4 ms·

I wish I hadn't mentioned the pension, because it takes away from the immediate and much worse problem that the governing party is trying to stay in power by pr

I wish I hadn't mentioned the pension, because it takes away from the immediate and much worse problem that the governing party is trying to stay in power by preventing members of the other party from voting.

pstuart 6y ago
If voting is effectively curtailed, everything else is moot. This election is a referendum on (American) democracy.
- johnchristopher 6y ago
  Hmm. Wasn't that referendum settled in 2016 ? Trump is 30 years in the making. Unless there's a swing back to restoring democratic norms there's no reasons the coming years are going to be much different, no matter who is elected president.
  - pstuart 6y ago
    No, this is different. Trump at that time was a "why the fuck not" to people who hated the current climate and wanted "change". He was an "unknown" as far as the governance he would provide. If Biden is able to take office I expect work to be done to try to salvage things.
    - input_sh 6y ago
      Democrats like to play nice ("by the rules"), Republicans (and Trump in particular) do not. As a consequence, it'll take a lot more than one term to undo everything that Trump has done in one term, and the way things were before Trump wasn't really peachy either. One Trump term is going to require at least a decade to undo, and that's if it remains at just one term. Now add climate change on top of that and the future looks pretty grim.
    - johnchristopher 6y ago
      > No, this is different. Trump at that time was a "why the fuck not" to people who hated the current climate and wanted "change". He was an "unknown" as far as the governance he would provide. But that climate, the white collar criminality, the nation wide rampant electoral schemes, the inequality haven't changed. What gave birth to Trump winning the 2016 election is still there. If I understand correctly, there's no reason republicans would support a democrat president trying to salvage thing considering they didn't prevent the swift acceleration in deterioration during the last four years. Maybe Trump was an unknown as far as the governance he would provide but it was known what kind of individual he was (and to an extent what would happen if elected, in broad lines). I don't know, I am in the final chapter of Sarah Kendzior "Hiding in Plain Sight: The Invention of Donald Trump and the Erosion of America" and things do look grim indeed.
    - ThrowawayR2 6y ago
      > "Trump at that time was a 'why the fuck not' to people who hated the current climate and wanted 'change'." Absolutely nothing prevents that from happening again. The economic, social, and political forces that disadvantaged large swathes of the public, riling them up enough to make them take a chance on Trump, are all still there. If anything, the fact that the COVID-19 recession is likely going to hit full force during the next administration and make their situation even worse makes voting for demagogues even _more_ likely. Biden isn't going to be able to wave a magic wand to fix the world even if he wins, which is not a given. We're in for a bumpy ride.
- shredprez 6y ago
  If voting is effectively curtailed, can it really be called a referendum?
jb775 6y ago
> by preventing members of the other party from voting This is so absurdly dramatic. Just about everything is back open and ppl agree that wearing a mask basically removes all risk. If ppl want to vote, they can get off their ass and go vote. And from a security standpoint, how can you say this with a straight face? Some of the hardest modern struggles in the tech industry revolve around security...and you're over here acting like mailing in paper ballots, with no authentication/encryption/verification is a secure practice. All it takes is one or a few bad actors to skew the results. Look up cognitive dissonance, I think it's hitting you hard here.
- chillwaves 6y ago
  You will need to find some evidence of voter fraud for mail in ballots. Many states have it as an option and it hasn't happened. The military regularly votes by mail and it hasn't happened. It's funny you open your reply about "absurdly dramatic" then lay an equally absurd claim about vote-by-mail having a problem with fraud. Your reply also conveniently ignores the historical pattern of voter suppression coming from the Republican party. It seems in America, some constitutional rights are more protected than others.
  - Simulacra 6y ago
    But the military I think we can trust more than the Postal Service, every time we hear of a postal employee destroying or throwing away mail should be a significant enough reason that the agency is simply not ready to take this on. Maybe at the next election, maybe with a significantly more funding, transparency, and security, but not now. Mail in voting would be great, but not now. It’s far too dangerous.
    - creato 6y ago
      Tell that to people that live in Colorado, Oregon, Washington, or (mostly) Utah. They've been voting by mail for years. I'd worry a lot more about computerized election systems before voting by mail. I think people are too worried about individual votes/errors. 0.0x% of ballots being lost/not counted/etc. is a problem with any election system ("hanging chads", signatures not matching well, ...), not just voting by mail. The question should be how hard is it to pull off a large scale disruption/fraud without being detected.
kryogen1c 6y ago
> the governing party is trying to stay in power by preventing members of the other party from voting. since trump lost the popular vote in 2016, isnt your grand republican conspiracy both categorically false and totally meaningless if it werent?
- ianleeclark 6y ago
  How would a vote 4 years ago invalidate the very real and observable means of voter suppression we see today?
  - kryogen1c 6y ago
    Because he had less votes and won, so im not sure what this alleged widespread voter suppression is supposed to accomplish.
    - fredophile 6y ago
      I'm pretty sure the alleged widespread voter suppression is supposed to accomplish a second term for Donald Trump as well as picking up some seats in both the Senate and House for his party. Do you really believe that someone winning in the previous election is a guarantee that they would not try to suppress the vote in the current or future elections? If not, what point were you trying to make by bringing up the results of the 2016 election?
phkahler 6y ago
How are dems more likely to vote by mail? And what are the percentages for each party?
- tedunangst 6y ago
  Dems are more likely to be affected by polling station closures and consolidation, so that e.g. all of Detroit has to vote in a single location.
- faitswulff 6y ago
  They are not. Republican leadership is convinced they are but consider this quote from https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/510040-gop-fears-trump-attacks-on-mail-in-vote-will-sabotage-turnout https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/510040-gop-fears-trump... : > The R Street Institute, a think tank dedicated to free markets and limited government, recently released a study titled “Why conservatives should embrace sensible measures to expand absentee balloting.” > The study cast doubt on claims that Democrats benefit from expanded mail-in voting, pointing to three states Trump carried in 2016 — Utah, Arizona and Montana — where about 70 percent of voters cast ballots through the mail. GOP leadership is just totally unhinged.
- mcguire 6y ago
  Most large urban areas are Democratic. In the time of COVID, would you rather vote by mail or wait in line at overcrowded voting locations?
- throwaway5752 6y ago
  Short answer is the effect should be even overall, but what matters happens at state and district levels, so you could even disenfranchise more people of your own party on the net and still end up with an improved electoral outcome. You could steal the vote from 500k Republicans in just Alabama and 150k Democrats spread across Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania and have a net swing of 0 EC votes lost and 50 EC votes gained for Republicans. You just have to create policies (like closing polling place, making vote by mail difficult, create voter id rules that exclude college students) that have small partisan differentials in a few swing states, which is why the greatest effort and impact is in urban centers in the midwest (followed by Latinx populations in the southwest like AZ and NM, and African American populations in the southeast like FL and GA).
newsclues 6y ago
The idea that we would be voting in 2020 by mail is crazy. I cannot believe that no one foresaw an election in a pandemic and said, “let’s build an app for this”
- throwaway5752 6y ago
  I think you are vastly underestimating the difficulty in automating this. This has been proposed for decades and there is published academic research about the extraordinary difficulty of ensuring the integrity of the voters and the tallies. You can look at literature on the challenges with REAL ID implementation or Healthcare.gov for similar and smaller projects.
- rabidrat 6y ago
  Extremely relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/2030/ https://xkcd.com/2030/

pstuart 6y ago

If voting is effectively curtailed, everything else is moot. This election is a referendum on (American) democracy.

johnchristopher 6y ago
Hmm. Wasn't that referendum settled in 2016 ? Trump is 30 years in the making. Unless there's a swing back to restoring democratic norms there's no reasons the coming years are going to be much different, no matter who is elected president.
- pstuart 6y ago
  No, this is different. Trump at that time was a "why the fuck not" to people who hated the current climate and wanted "change". He was an "unknown" as far as the governance he would provide. If Biden is able to take office I expect work to be done to try to salvage things.
  - input_sh 6y ago
    Democrats like to play nice ("by the rules"), Republicans (and Trump in particular) do not. As a consequence, it'll take a lot more than one term to undo everything that Trump has done in one term, and the way things were before Trump wasn't really peachy either. One Trump term is going to require at least a decade to undo, and that's if it remains at just one term. Now add climate change on top of that and the future looks pretty grim.
  - johnchristopher 6y ago
    > No, this is different. Trump at that time was a "why the fuck not" to people who hated the current climate and wanted "change". He was an "unknown" as far as the governance he would provide. But that climate, the white collar criminality, the nation wide rampant electoral schemes, the inequality haven't changed. What gave birth to Trump winning the 2016 election is still there. If I understand correctly, there's no reason republicans would support a democrat president trying to salvage thing considering they didn't prevent the swift acceleration in deterioration during the last four years. Maybe Trump was an unknown as far as the governance he would provide but it was known what kind of individual he was (and to an extent what would happen if elected, in broad lines). I don't know, I am in the final chapter of Sarah Kendzior "Hiding in Plain Sight: The Invention of Donald Trump and the Erosion of America" and things do look grim indeed.
  - ThrowawayR2 6y ago
    > "Trump at that time was a 'why the fuck not' to people who hated the current climate and wanted 'change'." Absolutely nothing prevents that from happening again. The economic, social, and political forces that disadvantaged large swathes of the public, riling them up enough to make them take a chance on Trump, are all still there. If anything, the fact that the COVID-19 recession is likely going to hit full force during the next administration and make their situation even worse makes voting for demagogues even _more_ likely. Biden isn't going to be able to wave a magic wand to fix the world even if he wins, which is not a given. We're in for a bumpy ride.
shredprez 6y ago
If voting is effectively curtailed, can it really be called a referendum?

jb775 6y ago

> by preventing members of the other party from voting This is so absurdly dramatic. Just about everything is back open and ppl agree that wearing a mask basically removes all risk. If ppl want to vote, they can get off their ass and go vote. And from a security standpoint, how can you say this with a straight face? Some of the hardest modern struggles in the tech industry revolve around security...and you're over here acting like mailing in paper ballots, with no authentication/encryption/verification is a secure practice. All it takes is one or a few bad actors to skew the results. Look up cognitive dissonance, I think it's hitting you hard here.

chillwaves 6y ago
You will need to find some evidence of voter fraud for mail in ballots. Many states have it as an option and it hasn't happened. The military regularly votes by mail and it hasn't happened. It's funny you open your reply about "absurdly dramatic" then lay an equally absurd claim about vote-by-mail having a problem with fraud. Your reply also conveniently ignores the historical pattern of voter suppression coming from the Republican party. It seems in America, some constitutional rights are more protected than others.
- Simulacra 6y ago
  But the military I think we can trust more than the Postal Service, every time we hear of a postal employee destroying or throwing away mail should be a significant enough reason that the agency is simply not ready to take this on. Maybe at the next election, maybe with a significantly more funding, transparency, and security, but not now. Mail in voting would be great, but not now. It’s far too dangerous.
  - creato 6y ago
    Tell that to people that live in Colorado, Oregon, Washington, or (mostly) Utah. They've been voting by mail for years. I'd worry a lot more about computerized election systems before voting by mail. I think people are too worried about individual votes/errors. 0.0x% of ballots being lost/not counted/etc. is a problem with any election system ("hanging chads", signatures not matching well, ...), not just voting by mail. The question should be how hard is it to pull off a large scale disruption/fraud without being detected.

kryogen1c 6y ago

> the governing party is trying to stay in power by preventing members of the other party from voting. since trump lost the popular vote in 2016, isnt your grand republican conspiracy both categorically false and totally meaningless if it werent?

ianleeclark 6y ago
How would a vote 4 years ago invalidate the very real and observable means of voter suppression we see today?
- kryogen1c 6y ago
  Because he had less votes and won, so im not sure what this alleged widespread voter suppression is supposed to accomplish.
  - fredophile 6y ago
    I'm pretty sure the alleged widespread voter suppression is supposed to accomplish a second term for Donald Trump as well as picking up some seats in both the Senate and House for his party. Do you really believe that someone winning in the previous election is a guarantee that they would not try to suppress the vote in the current or future elections? If not, what point were you trying to make by bringing up the results of the 2016 election?

phkahler 6y ago

How are dems more likely to vote by mail? And what are the percentages for each party?

tedunangst 6y ago
Dems are more likely to be affected by polling station closures and consolidation, so that e.g. all of Detroit has to vote in a single location.
faitswulff 6y ago
They are not. Republican leadership is convinced they are but consider this quote from https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/510040-gop-fears-trump-attacks-on-mail-in-vote-will-sabotage-turnout https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/510040-gop-fears-trump... : > The R Street Institute, a think tank dedicated to free markets and limited government, recently released a study titled “Why conservatives should embrace sensible measures to expand absentee balloting.” > The study cast doubt on claims that Democrats benefit from expanded mail-in voting, pointing to three states Trump carried in 2016 — Utah, Arizona and Montana — where about 70 percent of voters cast ballots through the mail. GOP leadership is just totally unhinged.
mcguire 6y ago
Most large urban areas are Democratic. In the time of COVID, would you rather vote by mail or wait in line at overcrowded voting locations?
throwaway5752 6y ago
Short answer is the effect should be even overall, but what matters happens at state and district levels, so you could even disenfranchise more people of your own party on the net and still end up with an improved electoral outcome. You could steal the vote from 500k Republicans in just Alabama and 150k Democrats spread across Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania and have a net swing of 0 EC votes lost and 50 EC votes gained for Republicans. You just have to create policies (like closing polling place, making vote by mail difficult, create voter id rules that exclude college students) that have small partisan differentials in a few swing states, which is why the greatest effort and impact is in urban centers in the midwest (followed by Latinx populations in the southwest like AZ and NM, and African American populations in the southeast like FL and GA).

newsclues 6y ago

The idea that we would be voting in 2020 by mail is crazy. I cannot believe that no one foresaw an election in a pandemic and said, “let’s build an app for this”

throwaway5752 6y ago
I think you are vastly underestimating the difficulty in automating this. This has been proposed for decades and there is published academic research about the extraordinary difficulty of ensuring the integrity of the voters and the tallies. You can look at literature on the challenges with REAL ID implementation or Healthcare.gov for similar and smaller projects.
rabidrat 6y ago
Extremely relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/2030/ https://xkcd.com/2030/