Yeah absolutely! Doesn’t matter a lick for presidential elections (although knowing how your neighbor’s going to vote might sway your vote, but definitely not on election day) but as a candidate myself I heartily agree.
I even find myself getting confused between “names of people I remember because I meant to vote for them” versus “names of people I just saw on a sign outside the poll.” I make sure I have a written sheet now - which is even easier when filling out my ballot at home.
I took my Biden sign down early because it was getting bent up and looking sad, and I figured it wasn’t changing any minds by last week. But I kept up my sign for a local candidate so people would remember his name.
I’m not sure about that. It needs to be postmarked today and I believe many states allow for delivery time. In truth those ballots postmarked today will probably be counted to make the official count and used if there is a recount needed.
The other issue is that in a lot of Southern states, people of color, gay people, and other groups face pretty serious discrimination, and the federal government has been pretty influential in mitigating that discrimination. Saying “let’s let Southern states split off” is basically abandoning people to political repression.
This is where the fight’s being fought. Don’t abandon the battle.
This is one reason I dropped my ballot off at the drop box outside the county courthouse rather than mailing it back in. I wasn’t taking any chances!
It made me nervous enough when I saw on the county elections website that they weren’t mailing out ballots until 20 days before the election. I wondered, with all the USPS shenanigans, whether that was enough time to get them mailed out and back in.
True, even on the county level, and even when the percentages aren’t as close as 48/52. (Says one of a batch of progressives living in this overall very red county.)
Also a very valid point.
– I think part of the point of campaign signs is ‘See! It’s OK to vote for X! Look, your neighbors are going to!’
If I understand you correctly, as long as they get to the processing center and get metered (or whatever the term is), they do not have to be physically delivered to where the count takes place? That is good to hear, but why did people mail them so close to the deadline??
Here’s an interesting story about geology and voting that someone posted on Twitter yesterday. Sorry if you can’t get to Twitter to read it. I thought it was pretty neat. Just some interesting reading to pass the time.
Each state is different. For some the ballot must be physically delivered by the post office to the election agency’s ballot counting facility today by some specific time of day. For others the ballot must only be “postmarked”, i.e. recognized as legally input into the postal system, by today.
But even for the latter states, there is still some deadline beyond which any ballots that trickle in later due to post office delays (legit or otherwise) will be ignored. It might be 7 days, it might be 14. Each such state will have a different one. But they aren’t going to be 30 or 60 days because the rest of the election process demands a final result sooner than that.
One semi-legit reason to delay mailing if you’re in a postmark-counts state is to ensure you gain the benefit of any last minute info. I mail-in voted my primary ballot back this summer as soon as I could. The next week my preferred presidential candidate dropped out of the race. Had I waited I could have made a better (or at least more effective) choice.
I’m sorry, I have no idea. She’s someone who has been working to ensure that our voting machines across the country are safe, so this is the sort of thing she tracks.
Meantime, U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan, he of the Mike Flynn is a traitor fame, has ordered the USPS to sweep facilities for remaining mail ballots and immediately deliver them to election boards. As in, right fucking now you assholes, you do not get to lollygag.
I live in a rural part of Connecticut. My town went for Trump in 2016 (but voted blue in 2018). Our last Town chief executive (our First Selectman) was a Republican, but the current one is a Democrat. I drove by the polls this morning and saw a huge “Trump 2020” sign next to a guy in a Trump costume and rubber mask. (There was also a large Biden display, but not as over-the-top as the Trump one.) The bottom line is that I live in a purple town in a blue state.
My Mom and one of my sisters both live in Houston, and another sister and other extended family members live outside city limits in Harris County, Texas. Houston has been blue for years, and the county has been red. Now the county is shifting blue as well. So they all live in a blue city inside a purple county in a red state.
I no longer have family there, but also look at California. There are more registered Republicans in California than any other state in the country (mainly due to its large population).
The more granular you get, the more evident it is that our country is actually fairly purple.
I should be concerning/frightening to all Americans, Republicans or Democrats, that democracy is hanging on by the judiciary. This is a real problem. I’ve said in other threads that every politician has be fully 100% committed to the democratic ideal. It is better to lose democratically than to win anti-democratically. Every layer of the government needs to be on the side of democracy. Hopefully the Democrats, should they win, can pass some laws to help enshrine some of these principles. I would even go so far as they should propose one or more constitutional amendments and in effect dare the Republicans at the state level to reveal their anti-democratic stance and not pass them.