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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   Edited 1yr ago   18904 thread views

USA Election Day 2022 Megathread

Tuesday November 8, 2022 is Election Day in the United States of America. In addition to Congressional "midterms" at the federal level, many state governors and other more local offices are up for grabs. Given how things shook out over Election Day 2020, things could get a little crazy.

...or, perhaps, not! But here's the Megathread for if they do. Talk about your local concerns, your national predictions, your suspicions re: election fraud and interference, how you plan to vote, anything election related is welcome here. Culture War thread rules apply, with the addition of Small-Scale Questions and election-related "Bare Links" allowed in this thread only (unfortunately, there will not be a subthread repository due to current technical limitations).

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Who would you suggest monitor instead? Nonpartisans? Where can they be found?

They could at least set up an independent authority to run the elections. Here in Australia, both the Federal government and each of the State governments have their own Electoral Commission which is an independent agency that explicitly is meant to be non-partisan. In the US, as best as I can tell, elections are run by under a division by each State's Secretary of State, who is a partisan, elected official. A similar thing I always found silly in the US is that how judges are allowed to be members of political parties (even if they're appointed by governments they could at least give some effort to maintain non-partisanship). Same with most election redistricting.

Obviously, you're not going to be able to weed out every partisan or partisan influence from agencies, but the American approach seems to be 'well, we can't completely get rid of partisanship, so why even bother, just go full partisan and hope things balance out'. I have worked in elections in Australia in the past, and honestly when people describe how things are done in the US I am shocked about how mismanaged and partisan the whole thing is, my experience of Australian elections is extremely positive, non-partisanship seems to actually work at least to some extent.

The UN will be happy to help observe your election.

hehehehehehe

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