I haven’t voted in person for years but when I was, you’d feed your ballot into a machine that could draw it in, flash a green light, and put in a sealed ballot box. I asked the poll worked who was standing by it if it was counting the votes and he said, “Naw, it’s just checking for over-votes.”
Sure enough, one time the person behind me fed in his ballot, the light flashed red, and the ballot came out into the hands of the worker who glanced at a display and said, “You have too many votes for Corporate Commissioner,” and handed it back to the voter. I would imagine there was an override if the voter didn’t care.
That was the issue exactly, as I understood it. Some voter complained that they weren’t told what the red light meant or given a chance to correct, the poll workers just did what they had to do to override it.
Of course, I think even the most addled Trump supporter should’ve been able to figure out how to vote for Trump without also casting a vote for Biden. It really wasn’t that hard.
Hmmm. The one I witnessed, the ballot came back out right away – it wasn’t waiting there for the poll worker to make a decision. I figured – without seeing it – the worker would have to push an override button before feeding the ballot in a second time.
This was six or eight years ago and the ballots were different back then, so the very manufacturer might be different. At that time you filled in a gap between an arrowhead and tail pointing to the candidate’s name; with current ballots it’s fill in a bubble.
Do you think Trump Really knows hes hurting Americans by not helping Biden transition? Its hard to believe anyone could be that noncaring. My maga(former)friend says they will never surrender.
This is a man who built his business career on screwing over business partners and customers (including over extremely petty stuff), who has a long track record of pretty much not actually caring about anyone except himself (and maybe his immediate family), and who is incredibly, maybe pathologically, vindictive. I have no problem believing that he could be that non-caring.
It’s undeniable that Trump doesn’t care about the country or the American people he purports to lead. He has now completely checked out on all presidential job responsibilities. The biggest crisis of his presidency was and still is the coronavirus, but he hasn’t met with his task force in months. Another financial stimulus is vitally needed, a fact that both Republicans and Democrats agree on (they just disagree on how big it should be), but he has not lifted a finger to help resolve the impasse.
I recently re-watched Downfall, which portrays the last days of Hitler and is the source of countless internet parodies. Toward the end, Hitler proclaims that the German people do not deserve to survive, that they have failed him by losing the war and must perish.
This is, incidentally, not at all a fictionalization. Hitler truly believed this, and said it many times. It’s a cornerstone belief of Nazism itself; all peoples are in a state of war with one another, and if they survive they deserve to and if they don’t they deserve that too.
This is quite trumpian. He has said that his management style (excuse the expression) is to cause chaos among his staff-- to pit them against each other. He believes that the best ideas spontaneously emerge when he stirs the flaming cauldron while pouring gasoline into it.
Even Hitler had Albert Speer - an insider who deliberately disobeyed and sabotaged the Nero Decree calling for the destruction of German infrastructure. So far no one in Trump’s inner circle is stepping forward.
We might have to wait for a round of prison books to really know what’s happening these days in the White House.
(I’m sure Albert Speer’s efforts were not known at the time)
Speer started claiming he was apolitical after the war - when it was advantageous for him to do so. He was helped by the fact that he was still alive and most of the other top Nazis were dead; he could tell his version of events without fear of rebuttal.
So it’s ironic how Speer’s death triggered a backlash against his postwar redemption. People began going back to the wartime records and comparing them to what Speer had later claimed and found a lot of discrepancies. It’s now the historical consensus that Speer was fully aware of the Nazi program (including the Holocaust) and actively supported it right up until the end of the war.
You had two groups of people running Germany during the Nazi era. Those like Hitler and Himmler and Goebbels, who really believed the Jews were evil and worked on killing them. And those like Goering and Bormann and Speer who didn’t have any particular hostility towards the Jews but were willing to kill millions of Jews if it advanced their own careers.
