Turnout is key. If we get the same subset of the eligible we usually get, then they deserve what they get, but if a pandemic and historic levels of racial upheaval can’t drive better turnout, nothing can.
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That’s because California says that absentee ballots have to be postmarked by election day. Compared to Florida which says VBM ballots have to be received by the Supervisor of Elections by election day.
Both models have problems…the CA model being, final results can take a lot longer to be received and tallied (and will certainly not be done on election night), the FL model being that votes are at the whim of the postal service’s delivery schedule, and that creates uncertainty in voters as to when they have to mail their ballots in (my answer is, the day after you receive it in the mail!!). Both models also suffer from issues regarding giving Mail voters a chance to remedy their ballots if their is a question concerning their signatures…which can further delay final tallies.
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Big banks have incentives to do so and a lot more money thrown at it than any red state is going to throw at it, and at this point, many blue states.
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Yes, of course, but if we’re strictly talking about voting systems rather than social media manipulation like 2016, online is likely the most vulnerable at this time. It’s hard to imagine Russians somehow placing enough people in districts all over the country to sabotage the results.
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True, but I wouldn’t expect any district to do away with all other voting alternatives. Some kind of mail ballots would still be available for those who need it.
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BLM demonstrations must convert over to Voter Suppression marches. Now is the time before the GOP gets their machine rolling.
Not even remotely feasibe.
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538 has a piece on swing states with 3 or more polls in last 6 weekks.
TX Trump 1.5
GA Trump 1.0
PA Biden 0.1
NC Biden 0.5
FL Biden 2.5
WI Biden 6.2
MI Biden 7.6
FL is currently drifting blue–for now. And TX looks doable, but yes, more of a stretch than GA
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For an election, you don’t need it to break down all the time, you just need it to break down during the peak of the election. And things on the internet do break down all the time, we’ve just gotten used to it. Today, for example, there are reported outages for Google Fiber, Cox and Buckeye. Sure, most of them don’t last that long, and most things people can work around. And as for data breaches, we’ve been getting sent new credit cards on a regular basis not because our card was stolen, but because it was included in yet another tens-of-millions-of-records breach at some retailer or payments processor.
Sure, you could in theory engineer a voting system that was resilient to all that kind of stuff at the 0.01% level (which is what you need to keep errors under 10,000 votes). But in practice it ain’t going to happen any time soon. And paper is really so much easier to make work from where we are now.
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I live in Oregon. We’ve done this shit for years, along with Washington, Colorado, etc., of course. Have other states made any effort to see how voting is handled in 100% vote-by-mail jurisdictions? It seems like a no-brainer, but if your goal is actually to suppress the vote, maybe you’re not interested in learning how to make it work.
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The very big problem for the Trump campaign, is Michigan and Wisconsin.
Trump got a pretty narrow EC victory in 2016. He really doesn’t have a lot of flexibility in surrendering states. And is certainly not looking at expanding the map.
That list includes 5 states equal to 70 EVs, wiping out his victory margin. And, IMO, I think they are at great risk of losing AZ, but isn’t included (I assume due to lack of 3 or more polls in last 6 weeks), which is another 11 EVs.
Just those changes puts Biden at 333 EVs vs. 205 Trump. And there are danger signs cropping up in a lot of other places…MT, IA, TX, GA…I wouldn’t be feeling safe about SC or KY at this point, either.
The larger point here is, the sort of election that would flip a GA or even a TX, probably flips a lot of other states, too. They aren’t fighting for a close victory right now, they are trying to hold off a landslide disaster.
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The problem is, you have been doing it for years. Most states haven’t, at least on a massive scale. They are trying to scale up an operation rapidly, in the middle of a pandemic and economic recession happening.
That’s a recipe for a lot of screw ups. Factor in bad actors involved in implementing that scale up, and yeah…we get Tierney publishing articles like this. (BTW, good on her for getting this out).
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This would obviously have to be a federal initiative, and last time I checked, they’ve got more money than any bank. Again, not a tech or money issue, but a political issue.
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You must remember, MONEY has a detailed audit trail, the IRS and LE can always find out who, what, how, and where money moved, to and from and usually for what reason.
The government has a good reason for that, so it can TAX IT.
Voting on the other hand is “supposed” to be completely secret. It is designed to be difficult to figure out who voted for whom. It is much more like a “cash transaction”. Once the cash is pooled, it’s near impossible to figure out what money came from whom.
Voting is unique in the fact that we demand it be;
- Easy
- Secure
- SECRET
Pick any two.
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Whenever I see the phrase “Why X Is Going To Be More Effed That Anyone Realized” I am reminded that saying “We Told You So” only ever serves to remind your audience why they ignored you the first time.
We could always expand the voting days, open the polling stations on the Saturday before the first Tuesday, and leave them open until Tuesday until there’s no one left in line. And expand Mail In voting.
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If you weren’t at the whims of Ron “Superfan” DeSantis and his apparatchik SoS, yes, but the proposal I was responding to was specifically about online voting.
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Desperate to steal as much as he can from the Trumpholes before he’s thrown off of the campaign, Brad Parscale claimed 300,000 people had already signed up for the Bunker Boy’s Death Rally in Tulsa Oklahoma.
Huh?
First off, the venue where Morbidly Obese is speaking holds 19,199 people. MAXIMUM.
Second no social distancing or masks will be used, making it the world’s largest petri dish for the Donnievirus .
Third, anybody trying to get tickets has to sign a waiver saying if they get the Donnievirus and get sick, they can’t sue the campaign.
Fourth, the population of Tulsa is a bit over 401 thousand. So in order to swallow this, we have to believe three-quarters of the population of the city will show up to listen to the Failed Mail-order Meat Salesman.
My question is where are they going to stay?
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Given what DeSantis is doing with Covid data, I find it oddly endearing that you expect ballot counting to be done in Florida on the up and up.
Assume Trump will get 98% of the vote in places like Florida and Georgia, he doesn’t want to be embarrassed again by losing the popular vote nationwide.
I live in Washington and our vote by mail works perfectly but in close elections it might take days to count all the ballots. I wonder how the second wave of the pandemic, especially in open Republican states will effect the vote. Many Republicans might really be pissed off at their elected Cult leaders.
In the end I don’t think it will make much difference because the Democratic turnout will be overwhelming. We want to send the malignant President to prison.
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