This is why I always wear a hockey mask around where ever I go. It also helps in social distancing since nobody even comes close to me any more for some reason. And I’m not even named Jason.
Trump wingnut Sidney Powell tells Georgia Republican voters not to vote in January 5 runoff election
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While they are probably idiots, that’s not the reason for these statements. I believe you already answered the reason with this:
Which is exactly it. They simply don’t want to count votes not for them.
It’s even worse than that. While the 50 states set rules, process and guidelines, counties run most of the election mechanics. In many sates, all the polling locations are managed at the county level.
This cannot be said enough times.
Even the term “voting machine” isn’t clear enough for what’s mostly in use today. There’s really three types of “voting machine” in use based on how the process of voting is broken down.
- A Ballot Marking Device - This is some type of machine, probably touchscreen today, that’s used by a voter to mark their selections and then it creates a ballot that’s correctly filled out. A thing the voter can read and validate. If it’s incorrect their is a process to destroy it and create a new one. This has advantages where it can be in many languages, larger type, custom to the voters specific ballot, can validate under and over votes before creating the ballot, and save on wasted ballots.
- Vote Tabulating Machine - This is the scantron machine. In the best cases, a voter feeds a ballot, either preprinted and filled out or from a BMD, and it’s either accepted or rejected immediately. A reject can be fixed.
- A “voting machine” that does both - This is like a BMD that produces no ballot but simply tabulates it. It may produce a paper tape, but not one that impacts the recorded count. Likewise, the counting may not be done on the user readable part but using some barcode or directly from the touch screen instead. These are the ones with all the security issues.
For the first two used as a pair, or the second used on it’s own. Hand counting random audits provide the security that the system works in general. As stated, those are what most states use now.
Mail in ballots follow the same process, using the same Vote Tabulating Machine, but with larger delays between steps vs doing it all at one time. In states that process mail in ballots as they arrive or early, even the tabulation rejection and ballot correction can happen.
This also cannot be said enough times.
The “counting” as an issue is the narrative by the first group from above that has a motive to not count votes. The only issue was, they didn’t want to count votes not for them.
Specifically, in many states they have restrictive rules about who can vote by mail. Which in itself is a way to suppress the vote turn out. That also means they have limited capacity to process mail in votes. Some of those states expanded availability because of COVID, but they didn’t expand capacity. Meaning those votes would take longer to process. Then, they compounded this problem by also having rules to not allow processing of mail in ballots at all until election day.
So, now you have a larger volume of mail in ballots than infrastructure can process quickly combined with a restriction to not even start looking until late. Throw in partisan messaging to “vote in person” or “vote by mail it’s safer” which drives differences in vote distribution. Top it off with calls to simply not process anymore mail in ballots (even though they couldn’t even be started until late). It was never a counting problem. It was always a goal of simply not counting votes from people they didn’t like.
One of the PA lawsuits was trying to say the expanded mail in voting wasn’t legal, now that the election is over, not back when the change was made before the election. The resolution to that would be to ignore all the mail in ballots. To disenfranchise every voter who followed the rules by changing the rules after the fact. Not a counting issue, they just don’t want to include votes they don’t like.
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I wouldn’t neccisarily put it that way, as there are security issues with the other sorts of machines.
There are 2 competing sets of security issues. There’s the IT and software ones, some of the ballot markers and tabulation devices have these as well. And they’re magnified by the manufacturers refusal to give anyone access to code to audit it for problems, logistical issues with updates etc.
The second one is the general security of cast ballots and the count. The 3rd type of machine has serious problems with this. As they lack the redundancy of records and plan B that comes with the seperate physical ballot.
The first is less of a concern with the first two types because the seperate physical ballot, and separation of counting from casting means things can be checked. As does the ballot as a separate, physical primary record. For the same reason they lack the fundemental process security problems of the 3rd type of machine.
Many states also have rules preventing mailed ballots from being counted along with in person ballots, or until all in person ballots are counted.
Along with additional rules that provisional ballots, military, and international votes be counted after that.
Before reforms after 2000 there were seldom requirements to count these at all.
All deliberate strategies for supressing the vote.
It was one of the major reason for delays in particular states this year. Several of the key states could not even begin tabulating the significant number of mail in votes until they’d counted everything else.
This is also what created the huge, sudden swings and the slow creep towards Biden that Trump keeps pointing at.
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if the dem candidates win, it should be on the merits, not because some conspiracy theorists hoodwinked a bunch of gullible fools to suppress their own votes.
At this point, I hereby invoke the sacred Why Not Both meme.
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You truly come from a more civilized place…
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High five!
We flipped our state now let’s filp the senate!
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It’s only in the last couple elections that I’ve started relying on Voters’ Guides put out by publications I generally trust to help me sort out the downballot races. On the one hand, no more undervotes by me, but on the other hand, that also feels just very slightly skeezy.
Why would that be the case? I’ve been advocating in favor of paper ballots for a very long time now. (In fact, I recently came across a local copy of the “source code” for the old-school Diebold machines used in 2004.) My personal take on it, which also seems to be reflected in the general consensus here, is that ‘systems that produce a human-readable paper ballot are not inherently a problem’.
I don’t see anyone other than yourself saying ‘all voting software is safe and reliable’. That’s because anybody who thinks about the problem for more than three minutes can clearly see that software-only voting systems have absolutely nothing to recommend them. Running the same query a second time is not any sort of ‘recount’ of a database.
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The current status of MAGAland:
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This is annoying. I didn’t say that, but I did say that now that lines are being drawn over this issue in this instance, and Democrats are taking a defensive position, that it worries me that this may turn into a more generalized acceptance of voting software without the specific technical scrutiny needed.
Sometimes to discuss which notions you hope don’t become mainstream, you need to mention them. But they are to be understood as a sort of ‘quoting unnamed multitudes’ and not the view of the person who hates that position.
Which reminds me:
I would hope that – as a candidate in some election – my opposition (to contenders who espouse ridiculous conspiracy theories that hoodwink gullible fools) would be thought of as a merit.
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Wow. It gets even better. Now others are saying “vote, but write in Trump’s name.”
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Yes please! Write in Trump’s name! Misspell it while you are at it too! That’ll really fix us libz wagon fur shure! That way the R vote is split THREE ways: Trump (dumb and probably the largest %) then we have the votes for the incumbents (dumber, I mean they ARE crooks) and then the abstainers (dumbest, but please why bother and just crack another lite beer chum!). I’d look for a R split of 45% trump, 35% incumbent and 20% why bother.
That way Dems might actually WIN the Senate! And then do almost nothing. Again. sigh… is it 5 yet?
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Not me. If they have a party affiliation that matches my own, then they get my vote. I once voted for a US Rep because she was popular in our area and was very intelligent and likable. She turned out to be the last vote needed to get Clinton’s impeachment out of committee and onto the House floor. If she had said ‘No, this is not worth pursuing,’ and voted no, then there would not have been an impeachment. In this I feel somehow partially responsible for what they did to Bill C. I have not voted on personal liking since, and she was not re-elected.
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I love this story but y’all know that the number of GOP goose steppers who won’t vote because of this will be too small to matter, right?
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A lot of people were surprised at how many voted for Trump, let’s wait and see…
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The entire reason Georgia has run off elections is to ensure that minorities won’t win.
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We’ll see in this case. The GOP is cutting off it’s own nose to spite it’s face right now. That coupled with the effective ground game Abrams has put together could do it.
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