No need to - with things as crazy as they are now it can be really hard to tell if someone is joking or not.
The Onion writers must have a really hard time trying to create parody crazier than reality.
It seems that they gave up today:
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However, everything you said in your first reply [I mean, first reply to Michael Black] was perfectly true!
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“You get the government you deserve” - classic victim blaming!
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it actually is a beautiful sunny and warm (60F!) fall day here in SE Michigan. The poling station across the street has had a steady flow of cars and walkers voting in person, and no signs of intimidation. Even the sportsman’s club has been quiet (rare for us to not hear tons of gunshots on a day this nice in the fall)!
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Let’s hope that the rest of the article will turn out to be wrong though:
The report conceded, however, that tomorrow would almost certainly be a complete fucking nightmare.
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You get a notice that it has been counted? How do they manage that with anonymity?
There are things in the American voting process that seem weirdly backwards to us Europeans, but this is apparently one feature that just hasn’t been invented yet in Austria.
I get no notifications for my mail-in ballots. I just trust the mixed (all-party) group of volunteers who counts it to make sure that every vote counts, or at least that mistakes are honest mistakes and are evenly distributed so as not to distort the results.
Another of those hidden cultural assumptions that are actually rather fun when I discover them. You mentioned the word “auditorium”, but I overlooked that on the first read-through. When I think of a “polling place at a local middle school”, I think of a random ground-floor classroom that would fit at most 30 students. My local polling place served some 750 eligible voters at the last election, and not quite 50% of those actually showed up in person.
It’s still true - everything is bigger in America.
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Today there was no wait at my polling station, the local elementary school. I got my sticker when I handed the worker the strips you tear off the bottom before you scan the ballot sheets.
There was a slow but steady stream; at 7 am there was a two hour wait, according to a neighbor. I’m sure there will be long lines after work.
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Well, it was large enough to fit maybe 100 kids, so pretty small as auditoriums go. They use it for voting because all the other classrooms are at full capacity. It was somewhat funny that they forgot about a prior commitment (2018 election) when they scheduled a school performance and moved voting into a tiny room. Shows you where the priorities are. (Think of the kids and their parents!)
Also, I got a notice when the county clerk’s office collected my ballot and okayed the signature. I expect another text/email when they actually count it.
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I’m not sure, but I think @abutilon might have meant to write “accepted” instead of “counted.” That’s how it works where I am, anyway. I dropped off my ballot at a drop box, and could see online when it had been officially received and then when it had been accepted. That was at least a week before they start officially counting them.
To retain anonymity, the signatures on the envelopes are verified, then accepted ballots removed from envelopes and stacked in bins still folded so workers who saw your signature don’t see how you voted. Then later they are counted, all anonymously.
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I assure you it is at least as odd as it seems, and many of us know it. That’s what happens when a significant fraction of the population decides that worshipping the founders’ guesses and compromises is more important than updating things based on the later lessons of (domestic and world) history.
@zathras IDK about where @abutilon is, but in my state anyone who knows my name and address can see online that I cast my mail-in ballot and that it was accepted, but not who I voted for. Even I can’t look that up anywhere. Also, about the auditoriums, there are towns in the US with only a few dozen voters, and cities where a single polling place is supposed to handle tens of thousands of people. Voter suppression efforts in action. In any case, in many elementary and sometimes middle schools the auditorium, gym, and/or cafeteria are combined, and relatively easy to rearrange as needed for different uses.
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We got a tiny dusting of snow overnight, a tiny bit but it is still out there.
At least it’s going above normal temperatures on Thursday for four days. Hopefully that forecast is a good sign.
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Not to imply that terrorist are courageous, but yeah, trumpers are a bunch of blowhard cowards.
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I am still waiting for my vote to be counted. Of course that is in a different country for a provincial election. Apparently our rules on postal votes are a bit antiquated and it takes over 2 weeks after voting day for all the rules to be followed.
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Philadelphian here. I voted early, but walked by my polling place and it was fine. No local reports of intimidation here, and you have to think this would be a hot bed, so that is good news.
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Mine reads like a Pacific Northwest newspaper headline:
Legalized Marijuana Will Devour Pickup Trucks!
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I’m in a Boston neighborhood. I voted early (by mail), and verified that it’s counted. However, I walked by my polling station this afternoon, and there was no line. I asked one of the people holding a sign who told me that it’s been pretty light, but a constant trickle of voters throughout the day.
In the past, voting in my neighborhood has been pretty easy (<10 minute wait) but this one seemed lighter than usual.
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Do you think everyone voted early? Or via mail? Or lack of enthusiasm?
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It is odd, because the people designing the system did not really want democracy.
Excerpted from this interview with Noam Chomsky:
The Founding Fathers, let’s go back to them. They were committed to reducing democracy. The major scholarly work on the Constitutional Convention, the gold standard for today, is Michael Klarman’s book, and it’s called “The Framers’ Coup”—their coup against democracy. The general population wanted more democracy. The Framers wanted to restrict that; they didn’t like the idea of democracy. Their picture was more or less that of John Jay: the people who own the country ought to rule it. James Madison explained that one of the prime goals of government is to protect the minority of the opulent against the majority, and the Constitution was designed to try to prevent what is called the tyranny of the majority, meaning democracy. You’ve got to protect the minority; the opulent have to be protected.
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White (and in this case rural) privilege I’d imagine. Normally it takes 10 minutes for them so 30 minutes feels like an affront.
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