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naraburns  nihil supernum  1d ago (text post)   14428 thread views

U.S. Election (Day?) 2024 Megathread

With apologies to our many friends and posters outside the United States... it's time for another one of these! Culture war thread rules apply, and you are permitted to openly advocate for or against an issue or candidate on the ballot (if you clearly identify which ballot, and can do so without knocking down any strawmen along the way). "Small-scale" questions and answers are also permitted if you refrain from shitposting or being otherwise insulting to others here. Please keep the spirit of the law--this is a discussion forum!--carefully in mind.

If you're a U.S. citizen with voting rights, your polling place can reportedly be located here.

If you're still researching issues, Ballotpedia is usually reasonably helpful.

Any other reasonably neutral election resources you'd like me to add to this notification, I'm happy to add.

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Saw this tweet:

"Florida counted all its votes in about an hour. Fraud is a choice."

It's hard to disagree.

Given how this election is going, I'm guessing that states with red governors and state houses will make securing elections a top priority. Even a fraud rate of just 1 or 2% can be incredibly impactful.

I wouldn't characterize it as a "choice" but it's certainly to some extent preventable (and speed of counting isn't a great proxy for no-fraud, but FL as a whole does deserve props for reform after the 2000 debacle). I think the bigger issue is that it often takes a determined effort to run a clean election, and motivation seems to vary greatly -- even within each political party, and of course by state. Of course it depends on how expansive your definition of "fraud" is, but 1-2% is far, far higher than the data suggests. I will say and have long said that despite this, more urgency is needed to clean things up, but this isn't purely partisan nor is it nefarious. Inaction is simply put the norm. For example many states and local municipalities are reluctant to spend money to actually buy good equipment, this has been well documented for decades.

Yeah, I've seen similar sentiments. Isn't there some scheme in Florida where every county counts their votes and shows their hand near simultaneous? And as soon as these measures were put in place, wouldn't you know it, Florida went inexplicably solid red.

It just seems obvious to me — if A goes before B, then it gives B a chance to cheat

I don't get it. If B went first, it couldn't cheat?

It wouldn’t know by how much it needed to cheat.

This is only relevant for 1960's Illinois-style ballot rigging, which isn't how modern election fraud is done. In 2020, the plausible fraud allegations related to postal votes (illegal ballot harvesting in Dem machine cities being the one made most noisily, but there were also claims of large-scale manufacture of postal votes that hadn't been touched by electors). And in 2024, the fraud allegations that were being teed up to go if Trump lost mostly related to large-scale voting by non-citizens. For both of those techniques the work is done before polls close. (The time to inject bogus postal votes is at the postal vote opening stage after which postal votes are subject to the same chain of custody as in person votes - injecting postal votes once counting of paper in-person votes has started is Illinois-complete).

I don't think there is major voter fraud in the US, but the fraud that is least unlikely is postal ballot harvesting. If you're doing that right, it is all done before polling day.

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