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Notes -
Pennsylvania mail-in ballots with flawed dates on envelopes can be thrown out, court rules
This came up when the lower court issued their opinion a few weeks ago. I remember several commentators asking if the fact that it was only filed in two counties was going to have a material impact in the outcome. It looks like it did.
For those of you who leaned one way or the other, how does this impact your future predictions?
On a more specific note - @Rov_Scam, you had some fairly extensive commentary on this case that was interesting and insightful due to your profession. If you have time, would you mind chiming in with an update?
I'm a "Stop the Steal" agnostic. The 2020 election looked fishy, but most of the "proof" of election fraud has been merely suggestions with no follow-through. I'm not a Trump voter, but I have no faith in the integrity of his opponents -- especially if you take them at their word that he is an existential threat.
The Democrats do themselves no favors by trying to stop all of these election reform measures in swing states, like PA and GA. Their insistence that we should not clean the voter rolls, enforce ballot integrity or deadlines, or be able to produce records that verify vote counts or reconcile ballot and voter numbers is bewildering in the absence of fraud. Can anyone of the "Most Secure Election in History" persuasion steelman the argument against increasing election integrity? Isn't it in everyone's best interest to increase confidence in the electoral process, even if you think 2020 election deniers are kooks, as it will improve the legitimacy of whoever wins and diminish avenues of sympathy for the deniers?
I don’t think you should be agnostic here. Absence of evidence is, in fact, evidence of absence.
I also don’t think Democrats are categorically against security measures. They are generally opposed for the same reasons Republicans generally oppose gun control. It’s costly, it’s been abused before, and above all, it’s an attack on Our Team.
When I last looked at Texas election policy, I concluded it was pretty reasonable. But the Texas Republican Party has to push harder. They’ve made it a wedge and a sign of party allegiance; anyone who dissents is doing himself no favors. So the party platform (§221) has to be more extreme.
Implementing these will make voting slower, more difficult, and more likely to generate lawsuits. They encourage a heckler’s veto, where anyone with the time and money has more levers to slow down and cast doubt on the outcome. Is that likely to improve legitimacy?
No, these are designed more like the post-2020 Trump playbook. Spawn enough lawsuits, raise enough red flags, and people will start to doubt the outcome regardless of the facts. If you’re looking for ulterior motives, this is the one.
Also, preferential or ranked voting is literally my single issue. I would vote for Paxton, Trump, anybody if he came out in favor, but no, the party has decided that it’s a threat to democracy. Give me a break. But I understand that most people don’t really care.
...he said, standing in front a stack of burning papers...
Ok, Im being facetious, but what sort of evidence to you expect to see, in a system that doesn't to integrity checks, and preemptive steps, that the rest of the world consider basic?
I think we do most of those checks, and that we observe very little fraud anyway.
If there was widespread undetected fraud, I would have expected surprise audits like the Mariposa County report to turn up more of it. I’d have expected more of the Kraken lawsuits to win or at least make it to court. It’s not like they were lacking in motivation!
While I can’t run the statistics on my phone, I get the impression that most of these examples are caught by routine processes. That suggests there’s not much low-hanging fruit.
What specific integrity check would you have in mind?
Partisan scrutineers being allowed to meaningfully inspect the counting process is kind of a big one.
That’s definitely already a thing, no? Pennsylvania, Georgia.
They won't be able to make a repeat of it, but 'because covid', observers were made to keep a 3m distance from the actual counters, and accused of 'making the workers feel unsafe' if they tried to ask about anything in PA for sure. (there was a court case about it, which the RNC or whoever won and got an order to let the scrutineers scrutinize -- once the counting was more or less done)
GA I don't want to relitigate, but "we're stopping counting because of <definitely not a water main break>, you may as well go home" coupled with restarting the count a couple hours later seems well outside the spirit of that reg.
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