I got into a conversation on a “we are not politically correct” facebook page about mail in voting.
The guy believes you can just write “I vote for Bob” in a piece of paper, run it through the copy machine seventy five times, and mail them in. No official form required. I suggested he visit the county courthouse and ask how to go about main in voting. I doubt that he will do that.
Is this the official Trump version of mail in voting?
It’s whatever they need it to be at the moment. For instance, right now in the Pennsylvania GOP primary one of the candidates is arguing to count all the mail in votes without dates written after the signature, even though the envelopes are dated by the post office. In 2020 they were arguing that all mail in votes are fraud and shouldn’t be legal at all. Shrodinger’s mail in votes essentially. Both valid and not valid depending on what they need at the time.
It is really fruitless to have meaningful discussions with this kind of person because their reality is whatever they have created in their own mind without referent to any actual electoral law, election procedures, or physical reality. The only reason to engage with these people is purely for your own amusement, and even that is best left to experts who can do so by proxy with prepared ‘talking points’ and a security detail. To wit:
Stranger
I believe we Democrats do senseless things, too. I’ve seen demands to hang or lock up Trump and McConnel. One does wish the two sides could converse.
BTW, if everyone in the Straight Dope wrote down, “I vote Carnivorousplant for president”, ran it through the copier five hundred times and mail them in, we might save the nation.
Wait a minute, first I need to know how you feel about mandating CSV in schools
When I’m president, only genuine XLSX files will be allowed! No CSVs!
A comma-separated values ( CSV ) file is a delimited text file that uses a comma to separate values. Each line of the file is a data record.
Sounds good to me.
Ok I’m lost, how is that supposed to make white kids feel like they are racists? Maybe I’m missing something.
XLSX sounds like it isn’t age appropriate for school kids. It’s one X away from pornography!
My primary argument with election deniers, who will blow off every attempt to debunk specific fraud theories, is “If the Democrats cheated that hard, why they didn’t they win?”
Because they really didn’t. Trump lost, but Democrats in general underperformed horribly. They lost ground in the House, and didn’t even eke out a Senate majority until the run-off, and we can thank Trump for that.
In fact they underperformed so badly relative to the polls I’m so e what surprised the Democrats didn’t scream fraud and call for audits in rural districts. Then I suggest that maybe the Republicans are the real fraudsters.
Originating mostly from each other?
Well, let’s be clear: Donald Trump instigated an insurrection, unambiguously committed numerous ethical violations, used his position as President to try to bully the leader of another nation to investigate his political rival in an attempted quid pro quo, and was responsible for so many other potential crimes, ethical violations, cover-ups, and dissemination of lies regarding his official actions while in office too numerous to list that there is actually a reasonable basis to discuss his arrest, trial, and possible conviction. Mitch McConnell hasn’t done anything that is openly criminal (that I aware of, at least, though he has certainly skirted ethical rules on numerous occasions) but it is a fair discussion regarding whether he should be removed from office for unabashedly blocking the legislative process, using procedural shenanigans to prevent presidential nominees from receiving the traditional fair hearing, and generally being a useless dickwad who openly exercised his influence to get his wife a Cabinet position despite the serious ethical concerns given her background and family connections.
“One does wish the two sides could converse” is reasonable in the context that the “two sides” will come to a conversation with an agreement upon facts and ethical fundamentals. At this point, there is little to talk about with the GOP leadership and most of their representatives and senators in Congress because the party has become a front for proto-fascist prevaricators who eat their own when confronted with even the slightest internal agreement, literally attacking the wife of a deceased former GOP leader judged post-death to be inadequately onboard with their hateful rhetoric out of a fit of hectoring pique. You cannot hold an honest conversation with bald-faced, self-serving liars.
Stranger
Bravo, @Stranger_On_A_Train. As ever, well said.
People who demonstrate willful ignorance get exactly one chance with me.
With respect to this issue, I explain the realities of mail-in voting to them, invite them to participate as a mail-in voter just one time (hey, you don’t even have to actually vote by mail because you can always change your mind and vote in person!), and learn for themselves just how misinformed they are.
If they decline… I just write them off. As bald-faced, self-serving liars.
Ronald Reagan, the beloved saint of the GOP, loved vote by mail. The Military and older folks vote that way and they generally voted Republican.
The hate for VbM stems entirely from trump realizing he would lose the election.
And the generalized position that making voting HARD is per se advantageous to Republicans. They are cool with VBM for the military and middle class retirees and such who they see as willing to go through procedural rigmarole.
Friendly reminder-- the jokes can be funny but this is why it is important to write out any initialisms–at least on the first mention.
I (thankfully) live in Colorado, which is all mail in by default, all of the time. Even here, that just pushes back the distrust one level. They don’t follow the first point, but they just distrust the tabulators/scanners/etc that tally said mail in votes.
Because 1) it’s what they’ve been told and 2) Colorado while deeply purple, is very VERY split by communities. So they go with the classic “well, everyone -I- know voted for Trump’ so how can he lose by such a large margin?” It’s because they the districts away from the East Range corridor are super Red, and the majority of the population in the corridor vote bluish (Colorado Springs notwithstanding).
Colorado is hardly unique in these 2 issues, but it’s always funny when the mail-in-voting is fake issue comes up. Especially since it was so heavily valued by the GOP prior to the Trump era in terms of making it easy for the military as mentioned earlier, or the elderly (who lean conservative) to vote.
You’re correct it’s hardly unique. Oregon’s been a vote-by-mail state for decades. It was one of the few things both Democrats and Republicans supported as a good, sane way to handle voting.
Until Trump. Now, it’s, “We have always been at war with Eastasia.”
We don’t like bare links here:
Texas GOP voters are getting tripped up by their own party’s new voting restrictions
Republicans had a higher rate of error than Democrats, meaning there are thousands more Republicans in the state whose ballots aren’t being counted in the primary election.
Hey and now Texas is help scammer steal personal info too! One rule passed by Republican lawmakers mandates that voters must put either their drivers license number or the last four digits of their Social Security number on the envelope containing their ballot.