives of courageous American heroes may be lost and we may have casualties. That often happens in war, but we’re doing this for the future.” It’s unclear if there were casualties.
Other lawmakers, including longtime Iran hawk Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) rejoiced at the joint U.S.-Israel operation, calling it “necessary and long justified.”
Crossing the aisle, Sen. John Fetterman (D-Penn.) joined Graham in cheering on the operation. “President Trump has been willing to do what’s right and necessary to produce real peace in the region,” Fetterman wrote on social media.
Iran says it is in full-scale war with US, Israel and Europe | Iran International
ran’s president said on Saturday the country is facing a full-scale confrontation with the United States, Israel, and Europe, describing the pressure campaign against Tehran as more complex and damaging than the Iran–Iraq war.
“In my view, we are in an all-out war with the United States, Israel, and Europe; they do not want our country to stand on its own feet,” Masoud Pezeshkian said in an interview with the Supreme Leader’s official website.
He said the current war is worse than the Iraq war in the 1980s. “If one understands it properly, this war is far more complex and more difficult than that war.
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