Saying that we will not forcibly take money from person A and give that money to person B does not mean that we are shitting on person B, nor does that outright theft amount to some universal value that we should adhere to.
Charity and caring for the less fortunate are universal values, but implicit in charity is the voluntary nature of it, not some enforceable right to the property of another. The Dems have created that enforceable right and want the votes for the beneficiaries to go along with it.
Who’s stopping ya, cupcake? Knock yourself out. Might want to scratch “Pence” in there, as I think Orange Julius Caesar is showing signs of losing whatever fudge he has left.
Be sure to forward that little bon mot to the Republican who’s apparently allowing some of these people to vote by email in bold violation of state law.
If I can further break into your pontificating, Your Eminence, I’d like to ask: If indeed this recount goes forward and further cements DeSantiis’ and Scott’s leads in their respective contests, certifying them as the winners beyond question, will you offer up a full and unabashed apology? Seems to me the least you can do. After all, this recount may have given those whose votes for DeSantiis and Scott weren’t counted the first time the opportunity to be heard, as any voter should be heard in a democratic society.
I think the official who allowed email votes should be prosecuted.
You may interrupt my pontificating.
What would I be apologizing for exactly? If they did not fill in the bubble, but instead circled Scott or DeSantis, then their vote should not count. They did not cast their vote properly. Those were the rules: fill in the bubble. Just like the football receiver who does not get two feet down, he does not score a touchdown, the voter who does not follow the rules does not get his vote counted.
As I recall, this particular post office was locked down at one point due to a pipe-bomb scare. Is it fair that these voters should be denied their voice because of one nutjob?
From the article, the law says that the ballots must arrive by 7 p.m. on election day. That is the rule. It doesn’t say “except if the post office did not deliver them on time due to a bomb scare.” Now maybe the law should be changed. Maybe next year the NFL should change to a “one foot down” rule for catches.
What you do not do is change the rule in the middle of the process, or in the middle of a game, because you think that the rule is unfair.
Imagine if next week during an NFL game an official decided that kicking wasn’t emphasized enough in the sport and declared that all field goals would be worth five points. Everyone would be outraged at such a decision because those weren’t the rules in place prior to the game.
And that’s just for a football game which in the grand scheme of things means very little. Why should we change the rules in the middle of a election? Is that somehow better?
First off, this question seems rather secondary, as you don’t think ensuring that everyone’s voice is heard in society is a priority. Again, I am eager to hear about the political philosophy behind this; apparently taxation without representation is perfectly okay if you get confused by a poorly-designed ballot. (Or your ballot gets held up due to a bomb threat, or you didn’t realize you got knocked off the voter rolls, or if you weren’t 100% clear which ID you needed, or if getting photo ID was prohibitively expensive, or if you misplaced your ID on election day… Look, the length of this list of things republicans seem to think are perfectly fine reasons to deny someone their vote should be a good sign that something is wrong here.)
But to answer the question: it’s not really about money. The country is full of election locales where this shit works. Where they don’t have problems with butterfly ballots or bad instructions. Designing a functional ballot seems like one of those problems any number of democracies have figured out by now; why is it so hard here?
Of course everyone’s voice should be heard. They can walk into the polling place, read the instructions (or have them read to them) and fill in a bubble on the scantron sheet. Now, if you are unable to do that, or cannot look down and to the left, then what extra steps do we need to take? How easy must we make it?
AFAIK, the ballot designs are approved by the election officials of which at least one member of each party is a member and they approve the ballot design. If a person was wanting to vote for Bill Nelson for Senate and somehow missed the race because it was in the instruction column, didn’t that person complete his or her ballot and say, “Well, hell, where was the Senate race? I wanted to vote for Nelson?”
If the voter asked a poll worker where the Senate race was, the poll worker would point that out to them.
I don’t think that “because we want more Dem votes” is a sufficient reason to dumb down the already trivially easy process of voting. Read the instructions, fill in the bubble. Millions were able to do it.
As far as voter ID, we have done that to death in other threads. If in 2018, you do not have an ID, I don’t know how you function in society.
Football is a game. The purpose there is… to play a game. It’s a sport. There’s not really a purpose beyond that. You don’t change the rules because the rules are what define the sport. Yeah, it’d be a dick move to change the rules mid-game, because then you’re not playing the same game any more.
Elections aren’t a fucking game. They have an actual purpose - to elect representatives that represent the will of the people. If the rules currently in place do a poor job of fulfilling that goal, then you’re goddamn right we should change the rules mid-game! In this case, there’s simply no reason not to count those votes. Sure, technically against the rules, but not counting them merely because they were held up due to a bomb threat is fundamentally against the spirit of the election, and the spirit is what matters. Imagine if those held-up votes would shift the outcome of the election - does it make any sense not to count them, just because of a bomb threat?
(This is also what’s wrong with attempts to disenfranchise voters, and to act as though those unwilling to jump through increasingly ridiculous and completely unnecessary hoops are “too lazy” or “too stupid” to be worth considering. Someone who gets robbed on election day and loses their photo ID deserves to have a voice in our government just as much as you do.)
Remember when GeeDubya gave that speech after the Florida Debacle of 2000? About how he recognized that the election result was not a mandate, nor really even a victory? How the Republican Party would seek policies of mutual accommodation and compromise?
The fact that elections are not merely a game is all the more reason to follow the pre-established rules. Either party can point to a law mid-counting and say that it is wrong or unfair for X, Y, or Z reasons. And what seems “unfair” bears a striking similarity to what gets more votes for the party claiming the unfairness.
If the Steelers are awarded a touchdown because of some arcane rule, then I tend to approve that rule. If their opponents are awarded a touchdown because of the same rule, then I tend to think that it is a stupid fucking rule that should be changed. Such is the nature of human beings.
To change the rules during the counting process would invite chaos.
There are many rules for elections. Some of them are unconstitutional. If you tried to litigate them before they mattered, you would be thrown out of court. So the only option is to ignore them when they matter or force parties to litigate them when they matter. What you’re seeing is a mix of both, depending on who controls the decision.
All of that is required by fidelity to the Constitution. There is no analogous situation in professional sports.
Yeah, I remember how pissed you were a year ago when a similar case wound up being the tying vote in a VA House of Delegates election, and without that vote, the HoD would have been split 50-50 instead of a 51-49 GOP majority.
Of course. I agree with that. If a law is unconstitutional, it should be challenged, even during the counting process. But so far, all I am seeing are rules about when ballots need to be returned and deadlines for recounts. I fail to see any possible constitutional issue with those.
Depends. Is the right to vote implied by the Constitution? All it says is that various groups can’t be denied the vote on grounds such as race, gender, being between 18 and 21.
But does that mean that as long as everyone was denied the franchise, a state would still be vacuously complying with the 15th, 19th, and 26th Amendments, and would not be doing anything unconstitutional?
If not, then citizens have a right to vote. And presumably that right, and their right for their votes to be counted, can’t be canceled simply by administrative failures of one sort or another that the voters themselves didn’t have anything to do with.
The fact that elections are not merely a game is all the more reason to [del]follow the pre-established rules[/del] not give a higher standing to arbitrary and capricious rules that stand in the way of voting and having votes counted, than to the right of citizens to cast their votes and have them counted.
I think that a cobbling together of many Supreme Court decisions show that there is clearly a right to vote by adult citizens. But like with any human enterprise, including football games, there have to be administrative regulations that set certain boundaries.
I mean, I had a right to vote in the 2012 election, but nobody would seriously argue that I can cast my ballot NOW for that election. Reasonable rules set reasonable deadlines for my vote to count. That’s the absurd case.
Why couldn’t it be argued that by mailing in a ballot, one takes the risk that the ballot will be lost in the mail or delayed due to unforeseen consequences? Now, maybe there should be a law that says that in exceptional circumstances like a bomb threat at the post office, late arriving ballots shall be counted. Maybe not. Does the Constitution really require such a law? That seems specious at best.
Likewise with recount deadlines. You know on election night that there may be a recount, so it is up to the officials to gather staff and machines to make sure that the counting is done by the deadline. If they fail to do that, is that a Constitutional violation? That starts down the slippery slope because the deadlines are there exactly so the government officials complete their tasks in an efficient manner. If you hold that the deadlines violate a Constitutional right to vote, then you encourage or allow sloppy behavior by election officials.
I simply cannot see how these regulatory and facially neutral laws like deadlines are a violation of the right to vote. You have a right to vote, you just must do so in a timely fashion.
Most rules are arbitrary. I can drive 70 on the interstate, but not 71. Is there any measurable degree of increased harm to other motorists because of one measly mile per hour? No. But you could argue that all the way up incrementally by 1mph to 200mph.
There has to be a deadline for votes to come in and one time is just as good as another.
As you might imagine, the constitutional jurisprudence on elections is more complicated than that. Often these laws about timing are found to be unconstitutional. There are many reasons why this happens. Common ones are: (1) the law treats similarly situated voters differently; (2) the law was designed to disenfranchise certain voters; and (3) the law lacks sufficient justification given the impact it has on the franchise.
Obviously, you are right that some subset of laws about timing are perfectly constitutional. But that’s why we have the courts: to decide which are which.
