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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Notes -
Fraud
SubthreadMosh PitI will listen to allegations of fraud, dismissal of potential fraud, and attempted refutation of fraud here. Show receipts to add spice.
New York Times is on the beat.
The Maricopa County shitshow: the alt-right and conspiracy boards were lighting up about Dominion vote tabulators not accepting ballots in a big Republican section of Arizona.
Detroit voters were stunned to be told they’d already voted absentee.
Some Pennsylvania voters whose mail-in ballots were rejected for errors were notified in time to cast an in-person ballot, some weren’t notified, and some were told they couldn’t cast a provisional ballot to replace it.
All in all, “red wave barely a ripple, Trumpism refuted, cope and seethe more” will once again be met with “y’all cheated, just give us a year to figure out how.”
The problem with “fraud” is that there is no individual guilty of a crime.
Take Arizona: is it fraud that the printers just happen to malfunction on the day where most republicans are actually casting their votes? And is it “fraud” when nobody knows what to do about this for a few hours? This very clearly benefitted Katie Hobbs (who conveniently is also the person in charge of elections in the state), but…she wasn’t running around messing with printers.
Who is the guilty person here?
If someone tampered with the machines, telling them via wifi, USB, modem, or floppy disk to screw up Republican ballots, or just telling the ones in high-R areas to screw up, that would be a crime.
Similarly a crime if the choice to use Sharpies instead of ballpoints was made by people who knew some of the ballots in Maricopa would be made of lesser-quality paper through which Sharpie ink soaks.
If one person did these, it’s a crime. If a cohort of people enacted distributed parts of a plan, it’s a criminal conspiracy.
Even if it was negligence rather than intent, the Secy of State has a lot to answer for. Specifically, if the machines weren’t tested, if the high-quality ballot paper supplies were under-ordered, and so on.
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