... then analyzing the results of the experiment is a waste of time.
My man Ted Cruz is out making big points with the Trumpian base by objecting to the certification of the vote. There's some kind of Guarantee Clause or something.
The Guarantee Clause puts the jurisdiction in the hands of the political bodies, executive branch and legislative branch, to decide the merit of any state vulnerability in their election outcome.
So what? This is all grifting, angling for the top spot in the next set of presidential primaries. I have no doubt that the ether is loaded with fund-raising emails with the subject line, STOP THE STEAL or, in the case of the progressives, the evergreen FIGHT HATE.
The point is not just that there may have been discrepancies in the counting or there may have been votes manufactured at the last minute when the Ds saw Trump running away with it in places like Pennsylvania, the point is that all of the mail-in ballots are tainted raw data. Like I've raved before on this blog, no one on Earth has any idea who won that election.
Why do we have private voting booths? It's so our votes cannot be seen by others. Why does that matter? Because if others saw who we chose, we might face retaliation. If they saw us about to vote a certain way, we could be threatened and our votes extorted from us.
Every mail-in ballot has this problem. Yes, it's a problem with absentee ballots, but it's a risk we've had to accept. We've minimized it by forcing people to request them. This time, we simply sprayed out ballots, willy-nilly, using voter rolls we knew were suspect. That leads to a very simple question.
Who voted?
Say you sent out four ballots to 1334 N. Beechwood Dr. Say you receive all 4 of them back. Who sent them? There's supposed to be a signature on the back of the envelope, but how accurate is the validation process? More to the point of this post, how do you know 3 of the votes weren't coerced?
You can't possibly know any of that. That's why the argument over the vote counting and the signature checking is a total waste of time. From a strictly scientific point of view, the raw data is worthless. We don't know who decided which boxes on the ballots got marked.
That's why I continue to say that no one on Earth has any idea who won, but worse still, the Elites who came up with this didn't care if we trusted the results or not. The election wasn't by and for us, the racist bigots in Deplorableville, it was by and for them.
In a country where there are more guns than people, that is absolutely insane. Watch this video and imagine the stack of gasoline-soaked TNT crates beneath the Elites as they carelessly flick lit matches around.
22 comments:
Yes, voting by mail has the problems you cite, and these are indeed big problems. But I think we need to remember why mail-in voting even came up in the first place - voting in-person has its own issues.
The big issue with in-person voting is availability. Polling places can be hard to get to, and the trend has been to reduce the number of polling places, which both makes them harder to reach, and makes the lines longer when you get there. There used to be a polling place only a mile and a half from my house (close enough to walk or bike to), but they closed it down about three elections ago, and now I have to go a bit over four miles. Not a problem now, since I own a car, but I didn't own a car until I was almost 30.
That, and since it is on a Tuesday, voters have to take time off of work to go there. Again, not a huge deal for me because I have a car, and I go vote first thing in the morning when the lines are short. But I understand that in more populated areas, you might need to stand in line for a long time, and if you don't have a car you'll need to get a bus or arrange some other ride. Public transit tends to be slow, so you might be looking at needing to take off the whole morning or afternoon. In comparison, voting by mail is an enormous time-saver.
So, given that there doesn't seem to be much stomach for making sure that everyone (a) has a polling place within walking distance, and (b) has the time off to go vote, this means that we have a choice of two kinds of issues that can skew the elections: either a strong bias against people who live in areas where there are a lot of people with inflexible work schedules and a lot of voters per polling station, or potential for not-secret voting on mail-in ballots.
So, how much do you care about making voting not only secure and uncoerced, but also available? And are you willing to pay for it?
This time, we simply sprayed out ballots, willy-nilly, using voter rolls we knew were suspect. That leads to a very simple question.
Who voted?
I've been wondering that since I was able to find out that the ballots I never got, in the Navy, were all filled out and returned.
Especially after some Washington politicians bragged about stealing their husband's ballots because they'd "vote wrong."
Tim-
there are multiple organizations that literally drive out and pick up voters, no questions asked, to take them to polls.
Many cities offer free buses to polling places.
And polling places only "close" in the sense that the stop letting new people get in line after X time.
Foxfier: Yes, exactly. "Many" cities. Not all. "Multiple organizations" - but not everywhere. And sure, you can eventually get in to vote after work in the evening with sufficient persistence, but I've been hearing about multiple-hour waits down in the heavily-populated parts of the state. Just how long is it reasonable to make someone suffer in line to vote? I personally think that less than 10-15 minutes in line is optimal, and anything over about 30 minutes in line is getting pretty unreasonable.
Again, this is all fixable with enough effort and money, but as of right now, in a lot of places voting in person is far from great.
Tim-
That's because the problem doesn't exist everywhere. You've theorized that it exists at all, and then want a solution that covers places where it wouldn't even apply.
As opposed to mail in vote fraud, where it is known to exist, exists inherent to the method (thus in all locations), and is not limited to special situations.
This is before solutions such as early in-person voting, which are also given as options where people know they will not be able to vote in person on the designated day.
Tim, I'd be fine with a week of voting if it meant in-person and ID-verified. Make it easy, but make the data more reliable.
My whole desire is to keep the country as stable as possible as I cruise into dementia.
Thinking about this problem, I've come to the nauseating conclusion that voting is indeed important. I hate those ads that shout at you to vote because it's such a big deal, but it is. When the victor gets to define basic biological terms, spending has hit $5T a year and the government decides it can tell you to wear face covering outdoors, it really does matter that you get a say in it.
The point of this post is that we have no idea if we had a say in any of it.
I'm also tumbling to the conclusions Richard Fernandez, aka WretchardTheCat on Twitter, has been discussing for a long time - a diffuse network is more stable than one with only a couple of crucial nodes and connectors. As the government grows, the number of important nodes decreases. In a more libertarian world, power is spread and the network is much more stable.
If we're going to live in an unstable world, it might be a good idea to not torch faith in our institutions.
"You've theorized that it exists at all"
Yes, because people that I know personally have told me that it exists where they live. Why isn't that good enough evidence to theorize that, you know, maybe there's a problem here?
And yes, I think that early in-person voting is a great idea. It also costs extra, and not all places offer it. Like right here where I live, for example. I'm all for it, if they'll let me.
What I'm not going to do, is try to get vote-by-mail curtailed without first fixing the issues with in-person voting that caused the voters of the State of Michigan to approve vote-by-mail in the first place (by a 2-1 margin, no less).
KT: Yes, I'd be fine with extended early in-person voting too. I have no problem at all with only having voting being done in-person (with some carefully supervised exceptions for people who physically can't be there), as long as every person finds it easy to get in to do it.
And the diffuse network is also my preference. No argument from me there.
Not to change the subject but I'm going to change the subject.
But this is important! :-)
Tim, my son reports that the Miner Statue was hit and is now gone on Montezuma. Other than a picture on reddit, he can't find any information?
This is the first I've heard about it. I don't normally drive past it, so I wouldn't have seen it. I'll have to detour past in the morning to check. I would have thought it would be all over the local news, though.
Yes, because people that I know personally have told me that it exists where they live. Why isn't that good enough evidence to theorize that, you know, maybe there's a problem here?
Tim, when you can be bothered to read what I wrote rather than emoting about a lack of validation, I'll try answering questions.
When your response makes it clear you didn't bother listening to the first time, I'm not going to try to answer demands based on your failure of understanding.
Mostly Nothing: my daughter said we should go and check, so here we are. Yep, he's gone, all right. Whoever hit him must have been screaming along, they went through about a 20 foot stretch of unplowed snow, took out a concrete block retaining wall, and then went another 20 feet through deep snow to knock him off of his boulder pedestal. Somebody hauled him away already, hopefully for repairs.
I hope it gets fixed as well.
Foxfier: As you have pointed out many times, none of us can read your mind. And so all I had to go by was exactly what you wrote. And when I read "That's because the problem doesn't exist everywhere. You've theorized that it exists at all", what I see is a flat accusation that I am making stuff up.
If you don't want to be misunderstood, then don't write things that you don't mean.
Say you sent out four ballots to 1334 N. Beechwood Dr. Say you receive all 4 of them back. Who sent them? There's supposed to be a signature on the back of the envelope, but how accurate is the validation process? More to the point of this post, how do you know 3 of the votes weren't coerced?
This is a problem. The other choice seemed to have been to force people to wait in longer lines than they ever had, in the midst of a pandemic. We shouldn't need to risk our life or the life of our loved ones in order to vote.
Also, there's no reason to think such coercion alters the outcome of the election. Coercion would be applied by people on both sides of the ballot.
Not to mention you have audits being done on signature checks from postal voting in, for example, Georgia. They have verified the accuracy of the signature-checking process.
Had Trump won, he would have commended the reliability of the voting process. All the news organizations you read (like the Daily Wire) would have extolled the security of this vote, and you would be a lot more comfortable with the results.
One Brow: Had Trump won, he would have commended the reliability of the voting process. All the news organizations you read (like the Daily Wire) would have extolled the security of this vote, and you would be a lot more comfortable with the results.
I think you give Trump too much credit, I think he would have said he won despite the
Foxfier: As you have pointed out many times, none of us can read your mind.
That is why I used words, Tim.
They haven't moved.
In fact, the problem with your response is that you didn't respond to what is there, you responded to your own emotions and scan-reading.
And still have not made a rational argument.
If you don't want to be misunderstood, then don't write things that you don't mean.
I have given you information. I cannot give you understanding. That does not mean I am required to abide by your misunderstandings.
You're right, Foxfier. I do not know what point you are currently trying to make.
You're right, Foxfier. I do not know what point you are currently trying to make.
*dryly* For someone who keeps demanding that I explain things, in words, you sure work hard to avoid responding to the actual words I lay down.
I'm not your therapist, I am not paid to try to work through your emotional reactions triggered by some aspect of a word or phrase.
My only interest is in pointing out problems when people claim a thing must be done. When there is no reasonable argument to support the flaws I pointed out, I don't need to keep chasing after whatever you throw out.
My point is made.
You couldn't respond to it.
So you started flailing.
*shrug* Not. My. Problem.
Mostly Nothing,
You could be right there. Still, I don't think we'd be seeing posts from K T Cat about the number of guns in the country and the instability of the situation.
One aspect of mail-in voting that seems problematic is the possibility of ballots being filtered out and also of fake ballots being added before the ballots get fed into the batch scanners. For that matter the batch scanners could be pre-loaded with ballots favoring one party before the processing begins. Any changes made this way would not be detectable by recount.
I have been thinking that publicly accessible audit files might be useful in improving confidence in elections. For example, record the person's name, signature image and standardized address for every mail-in ballot processed and post to a county or state website. That would allow for organized citizen auditors to look for any invalid voters. Unfortunately, it would be impossible to recall any votes cast. On the plus side, it would be possible to compare the number of mail-in ballots cast and see if they match the totals counted by the batch scanners. That might make stuffing the ballot box harder though not impossible.
It should be possible to have the ballot counting machines to record the contents of every single ballot along with a timestamp of when it was scanned. Making that RELIABLY available to the public would again enable citizen auditors to look for suspect data -- e.g. 10K identical ballots scanned in 20 minutes.
A more transparent -- and possibly open source -- approach to counting votes would be better than having to take the assurances of private vendors and government officials that these systems and processes should be trusted.
Anon, you make good points, but you don't address the real problem. It's not the tabulation of the data in the experiment, it's the data itself. It's all worthless because you don't know the conditions under which it was created.
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