When ballot counting takes place in the 2020 presidential election (particularly in red states or highly contested states (particularly states that Trump won: Indiana, West Virginia, Montana, North Dakota, Florida, Ohio, Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania
Minnesota) what rules are in place that would be difficult to violate/abuse by Republican Party? I expect that these states will try to skew the rules in Republican favor ? What mechanism takes place when the ballots are being counted to ensure fairness?
I look forward to your feedback.
Quite a biased question, if you ask me. What makes you think these states, if any manipulation occurs (which is, in itself, already a very strong claim) would be more likely to manipulate in favour of the Republicans rather than the Democrats? It may also be noted that quite a few of the states you mention are governed by Democrats.
I want to deal in reported facts. I’m just looking at trends.
“The two secretaries of state most aggressive in culling voter lists are Kris Kobach in Kansas and Brian Kemp in Georgia, who are also both Republican candidates for governor, exacerbating partisan rancor. Mr. Kemp has presided over a series of purges and restrictive voter-registration rules that heavily affect minorities. Mr. Kemp is white, and his Democratic opponent, Stacey Abrams, is black.”
Assuming election machines are not hacked, the voting count is kept accurate by simply having Republicans and Democrats doing the official count together.
Election chicanery happens either before or after the actual voting and counting.
This would be possible only with paper ballots. And even then disputes arise. E.g., “hanging chad” in Florida in 2000. Even really old fashioned marked ballots have been challenged based on the mark not being clear, idiots writing on the ballot their “opinions” which may or may not cause ballot spoilage, etc. But those are small scale compared to what can be done to mess things up electronically.
With touch screen voting, all reasonable presumptions of a correct tally are completely out the window. Over and over these machines have been proven to be easily cracked in person or over the Internet. Having people of both parties somewhere around doesn’t mean squat.
And that doesn’t even address bias on the part of the companies that supply the machines. In Georgia, they recently passed a bill to get new machines. Despite overwhelming evidence of the bias of the top two companies involved, the Republicans went with one that just happens to favor the GOP. (The Dems wanted to go with some form of paper ballot.)
Not necessarily. The Democrat paper ballot-counters in King County handed Christine Gregoire the governorship of Washington by “interpreting the intent of the voter” as voting for her.
The issue was the ballot counters were allowed to mark the voter’s ballot to better clarify the voter’s intent. Once mark like that they could not be questioned as to what the original mark was. That is permitted under Washington State law but there was an argument that the counters were marking ballots with no votes for governor.