The problem with mail-in voting is that it is going to be such a balls-up either way that the losing side - D or R - can scream shenanigans.
He’s saying the quiet part out loud again.
President Donald Trump has once again taken to Twitter to admit that his entire reelection strategy rests on making sure Americans can’t vote.
@realDonaldTrump
In an illegal late night coup, Nevada’s clubhouse Governor made it impossible for Republicans to win the state. Post Office could never handle the Traffic of Mail-In Votes without preparation. Using Covid to steal the state. See you in Court!
And by “in force,” the RNC Chair means a whole 19 people showed up to protest when the legislature met to pass a law making it safe to vote during a pandemic. And while we’re on the subject, WTF is a “clubhouse governor?”
On Friday, the Nevada Assembly passed a bill on party lines, 29-12, to send mail-in ballots to every registered voter in the state and keep polling places open for early and in-person voting this November. The legislation also allows for non-family members to collect and deliver completed ballots to county elections supervisors, which the GOP has labeled “ballot harvesting” and is working overtime to convince Americans is rife with fraud. It isn’t — the Heritage Foundation found a whopping 107 cases of misuse of third-party ballot collection dating back to 1988.
Colorado, Hawaii, Oregon, Utah and Washington routinely send every registered voter a mail-in ballot, but Republicans have convinced themselves they can’t win if people actually vote.
…
Probably true. I hope so.
To be fair, the GOP knows, without a doubt, that ballot harvesting happens. They know it does because they are the ones who have done it.
“It’s coming from inside the House and Senate!”
I just got an application for a mail-in ballot!
Part of COVID-19, Illinois is sending everyone an ap for a mail-in ballot.
Looking around a bit, I think EVERYONE is trying to make this as easy as possible. In the letter, it says you can fill out this paper form and mail it back; you can scan and email to an account; you can go to a site the county created and fill out the form electronically. As I was searching around a little, I saw a link to that site on the County site; I saw an application for a mail-in ballot on the State website. Vote.org had an ap. No wonder Trump is against it!
Trump doesn’t think the Post Office could handle one additional piece of mail per person?
They fail all the time in Oregon, Washington and Colorado. Not!
Although I did hear about some ballots for the Georgia primary (I think) that were mailed in plenty of time and didn’t make it to the Elections Office in time. So maybe post offices in other states aren’t as good.
Only Republican mail. Democrats’ mail is illegitimate.
https://www.wonkette.com/postal-service-just-removing-sorting-machines-before-election-no-big-deal
The Trump administration’s war on voting continues, with all sorts of neat developments! In addition to eliminating overtime for postal workers and other operational changes that have significantly slowed mail delivery, Trump’s pet Postmaster General, Louis DeJoy, pulled a Friday Night Massacre of 23 top US Postal Service executives over the weekend, as well as letting states know they’ll need to pay the 55-cent First Class rate for absentee ballot applications and ballots, instead of the 20-cent bulk rate that had been used up until now. Now you know what “freedom isn’t free” means — it means nearly tripling the cost of voting by mail, as record numbers of Americans plan to vote by mail due to the pandemic.
In the latest bit of fuckery to emerge, we learned on NPR’s Morning Edition that the USPS has been removing mail-sorting machines in certain places. That fun fact was dropped in an interview with Kimberly Karol, a postal clerk in Waterloo, Iowa, and president of the Iowa Postal Workers Union. She brought co-host Noel King up short while discussing how the changes have affected her workers:
Karol: Mail is beginning to pile up in our offices, and we’re seeing equipment being removed, so we are beginning to see the impact of those changes.
King: Curious, I hadn’t heard about this one. Equipment being removed. What equipment?
Karol: The sorting equipment that we use to process mail for delivery. In Iowa, we are losing machines, and in Waterloo we’re losing one of those machines. That also hinders our ability to process mail in the way that we had in the past.
Karol said that DeJoy’s management had disrupted what she had seen as a “culture of service, where every piece was to be delivered every day.” The changes made that high standard impossible, she said. Most postal workers oppose it, she thinks, and they really want to let the public know what’s going on. It’s every bit as bad as closing post offices or restricting their hours, but is being put in place in such a way as to escape the public comment required under federal laws for rule-making.
The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly.
Trump is now openly admitting that he is withholding funds from the post office in order to help his chances in the election:
“Now they need that money in order to make the post office work so it can take all of these millions and millions of ballots…But if they don’t get those two items that means you can’t have universal mail-in voting…”
So help me GAWD, I’m an old lady (67), but if Trump voids the election, declares a “national emergency” and imposes martial law, I’m hitting the streets! They’ll have FUN throwing me in jail, because I’ll bring my Rx medication list with me.
Trump wants any excuse to declare himself Emperor of the Universe, and I’ll “First Amendment” his ass over that!
I “came of age” when voting was lowered to 18; I was the first 18-year-old to register at my high school. I consider myself to be a rare, “Sixties Liberal Democrat.” I won’t stand for Trump’s nonsense!
~VOW
We aren’t rare. We’re everywhere. I made it my life’s prime objective to raise 3 more (‘84, ‘86, ‘89) to replenish the supply. So far, so good. ‘86 has followed suit and produced gen 3, ‘17.
The really Trumpian thing here is that there’s no guarantee that it won’t hurt Republicans as much or more; it’s all just speculation and assumption. Not that he cares for Republicans in general, but still.
The republicans probably are operating on the assumption that retired people are more likely to vote R than D, and that the more white-collar your job is the more likely you are to be R too. Thus doing things that make it harder for working people to vote (particularly ones who can’t easily take a few hours off) will help them. This is also why the US doesn’t make the day a national holiday - it would be contrary to the Republican goal of voter suppression.
Of course this year all the retired olds going out to stand in line to vote will probably fasttrack a bunch of them to their deaths, but once they’ve cast their vote the republicans won’t need those people anymore.
This is interesting!!
Pennsylvania judge orders Trump to put up or shut up on mail-in vote fraud.
It’s cool. I’m sure congressional Republicans can’t believe what he said, and are going to take a stand for democracy.
Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha. Oh.
Something positive-ish.
A Supreme Court order helps mail-in voting in Rhode Island.
WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court on Thursday let stand a Rhode Island judge’s order that makes it easier for voters in the state to vote by mail during the pandemic, dealing a defeat to Republican efforts to block the order.
The judge in Rhode Island had suspended a requirement that voters using mailed ballots fill them out in the presence of two witnesses or a notary.
In asking the Supreme Court to intervene, the Republican National Committee and Rhode Island’s Republican Party argued that the witness requirement imposed only a slight burden and was similar to one in Alabama that had survived a Supreme Court challenge.
But the Supreme Court, in explaining its refusal to stay the Rhode Island ruling, noted that unlike in Alabama, “no state official has expressed opposition” in Rhode Island to suspending the witness requirement. The Rhode Island judge had noted that Rhode Island’s last election was conducted without the witness requirement and wrote that instituting a change now could confuse voters.
Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel A. Alito Jr. and Neil M. Gorsuch dissented from the order.
Note the two places I bolded.
First, needing to fill out your ballot in the presence of two witnesses or a notary? Are you fucking kidding me???
Re the second place I bolded, (correct me if I’m reading this wrong) the SC suspended the requirement in Rhode Island only because, unlike in Alabama, no state official came forward and objected to the suspension in this election. But that doesn’t rule out future elections, does it? And now Republicans know what they need to do, additionally, in other states to make voting by mail difficult. Two witnesses or a notary?? There were way too many negatives in that second bolded spot for me to readily sort it out.
The USPS just told Pennsylvania that they can’t guarantee that ballots will be delivered by Election Day. It’s 2 1/2 months out!
https://www.thedailybeast.com/usps-says-its-probably-too-late-to-send-mail-in-ballots-to-pennsylvania-for-2020-election-in-november
This is a VERY misleading article, know why? Because I work at one of those machines.
Talking to other USPS employees at other facilities and online, they are removing DBCS machines (the ones you sort letters with) but this was happening before Dejoy even stepped into the position. The reason is, we’ve seen letter volume drop precipitously, I use to work 8-10 hour days running letters on the machines up until last January. Now we got runs that are 6 hours a day at most. On the other side of things, packages have doubled or even tripled depending on the facility, so when you have one area of the mail that is halved while the other is doubled/tripled, it makes sense to cut back on one area and invest in another.
Note how even in the article they mention Waterloo is losing one of those DBCS machines. you know how many DBCS machines their normally are? My current facility has 15 and my previous facility had 40 of them. We lost two and I learned my previous facility lost 5. So a maybe 12% at most loss when we already have significant drop in letters, and also remember not all of those machines are operating at the same time, at my current facility as we had one machine as a “redundancy” machine and another that did maybe 4 hours of work in an 8 hour shift.
We’re getting rid of letter sorting machines to deal with the massive influx of packages we have, otherwise we’d have to start severely delaying packages which are already delayed as it is. And once ballot season comes in the machines we have will easily be able to handle them since I’m assuming “junk mail” volume isn’t going to up anytime soon.
Excellent perspective! Thanks.