Note he says clearly: "society probably wouldn’t tolerate because we recognize that there are trade-offs. …little bit of fraud that actually is happening. So, yeah Vote by mail is possibly the largest sources of individual voter fraud (The GOP and the Kremlin are the largest source of organized large scale voter fraud), but that amount is too small to worry about.
No where does he mention " wives of conservative, domineering patriarch types" or anything like it, so yeah, that is based solely on your feels. You think you are citing him, but he never mentioned anything at all like that.
Quickly, so as to not hijack the discussion: the ultra Orthodox Jews have not hijacked the system to dominate the school board. Whites are 60% of the population, they hold 66% of the school board seats. That isn’t a hijack, that is majority rules. This is a straw man distraction being thrown in and a suspiciously anti-Semitic one at that.
As for the them ‘letting’ their ‘ultra orthodox Jewish wives go off and fill out their votes privately’, I’m guessing you don’t know many Jewish wives well. There isn’t much ‘letting’ them think independently needed, the wives think and act independently and the husbands respect that as part of the marriage covenant.
Drum up support for your jaundiced views of the sanctity of mail-in voting with some thing else. What you insist is happening on a wide basis with mail in ballots isn’t happening as you say it is. And I, as a woman, do not need your defense of my voting rights. I am quite capable of that on my own.
I was warning people about the potential for the kind of fraud that happened in North Carolina (that was so bad it led to a redo of the election) years before that came out. Based on “my feels” (my commonsense observation of the serious vulnerability of this kind of voting). And then it happened.
It looks like Dowless got away with the same shenanigans in earlier elections, and we don’t know how many times this has happened elsewhere without detection. We also can’t know how many people are voting differently at the kitchen table than they would if they had to go in the polling booth. But we do know we can preserve the secret ballot and eliminate these concerns if we take care to “not allow people to vote by absentee ballot, to vote by mail unless they had some kind of excuse, like they were out of the country or disabled.” That’s what I’m advocating. If you want to advocate something different, go right ahead. That’s democracy.
Yes, I strongly support Ex-Muslims of North America, and other freethinkers who fight against conservative religious oppression like we see in those ultra-Orthodox communities.
I quote “It’s not “based solely on my feels”. I have repeatedly cited the expert interviewed on NPR.” the expert who said NOTHING AT ALL about the kinds of fraud you are talking about.
“More than 96 percent of the district’s 8,500 public school students are minorities.”
But they should have their schools run by white ultra-Orthodox Jews who don’t have any kids in the school population, and who have made it clear they are only interested in draining the school system for resources for them to use? That’s what democracy looks like to you?
He’s right on this incident. If you have a little time, listen to this “This American Life” podcast on it.
[Also it’s true that some number of ultra-orthodox Hasidic Jewish women are very much subjugated and isolated from outside help. The fact that you’re not one of them is irrelevant. The question is whether it’s relevant to the issue of voting changes (likely not).]
The judge didn’t rule that there was any fraud in how votes were cast in school board elections. None, no fraud alleged. None. No one vote alleged to be fraudulent. The judgement was to switch to a by ward or district versus an at large system. The article stated that it might be possible to create wards where black voters were in the majority in four instances. If all these wards vote for black candidates, there could be 4 black school board members whereas there have been 3. All the ‘ultra Orthodox Jews” were alleged to have done was to organize get out the efforts, which evidently were successful, but hardly subversive. Everyone should do that.
The Orthodox Jews have 27,000 students in the school population, they choose to send them to yeshiva schools. 9,000 students in the school population go to public schools where the Jewish taxpayers funds also go. It is not illegal to use public funds to provide for special education services in private schools, it is done all the time. It also isn’t illegal to use public resources to bus students to a parochial school within their district. That is done all the time. What you should be thanking the yeshiva parents for is paying for 27,000 students classroom expenses out of their pockets and using only special ed and busing resources from public funds ( the public school budget funded by their tax dollars). Read your own cites. It is all there. They don’t have more votes than anyone else, they have until now, used them well. Democratically, as a majority, without fraud. What appears to be anti-Semitism does not reflect well on your avowed cause.
I repeat, there is absolutely no allegation of voting fraud of any kind here, much less any finding of fraud. You are conflating two very different things to fit your bias. I will fight to the death for your right to express that bias, but I won’t dignify it by not challenging it.
How very impertinent of you. You don’t know the first thing about me. I’m not an ultra conservative Orthodox Jew, I’m not a Hasidic Jew, I not a Jew at all, I’m not a wife. Yet, my views are as relevant as yours, regardless of your protestations to the contrary.
It’s comparing apples and oranges. We in Minnesota achieved high turnout the old fashioned way, but of course we can’t compete with a state that has universal vote-by-mail.
A charge of anti-Semitism is a very serious one. My own ancestry includes secular Jews, the kind of people I hung out with when I worked at a literary agency in NYC. Modern, secular Jews are awesome people. I’m not down with Hasids or other ultra-Orthodox, just as I’m not down with conservative Muslims (who unfortunately make up a significantly greater proportion of that faith), Southern Baptists and other fundamentalist Christians, or the Hindutva and other conservative, nationalist Hindus.
I don’t believe in “respecting someone’s faith” when it involves such ugly beliefs. I have made that clear in other threads here: I don’t believe religious dogma gets some kind of special pass where it gets to be immune from criticism just because it makes (very dubious) claims about the metaphysical nature of reality. Nor does it scan to call my being against particular religions some kind of bigotry. Religion is an ideology, not a race, gender, sexual orientation, disability, or any other immutable characteristic. And like any other ideology, it should be open to criticism and repudiation–especially when it is used as a justification for oppression of women, gay people, artists, atheists, and other freethinkers.
I’m not sure how this makes voting by mail worse - calling its numbers “artificial” just sounds like sour grapes over it being a more effective way of getting votes than forcing people have to take time off work to drive distances to stand in line.
However on the argument that religions are only as defensible as they would be if they were the same but secular, on that I 100% agree.
I can see how you could interpret it that way. I only meant that Minnesota’s dominance in civicminded levels of participation has not really been overturned by these methods.
Let’s keep in mind though that MN’s already high levels of participation got turbocharged in 1998, as a result of a lot of young males voting who normally did not turn out. The result was Governor Jesse Ventura, with the DFL candidate I preferred, Skip Humphrey (Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey’s son) coming in a fairly distant third. Making it super easy to turn out is not always good for Democrats, and I’m not sure we necessarily want people who aren’t very invested in politics, and may treat it as a reality-show lark, to find it as easy to vote for president as for American Idol.
Yes, that marks me as an elitist: I plead guilty to that charge, and it’s one of the many reasons I hate Trump who is elite in wealth only (though not as much as he claims), and in every other respect is the uncouth, boorish Queens lout his father raised him to be.
My real problem with this line of ‘elitist’ thinking is that if you’re going to set up obstacles to voting to ensure that only those with a certain level of seriousness about it bother, you have to make sure that these obstacles are fair or else you’re skewing your test.
And the obstacles are not fair - not even close. They favor the wealthy and retired and those who personally own transportation. People who are unable to spare time from their jobs without risking needed monies or unemployment, or who are have disproportionate difficulty in making the trip out to the (sometimes deliberately unfairly distributed) polling places are being asked to show a much greater devotion to civic duty than those who can simply wave to their boss and walk out of the office - or who don’t have to go to work at all. And, shock of all shocks, it seems that the concentration of inconveniences seems to hit one political parties harder than the other.
Until the obstacles for voters are completely leveled off to be equally arduous for all people regardless of life circumstances, using them as a deliberate barrier to prove “investment” is hoary bullshit.
President Donald Trump said he planned to send law enforcement and U.S. attorneys to polling places around the country to protect against his unfounded claims there will be mass voter fraud during the November election.
Trump made the comments on Fox News on Thursday night, his latest efforts to sow doubt ahead of an unprecedented election as millions of Americans plan to vote by mail due to the ongoing coronavirus pandemic. Poll-watching is a standard part of elections, but Democrats have expressed concern about the scale at which the GOP plans to do so.
“We’re going to have everything,” the president told host Sean Hannity during the final night of the Democratic National Convention, just before Joe Biden accepted his party’s nomination. “We’re going to have sheriffs, and we’re going to have law enforcement and we’re going to have hopefully U.S. attorneys and we’re going to have everybody, and attorney generals.”
Trump made a bevy of false and disproven claims during the interview, saying states had “no idea” who they were sending voting forms to, alleging government officials may send the documents “to all Democrat areas” and not Republican strongholds and claiming people “don’t have to send [voting documents] back until after the election.”
“Nobody’s ever heard of anything like this,” he told Hannity.
…
I’ll give him that. No one has ever heard of a president openly declaring that he will undermine a national election.
In the county I work for, we are going to set up special buses, heated, and just parked at polling places so that people don’t have to wait in line. Or at least that was the plan before COVID.
And we are a mail in state (Colorado).
Trump is going to send AG’s to polling places. HAHAHAHHAHAH. I suspect he will soon to get to know the 50 of them by name - When he is sitting in a courtroom.
–universal registration (or at least automatically registering anyone who gets a drivers license or state ID*)
–making Election Day a holiday
–weeks of early voting
–expanding the number of polling places, especially in areas that have been shown to have long lines in the past
As for transportation, this is something I have done for the DFL (and Missouri Democratic Party before I moved back here) for years. It’s something parties can and should handle.
*I (like Jimmy Carter) also support voter ID, but it should be at no cost to those who need it and, again, parties should help shepherd people through the process of getting it.