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Notes -
Pennsylvania's Commonwealth court just ruled that ballots that are in Allegheny or Philadelphia must be counted, even if they are undated or misdated. This only applies to ballots submitted on time, purportedly. The takes that I've generally seen online are that this is evidence that they have plans for fraud. The court argued this, though, on the grounds that dates are unnecessary, as the counties have other means of telling when votes were submitted (I think they scan a barcode when received). But what's certainly a problem is that this decision was written to apply only to Allegheny (where Pittsburgh is) and Philadelphia counties, the two counties that contribute the largest margin to the democrats. Given that they estimate that around 75% of mail-in ballots are for democrats in Pennsylvania, the most mail-in ballots are from suburban and urban voters, and that around 10000 ballots were not counted for that in 2022, this could have the effect of aiding the democrats by 5000 votes or so. Thankfully, this is only 0.07% of the vote, so not all that likely to be decisive.
The other interesting feature of this case is that the court ignored non-severability provisions, which said that if any provision of the act, or its application to any person or circumstance, was held invalid, the whole act is void. They did so merely by arguing for a presumption of severability in Pennsylvania laws, despite the explicit language to the contrary in this case. Voiding the act would have thrown out the entire mail-ballot system. Them striking down part of it, but not the whole thing, against the explicit text, seems the most sophistic part of the whole thing, to me.
This can still be appealed to the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania. It's blue, though, so I'm not expecting changes. Thankfully, it doesn't seem like, barring fraud, the effect will be too large.
Edit: Make sure you read the comments of @Rov_Scam, where he argues that I'm not representing this accurately or completely—I don't want to be misleading.
I think this election will provide evidence for or against the 2020 election fraud narratives.
How? Because some states, but not others, are now taking action to prevent election fraud. And if Republicans outperform expectations in those states it would indicate that Democrats were benefiting from fraud. It's a natural experiment.
Virginia seems to be ground zero here. The Republican governor, Youngkin, has directed that the voter rolls be purged of people who are dead, non-citizens, or have moved out of state. Tens of thousands have been purged. To further prevent fraud, they will only allow paper ballots, and the machines that count the ballots will be tested and not connected to the internet. People will need to request an absentee ballot instead of mass mailing of ballots. And all dropboxes will be monitored 24/7.
All of this stuff is basic common sense and should be standard practice.
The fact that many states don't take these basic actions is sort of a wink-wink-nudge-nudge, "there's no fraud, but also we're going to make it incredibly easy to do fraud". There's a good chance that this election will come down to how much cheating happens in corrupt cities like Detroit, Philadelphia, and Milwaukee.
So I wouldn't be surprised if Trump outperforms polls in Virginia. I also won't be surprised if he doesn't. Whatever happens, it will be a good opportunity for me to update my priors.
I found this incredibly frustrating in all the discussions on the topic. I get "look, we can't overturn the elections on the basis of your sayso", but the lack of acknowledgement of the sad state of American election integrity was driving me bonkers.
I think the flip-side is, the lack of acknowledge of the frictions of voting are also frustrating.
Both are valid, IMHO. We have a system that manages to be both awful at integrity and awfully painful to use.
Can you elaborate on what friction there is to voting where you are? I am in Texas and I find it ridiculously easy and painless to vote here.
Well, these days I live in a deep blue state that's completely eliminated friction at the enormous cost of serious doubts about the integrity of the election. But before, I'd say the largest friction points were:
You can 100% pre-fill choices on your own time and use the sheet in the voting booth in Texas(supposedly strictest voting laws in the nation), don’t know about other states. You just can’t use your phone(it must be physical paper) and need to research the races ahead of time.
Ideally I would want to get a machine readable version so voting in person was as smooth as possible.
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