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Speaking of which- the really incredibly blue counties in Atlanta illegally extending early voting hours, what’s going on with that? Is there any way to stop the illegal votes from counting? Of course not.
In 2020, I was on my cousin’s deer lease for the election, watching TV during the day and he said- this was before Trump got up and claimed the election was stolen, mind you- ‘they’re counting them(ballots) just as fast as they can fill em out’. I don’t know if he was referring to Pennsylvania or Arizona or what. But 2020 was weird, the establishment had trashed its trust, and it was apparent that democrats were willing to do things normally beyond the pale out of TDS.
This kind of reaction to the base’s sentiment is natural even if it doesn’t do anything.
AP News "Georgia judge rejects GOP lawsuit trying to block counties from accepting hand-returned mail ballots" says a judge has already reviewed the issue and said they're not violating the law. Apparently the law says that after a certain deadline, the drop boxes have to close and absentee ballots can only be accepted by handing them to an election official... so they kept the offices open so people could hand their ballots to election officials without having to do so on election day when presumably anyone could go to their polling place and hand in an absentee ballot, but at that point they might as well just vote in person (modulo rules about letting you hand in an absentee ballot for someone else; not sure what Georgia's laws say about that).
It is a bit disorganized that they would be deciding to do that last minute... but early voting is new enough and significantly more popular this year, so it's not surprising the election offices were caught off guard by its popularity and needing to increase resources.
There's also the related issue that apparently Cobb county messed up and sent out ballots late, which would be a reason for them to attempt to do their best to make up for their mistake so people could still return their ballots.
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Catholic doctrine distinguishes between a sacrament which is illicit, and one which is invalid. An invalid sacrament is null and void, whereas one which is simply illicit is meerly wrong or sinful, while still retaining its essential function.
I wonder if a similar distinction is appropriate here. Its hard for me to see why votes cast in violation of minor provisions of state election code (such as early voting hours) should be voided. Voters can't be expected to understand the entireity of the state election code. A proper remedy would target the election officials responsible for the violation.
Of course, things like ballots cast by inelligible voters or in the name of others should be tossed out and rendered invalid.
Let’s say you have Area A and Area B. A votes R and B votes D.
A and B are supposed to be open 9-9. But B decides it will remain open an extra 2 hours.
B making the decision to stay open is unfair unless A also gets to stay open longer.
Except this is already the case because different states have different rules and in some cases so do different muncipalities within states.
Which isn't to say whatever the rules are shouldn't be followed, but your example would suggest there is already built in unfairness due to the fragmented nature of your electoral law and procedures.
If the rules are published in advance, it averages out. If you change the rules at the last minute, you're explicitly fishing for a certain outcome.
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That’s one reason why the electoral college still makes sense. If votes are pooled nationally but elections are run locally then you’re incentivizing states to be as lax as possible to pile on the votes, trading validity for volume.
About a decade ago in Washington, which is fully by mail, we had some conservative counties start offering free postage for ballots. Very quickly the state moved to make free postage universal.
Doesn't that just switch the incentives to swing states? Indeed PA has mail in voting because Republicans passed it in 2019 prior to Covid, because they thought it would help rural turn out, to make the state more Red. Obviously that is not what came to pass, but that was the intent.
With the electoral college a legislature has incentive to help their preferred candidate win, but they only need 50% + 1 to do that.
Without it a legislature has incentive to put as many votes on the board as possible. So if your state leans hard in one direction, it helps your candidate to do maximize number of votes cast, so you have incentive to be lax on election security excepting coordinated attacks by the other side.
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Because the minor violations are ways to get around (what little) safeguards. In Fulton County Atlanta's case, they were trying to count ballots during off-hours, and attempting to refuse GOP poll watchers from being admitted because they weren't allowed to come in during off-hours.
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