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We live in a constitutional republic, not a democracy. The electoral college is set up to protect those states that have smaller populations. It also exists to avoid the "tyranny of the majority". In 2016, for example, Hillary's margin in CA exceeded her overall margin in the total election. So she lost the election in 49 states but won in a state that allows totally open voting by anyone who looks 18.
But the root of this debate is about a population's acceptance of an election. When Trump won in 2016, the Ds spent four years saying he was illegitimate because of Russian collusion. Many Ds did not accept GW Bush as legitimate. Trump does great harm to this country by denying the Biden election in 2020. It is about the veracity of the election and the peaceful transfer of power.
Remember, my post was about a four-day period to vote in person. How many here have actually waited in line more than two hours to vote? I never have. Klondike calls it the "comfort vote" and that is accurate. What I want to achieve is ease in voting for adult citizens without the potential for massive cheating that mail-in voting entails. You fellows should actually read books like Boss by Mike Royko where the massive cheating apparatus that has always existed in Chicago is explained. This exists in cities across the country and has most of my life. That is why they are called "machines".
And Republicans have always dominated the absentee ballot count in presidential elections. That is because the largest groups of absentee voters (prior to 2020) are military and elderly, and both have always been overwhelmingly R. Now we have "comfort voters". What could possibly go wrong?
Nothing like using blatant lies to try to prove a point.
Have you considered that if you can't make a case for you bullshit beliefs without resorting to lies that maybe you beliefs need to be reevaluated?
But here's what I'll say about Hunter Biden, Jared Kushner, or anyone who uses their family name and associations to get ahead.
It sucks. It's bullshit. It shouldn't happen, and we should welcome any investigation to see how it impacts the decision making of their relatives who actually do hold levers of power. So go ahead, investigate Hunter Biden. We should! If it turns out that Joe was letting that influence his decisions (so far, it doesn't appear so; if Hunter's e-mails are to be believed, Joe was largely indifferent at best to Hunter's attempted deals over the years), then drag them off to jail.
But demand the same accountability from those on "your team" as well; if you are constantly demanding justice on Hunter Biden, but ignore Kushner (who was an active member of a President's cabinet) getting billions from the Saudis without any extrapolation about what that money was for, then it's pretty clear that you don't actually give a fuck about shady dealings of this sort, and it's all just a game to you.
And you can fuck straight off with that shit.
And let's not forget Trump appointing Kushner and his own kids to high level government positions simply because they were his family. Nepotism has never been part of our culture at that level. Loads of kids have benefitted from their parents but Trump took it to a new level.
I must have missed the Hillary Clinton stop the steal barnstorming tour that culminated with an attempted insurrection at the capital while Barack Obama threatened to not leave the White House and was meeting with lawyers to try to overturn the election or considering deploying the military to implement martial law and seize voting machines while engaging Fox News as a propaganda tool to push conspiracy theorists to the fore while embracing violent right wing militaristic groups, white supremecists, Nazi sympathizers, Qanon and any crazy millionaire willing to stand by their side and scream 24/7 about ”evidence” that none of them had for the last 2.5 years. I mean, it really is all the same when you get down to it.
Im also a fan of how voting should be a “privilege”, but the GOP will nominate anybody to serve in Congress no matter how completely insane, deceitful, racist or downright stupid they are and then defend those people when they continue to be insane, deceitful, racist and stupid on the job.
We HAVE free and fair elections. It's not my responsibility to do my part to make unnecessary changes because YOU can't accept reality. You're fired up about a problem that you can't even prove exists on any meaningful level. The vast majority of the crap you are hearing in your echo chamber are evidenceless accusations you accept as fact. That's not a me problem, it's a YOU problem.
As long as losing candidates are unwilling to concede, when they have no proveable evidence of fraud. Outcomes will not be accepted. That is the problem. Changing laws won't change that. It will only move the goalposts. Republican primaries have been loaded with candidates not conceding and not having any proof of wrongdoing. It's whiny self-important people not being able to accept that maybe people just don't like them. Taking away absentee voting will not change that.
They have absolutely no understanding about voting by mail. I guess they think that government just mails ballots unsolicited to every address, collects them and just feeds them through the counters with absolutely no checks or analysis of voter rolls.
Granted, there are some variances from state to state; but the general process goes something like so:
1) The "mass mailing of ballots" that Republicans take so much umbrage with is actually the application to vote by mail, and it's sent to every registered voter. Yeah, you have to be registered ahead of time to even get the option.
2) The ballot you receive is numbered and registered just like any paper ballot. You can't just head down to your local Kinkos, make 2,000 copies for each of your 2,000 mules and get 40k votes added to the system.
3) You can't just walk up to your election official with a stack of ballots you "collected." They have to be received in approved drop off points (usually US Mail Drop Boxes or Drop Boxes with your City or County Clerk). Once collected, they are first examined to see that the signature on file matches the one the clerk has when you registered to vote in the first place. Then it's compared with the in-person votes to see if that person voted in person instead.
4) If there is a conflict of some sort or any sort of tampering is found, you are contacted directly to confirm that you placed the mail-in vote in question. How they go about resolving it will vary, but in no place is a mail-in ballot simply accepted if there is any conflict, and it sure as hell isn't blindly added to voter tallies.
Fraud of mail-in votes is no more a thing than in-person voting fraud; exceedingly small scale, amounting to maybe a few hundred cases across a nation of 300+ million, and nowhere near enough to tip even the smallest of elections.
The reason you should is that you should do your part to have free and fair elections. There must be a PERCEPTION of fairness for outcomes to be readily accepted. Again, you are simply ignorant of what goes on in cities all over the country. In MN, an absentee ballot is worth $ 50.00. The Farm-Labor party has always purchased ballots.
I doubt any of us here can make the claim that we are too busy to vote, else we wouldn't have time to spend here. You correctly point out that it is a convenience issue for you. It is for any eligible voter who claims an inability to vote in person other than the folks who actually can't make it to the polls
Hillary Clinton conceded the same night, your messiah Donald Trump never conceded and assembled a mob to sack the Capitol so he could illegally stay in power. The collusion and obstruction investigations were initiated by Republican operatives (James Comey, Rod Rosenstein) it was investigated by a Republican operative (Robert Mueller). The report was covered up by another Republican (Bill Barr). If you don't want criticism for Russian influence quit kissing Putin's ass.
Won't somebody please think of Da Geezer's feelings? He has a PERCEPTION that there is cheating afoot!
My God, ballots are going for $50, $58 if there are bamboo fibers in them. Ya gotta believe me!
It's only sensible that we should all the change the way we conduct voting, and living the rest of our lives to ease his mind and put him at ease that there could be cheating going on. He's a very special boy.
Lions Fans.
Demanding Excellence since Pathetic Patricia Piddled the Pooch!
We HAVE free and fair elections. It's not my responsibility to do my part to make unnecessary changes because YOU can't accept reality. You're fired up about a problem that you can't even prove exists on any meaningful level. The vast majority of the crap you are hearing in your echo chamber are evidenceless accusations you accept as fact. That's not a me problem, it's a YOU problem.
As long as losing candidates are unwilling to concede, when they have no proveable evidence of fraud. Outcomes will not be accepted. That is the problem. Changing laws won't change that. It will only move the goalposts. Republican primaries have been loaded with candidates not conceding and not having any proof of wrongdoing. It's whiny self-important people not being able to accept that maybe people just don't like them. Taking away absentee voting will not change that.
I like how he asserts that the Farm-Labor party buys absentee ballots for fifty dollars a pop. Huge if true.
Our political system pretends to be the best thing since sliced bread, but in reality it's the most restrictive system to breach.
A two-party system with unlimited funds - that essentially excludes any other party from the grand prize.
A billionaire would be a literal fool to run against two entrenched parties (Perot). Conscience and a plan mean shit in the cauldron of U.S. politics.
Sad thing is he might have been our last best chance to escape from this bipartisan shitshow.....
Were stuck with it for our lifetimes, and hopefully not our kids (but that seems a pretty remote chance).
Our political system pretends to be the best thing since sliced bread, but in reality it's the most restrictive system to breach.
A two-party system with unlimited funds - that essentially excludes any other party from the grand prize.
A billionaire would be a literal fool to run against two entrenched parties (Perot). Conscience and a plan mean shit in the cauldron of U.S. politics.
Sad thing is he might have been our last best chance to escape from this bipartisan shitshow.....
Were stuck with it for our lifetimes, and hopefully not our kids (but that seems a pretty remote chance).
This entire "two party" complaint is severely overplayed.
It doesn't matter what system you put together, it will always boil down to a majority coalition and a minority coalition at the end of the day. It doesn't matter if you have 300 parties all vying for attention; the end result (and all the concessions that are made) is going to be largely the same. The only real functional difference between a parliamentary system and a Madisonian one like in the United States is that the latter does its coalition building before the general election rather than after.
There are a lot of problems with American government. It's party structures really is at best a very minor one.
Yeah, while the need to build coalitions of multiple parties can lead to more moderation and cooperation, it also can give a seat at the table to some pretty extreme factions. You also can end up like Israel who’ve had multiple elections over the last couple of years and a lot instability at the top of government. That can be good or bad, but as you can seen with Netanyahu, it’s not suddenly going to stem corruption and power grabs.
I think a bigger issue with the parties is just the inability of the electorate to move on from the officials they know. The fact that our country is run by a bunch of 70+ individuals is sad.
Any type of government you setup is going to have choke points. But it is noticeable that when the US helped various governments around the world, they don't replicate our presidential system rather they use the parliamentary style of democracy.
To me the biggest problems lately have been ideological sorting, gerrymandering at the federal and state level and the primary system. Even with all those choke points stuff still gets done by the government. There is also a lot of money to be made by covering politics like it were sports and that has had a detrimental affect in the last 25 years.
Yeah, getting rid of gerrymandering and dark money contributions would be great steps that shouldn't be controversial to the general population but will never happen.
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