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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   34976 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 6, 2023

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I say rigged quite specifically. A game can be rigged without secretly changing the score.

Suggesting that the massive changes to mail in voting is just par for the course is intellectually dishonest. The total vote increasing something like 20 million is evidence that something significant changed in how elections were operated. The fact these were pushed through so quickly is another major problem even if in principle the concept is sound (in opinion, it is not sound).

I strongly disagree that all of my points are just a continuation the same old gaming of the system. But perhaps you are right and I am wrong. If that’s the case, perhaps democracy has always and will always be total bullshit.

Either way, they may have gotten rid of trump, but at what cost. This is not an ingediant for a stable political system.

The idea that massive changes to mail voting that were pushed through quickly had anything to do with the election outcome is a myth that election deniers have been pushing without even looking at the actual facts. While some states did loosen absentee ballot requirements due to COVID, none of this happened in any of the states that were contested. The closest you'll come to finding it is in Pennsylvania, which held its first-ever general election with non-excuse mail voting in 2020. However, the law that allowed that had been passed in 2019 with unanimous Republican support, and the changes would have taken place in 2020 regardless of COVID. In every other contested state, mail voting had been permitted in prior elections without incident. It's certainly true that a lot more people voted by mail in 2020 than in prior elections due to pandemic concerns (except in Arizona and Nevada, which were pretty much all mail by that point anyway), but I don't hear anyone making the argument that legislatures should have rushed back to the statehouses to require in-person voting on the grounds that too many people were going to take advantage of a duly enacted provision of the law.

Wisconsin? Didn't the number of remote votes coming from the "indefinitely confined" (which the state explicitly said they would not check up on) increase by like 5x?

Wisconsin has had no excuse mail-in voting since 2001. The "indefinitely confined" qualification only comes into play if you're requesting a permanent absentee ballot, meaning the ballot will be automatically mailed every election without your requesting it. The only caveat with this is that if you don't return every ballot you're sent you'll be taken off the voter rolls, so it doesn't make sense unless you actually intend to vote in every election, and most people simply don't vote in off-year elections, especially primaries and special elections, so it's a double-edged sword if you apply for one on the assumption you'll always be sent one and don't get one for an election you intend to vote in.

Fair enough -- still sounds like something that should be looked into though, as if voters are claiming to be indefinitely confined when they are not, the rules are not being followed.

Also it looks like the dropboxes widely deployed in 2020 were against state law: (and a potential fraud vector)

https://www.npr.org/2022/07/08/1100696685/wisconsin-supreme-court-ballot-drop-boxes-disability-assistance

I mean you could Google that and provide a source for it instead of asserting it. Throwing a bunch of half remembered claims out there and expecting others to provide counter evidence is basically gish gallop.

Don't tell me what to do.

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