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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   Edited 1yr ago   18872 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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Maricopa County has been reporting a lot of trouble with tabulators. Maricopa County is famous for being the location of "Sharpiegate" in the 2020 election.

Sharpiegate was ultimately confirmed. Not all of the ballots were printed on bleed resistant paper, some Trump votes were found to have been lost to bleed through. Not a large number, but it was a real thing.

Problems are being reported at 26+ polling locations. Voters are being told to leave their votes in a locked box to be tabulated at a different location later. There are worries about chain of custody.

Arizona currently has tight races for both the Governor and Senator, so this is going to be a major source of contention going forward.

How long did it take to count races in the 1990s?

It just seems like pure insanity to me that we use these machines to do our elections.

The only people civic minded enough to turn out to run our elections are also 70-90 years old.

So it becomes a problem to have them do counting of ballots given their cognitive decline.

Don't people get paid?

In 2018 according to my gf's recollection she was paid 90 dollars to run a poll station for 12 hours as a volunteer. You're basically reliant on civic minded people to bother with it at that point I think.

civic minded people

And exceptionally politically "involved" people.

Oh, that's too bad.

I remember being paid like $300 for working as a vote counter (lowest at the totem pole) in Sweden during the 2009 EU parliament elections, so that was pretty attractive for me as one days work as a student.

That's wild. NJ is normally $200 for the lowest level volunteers for the day. The two times I did it during Covid, they paid extra, for $400 and $325.

Hahaha… oh wait you’re serious.

They either don’t get paid, or paid only a nominal amount, like jury duty.

Where are you?

The only people civic minded enough to turn out to run our elections are also 70-90 years old.

So it becomes a problem to have them do counting of ballots given their cognitive decline.

IME, 70-90 years olds in cognitive decline are typically challenged by computer-like machines. Why do we think that they are worse at manual counting than at everything involving the custody and machine tabulation of votes?

Here is an example of how it works in Poland, a country with a population size close to California.

There was a second round of presidential election on July 12th, 2020. The poll station closed at 9 pm. Next day, on 13th, the national election committee, announced the results.

https://pkw.gov.pl/uploaded_files/1594724319_obwieszczenie-pkw-20200713-1915.pdf

There were 20 million votes to count, almost all cast in person (out of 30 million eligible voters). No machines were used to cast votes, all of them were done on paper. No machines were used to tabulate them, all tabulation is done manually. Nevertheless, the official results are announced less than 24 hours after the polls close, and unofficial results (ie, enough stations reported results to give 99%+ confidence in election outcomes) are available around midnight the same day.

There is literally no excuse for the idiocy that we see in US every election.

There is literally no excuse for the idiocy that we see in US every election.

How many unique questions are on Polish ballots? IIRC British ballots have only one question typically, but my American one had about 60 odd questions from various overlapping jurisdictions. There are almost certainly more unique suites of ballot questions than voting locations in my county.

But the wide variation in election quality speaks to differing standards and equipment across states and even between adjacent counties.

The one I gave as an example was particularly easy, as there was only one question with two possible choices.

However, for a better analogy, in the national “local” election (555 seats to provincial assemblies, 6,244 seats to county councils, 32,173 seats to commune councils, and 3,162 local government heads, close to 40 000 elected seats in total) in 2018, the official results of Sunday election (and the elections are always on Sunday in Poland, by the way) were announced on Wednesday afternoon.

I don't think you understand the nature of the problem. In general european elections will ask each citizen a handful of questions (for example two votes: one for the senate and one for the parliament). The US has far more elected positions than the average european country and also likes to aggregate local and general elections all in one (probably because general elections happen so frequently). So a normal US ballot will ask the citizen to vote for national elections but also positions in the state and county administration and include things like: seats on the supreme and appeals courts, sheriffs, various public attorneys, one or more referenda questions, seats on the school board, things nobody knows what they are, like comptrollers, etc.

Random example of a ballot

Of course they could just use two ballots, put the one or two national questions on one and everything else in the other and then use two ballot boxes, and then just count the national votes first. I guess it never occured to them.

Blame Bush versus Gore. After the hanging chads etc. some American elections switched to electronic voting machines to avoid similar problems, and now new and exciting problems have come in their wake.

Like the Poles in the comment below, Ireland does paper ballots and manual counting (we even had a mini-scandal when the government of the day, back in the 90s, wanted to introduce electronic voting and bought some machines, but there were so many legal challenges that the machines sat in a warehouse and were never used).

The counts are the best part of the election 😀

Blame Bush versus Gore. After the hanging chads etc. some American elections switched to electronic voting machines to avoid similar problems

Really? Were the hanging chads worse than the 400 voting-machine voters who cast negative 16,000 votes? That was even in the Florida 2000 Presidential election too!

It actually looks to me like Maricopa is trying to get things right: voting machines for accessibility, but instead of storing results on a chip they print a human-readable paper card ballot. The ballot can be immediately scanned for a quick count and to double-check for problems, but then it ends up in a lockbox for recounts or disputes... and if the tabulator isn't working, it just goes in a different container for hand-counting. I wouldn't be surprised if some of those printers cause problems too and need to be taken care of(NSFW audio), but they're independent enough that you could just spoil any half-printed ballots and send someone to another voting machine. Scanners are usually more reliable than printers, but having redundant tabulators too would have been a good idea in hindsight.

I wouldn't be surprised if some of those printers cause problems too and need to be taken care of

I didn't know it would be that clip when I clicked on the link, but I was hoping it would be that clip.

Voting needs to come with a receipt/tracking number similar to UPS/FedEx. Should be able to enter in your number and match that your vote was processed. This doesn’t seem like a difficult control to add.

Hard to make it so that said tracking doesn't allow someone to confirm to others which vote they cast, which then opens up the possibilities of threats and bribery.

I think bribery to be an overblown concern. You can already bribe people today, without them being able to prove that they voted the way you prescribed. Sure, some of them will take money and still vote the other way or not vote at all, but this does not make bribery ineffective, it just pushes up the cost of buying a vote. Ability to prove who you voted for would affect the market price for a vote, and so would probably increase amount of bribery on the margin, but is by no means required to make buying votes an effective strategy.

Think threats and power differentials. Take a look at the history of why the 'secret ballot' is also called the 'Australian ballot'.

These seem to me concerns of marginal importance to election outcomes. They might happen, but I can scarcely imagine that making vote verifiable will make these significantly worse than they already are. Like, what do you mean by “power differentials”, in concrete terms?

So, when Australia was colonized by the Brits, they used it as a penal colony. Of course, they didn't go full Lord of the Flies with the convicts, but sent good, upstanding Brits to run the place and maintain good order. After serving out their sentences, many convicts did have the option of returning to Britain, but lots of them chose to stay. They were free citizens, but obviously, their jibs were cut a bit differently than the better class of good, upstanding Brits who were sent to run the place. The convicts were even free to run for elected office, and some even did. Yet somehow, confusingly, even as time went on and there were many more freed convicts than there were good, upstanding Brits, none of these convicts ever won any elections. Maybe everyone just realized that it was better if good, upstanding Brits continued running the place.

Other folks disagreed, and they managed to implement the 'Australian ballot', where each individual's vote would be totally, completely secret. Suddenly, magically, freed convicts began winning elections and were able to curtail some of the harshest abuses curious practices of the good, upstanding Brits.

There is a reason why people who are working on digital elections really care about a property known as "receipt freeness", that is, that there is no possible way that anyone possesses any information whatsoever which could be used as a receipt to prove how a person voted. The ideal would be for the government to be able to publicize an encrypted database which cannot in any way be used to demonstrate how any person voted, but that each individual can take with them a piece of information which can be combined with this database to verify that their vote was correctly counted (yet still not reveal how they voted).

Okay, and do you have a concrete story for today? Say, all votes are on paper, the scheme is that everyone take home a carbon copy of their own ballot. What problems do you expect it to bring, today?

Different effects in different places. This is a vast country with lots of different local cultures. The example above shows how a local culture can produce very perverse results. We can eliminate any concern in any locale if we just take to heart the lessons of those who came before us and insist on a secret ballot.

If you had asked me 5-10 years ago how the history of freedom of the press (as in 'printing', not as in 'journalist') mattered at all in the internet era, I probably wouldn't have been able to predict what actually transpired in the following years. But I hope I would have thought that it was a hard-fought, good lesson that society learned in the past, so it shouldn't be trivially dismissed.

Stage one is people who are out and proud about their partisan identity showing off their ballot receipts.

Stage two is this becoming a social norm in environments where "everyone" votes the same way, such that not showing your receipt with a correct vote is defecting (cf pronouns in wokestupid spaces or prayers in secular-but-tribally-Christian ones).

Stage three is defectors suffering professional consequences such that there is no longer a meaningfully free vote.

I think this could happen within 2 years given the current level of partisan bitterness in America.

Feels like a risk worth taking compared to right now where I have no confirmation of what happened to my ballot once it’s dropped in the box.

But you at least know that a physical ballot was dropped in a physical box.

You're not going to have someone show up at your door later to provide reward or exact penance for your vote.

Isn’t that point kind of moot when remote voting has become the norm in Arizona?

That cat already seems well out of the bag with widespread postal voting.

I've been thinking, US is so low trust we should probably use the purple thumb. Only in person votes and everyone gets inked when they vote.

I don’t know about other places, but I can track my ballot here in Utah.

Sharpiegate was ultimately confirmed. Not all of the ballots were printed on bleed resistant paper, some Trump votes were found to have been lost to bleed through. Not a large number, but it was a real thing.

The original Sharpiegate claim was that tabulating machines rejected ballots filled out with a sharpie marker, and that poll workers were intentionally giving people sharpies to invalidate their ballots. What you're claiming was "confirmed" appears to be a different theory involving bleedthrough, not necessarily machine invalidation.

Either way, what is your source that Sharpiegate v2.0 was confirmed? I was able to find some confirmation that bleed through is possible, but every source I found indicated the ballots were printed off-set to avoid any issues with bleed through. What is your evidence that bleed through caused votes to be lost? How many votes exactly?

I thought that the bleedthrough was supposed to have been leading to machine invalidation, in that the part with the bleedthrough would be read as having multiple selections, and thus a spoiled ballot?

If ballots were indeed being invalidated because of sharpies, your explanation is a plausible one. But what is the evidence that ballots were invalidated? Maricopa election officials issued this statement back in Nov 4 2020:

sharpies do not invalidate ballots. We did extensive testing on multiple different types of ink with our new vote tabulation equipment. Sharpies are recommended by the manufacturer because they provide the fastest-drying ink. The offset columns on ballots ensure that any bleed-through will not impact your vote. For this reason, sharpies were provided to in-person voters on Election Day.

Has anything come up since to contradict their claims?

The Cyberninjas report definitely shows that the sharpies were bleeding through -- apparently they only examined ~7k ballots for this issue and found none where it caused invalidation -- so probably not a major impact, although they suggest that they found some ballots misaligned due to being printed on normal office printers, which suggests that the offset method was not necessarily failsafe. They promise a full evaluation by some kind of machine analysis, but I'm not sure whether they delivered on this. (ninjas are great on initial action but don't necessarily keep their promises)

This is not an issue I care about either way particularly, but a couple of things occur to me:

  • Why would you use a sharpie at all? The excuse at the time was that they dry faster than other pens, which seems to me false; normal ballpoint pens have essentially zero dry time, and even the expensive rollerball ones seem faster than a sharpie, which will definitely smudge for a few seconds after use -- and certainly bleed through when ballots are printed on office paper.

  • It sure is hard to find anything other than "Sharpiegate lol, that was totally debunked dummy" results on Google these days -- I was only able to find the cyberninja report (which actually examines the issue in a serious way, and seems to give a fair assessment of the results) because I remembered that some organization with a dumb name had audited the Maricopa ballots, and thus could search for it directly.

Thank you for digging that up! That's at least plausible indicator that bleed through might theoretically be a problem. I agree with you that the sharpie drying claim is suspicious, based solely on everyday experience, but I also have no idea what kind of paper is used in ballots. The Cyberninjas did, and they could've spent $20 at Office Depot and thoroughly tested this theory out.

@DradisPing could the Cyberninja report be what you remember? If so, does it help you recall where you picked up the other claims of Trump ballots being invalidated because of bleed through?

Sorry had some stuff to do earlier.

So from the time I remember seeing articles like this focussed on bleed through https://itnshow.com/2020/11/07/arizona-election-official-seems-to-confirm-that-bleed-through-from-sharpie-markers-do-impact-votes/

It was a well known issue, Sharpies had been banned in previous elections for that reason. That's why the woman was freaking out.

The response was there was no need to worry because of a combination of offset printing and VoteSecure paper to avoid bleed through issues. It turns out the paper wasn't used in all cases.

https://rumble.com/vjw41g-audit-team-caught-them-ballots-were-on-wrong-paper-stock-verifies-sharpiega.html

https://www.westernjournal.com/az-audit-revelation-wrong-paper-used-ballots-confirm-sharpiegate-according-az-sen-president/

So the paper thing irked me because it was a specific broken promise. If a printout was misaligned then it would register as an invalid over vote.

Someone fairly prominent on Twitter was claiming they found a handful of instances of bleed through invalidating Trump votes, but I can't for the life of me remember who.

Someone fairly prominent on Twitter was claiming they found a handful of instances of bleed through invalidating Trump votes, but I can't for the life of me remember who.

If your only evidence of ballots being invalidated from bleed through is that you remember someone prominent saying that on Twitter, do you still stand by that belief?

Why would you use a sharpie at all?

...When filling in my ballot selections this afternoon, while laboriously scribbling in the tenth little square, I found myself thinking "man, I wish I could use a sharpie for this". This despite having read the sharpiegate claim here this morning,

The article is misstating the original claim. It was always about bleed through. Republicans had seen bleed through issues in the past, that's why they were so concerned.

They were offset, but some ballots weren't properly aligned. It wasn't a significant number, but my recollection is that they found some.

It wasn't a significant number, but my recollection is that they found some.

Do you have a source besides your recollection?

my recollection is that

You know the "source: trust me, bro" joke? You are doing it to us right now. Knowing how fallible human memory is, we can't take vague recollections as meaningful evidence.

"Why bother? Boo outgroup." Don't.

You're doing the lord's work. Please keep up the civil discourse and I will work to do the same. Don't listen to the fools wanting to destroy our beautiful corner of the internet.

Katie Hobbs, the Dem candidate for governor in Arizona, is the current Secretary of State of Arizona and so is in charge of administering the election. I'm guessing lots of voters are going to be turned off of Hobbs because of this election screwup. Hobbs's opponent is ultra-MAGA so-called election denier Kari Lake who won the Republican primary in part with the help of Democrats who believed that Lake would be a weak candidate. Lake has turned out to have lots of charisma and is skilled at going on the offensive so if she wins should would be an obvious choice for the Republican Vice Presidential nominee.

This is just so far beyond parody that I can't handle it.

Katie Hobbs, who refused to debate or engage with the campaign in any meaningful way, is also in charge of running the election and now immediately in the morning the system that she (yes, she, since she is literally tasked with it) set up is collapsing.

And while all of this is happening, she is asking for a promotion. Insanity.

It does seem like candidates shouldn't be able to run their own elections.

But I don't recall people on the right having a problem with Brian Kemp as secretary of state overseeing his election to governor.

Maybe this can become a cross-party issue?

Ken Paxton and the rest of the Texas GOP establishment made a lot of noise about election security in Houston, to the point of sending task forces. Significant or not, this is a category where I wish the perception of interference was career-ending.

Hobbs's opponent is ultra-MAGA so-called election denier Kari Lake who won the Democratic Republican primary in part with the help of Democrats who believed that Lake would be a weak candidate.

Just to correct a typo.

Thanks!

Are partisans involved in monitoring the chain of custody?

I expect something to get disputed either way, but the big dogs might shut up if their vassals are watching the process.

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

The UN will be happy to help observe your election.

hehehehehehe

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.

It's standard practice in elections to never do anything without both a Democrat and a Republican present. I assume the laws don't mention those parties by name, but I'm not sure exactly how they are worded. And by "a Democrat and a Republican", that probably means an election official attesting they are of that party, not, say, someone who currently or has held elected office for that party.

"We've got about 20% of the locations out there where there's an issue with the tabulator, where some of the ballots that after people have voted they try and run them through tabulator, and they're not going through," said County Chairman Bill Gates in a video posted by the elections department.

Not only that but the person in charge is called Bill Gates. The memes write themselves honesty.

Y'know, if you're going to insist on the existence of a danger to democracy called "election denialism", you kinda sorta oughta make sure that there is no screwing up of the sort that makes it look like something dodgy is going on.

I don't think there is anything fraudulent, just general incompetence, but hoo boy. If I remember correctly, Maricopa County was one of the places in the 2020 election that gave rise to "this result seems very odd and possibly fake". Again, it was just a matter of a small amount of votes (I think about 3,000) causing it to flip from red to blue, but you really don't want to be always having something (ahem ahem) happening with the way you count votes, it begins to look like a pattern.

It's simply a matter of resources. I was talking to my girlfriend about this who in every mid-term and Presidential Election from 2008 to 2018 volunteered as a site judge in Philly. She was paid a max of 90 dollars for a 12 hour day, plus she got half a day training on setting up the voting machines and had a couple of other volunteers at her site. She often would have to stay late without getting paid any more until a police officer arrived to transport the ballots to the counting facility.

Whereas when I was running elections in a much smaller UK city, I had pretty much a hundred or more of council workers getting paid over time and time in lieu to do the polls and counting. We could train them throughout the year on whatever new set up we were using and do practice runs. And even then we pretty much always had some kind of issue every year. But you only see that internally because we only announced the votes when they were completed at the end. The fact we missed a box until the final sweep or a whole table of counters was reversing the piles in error would never show up in the results because it was caught by the final audit before we announced the final counts. Any challenges by the parties were usually dealt with prior to then as well.

Running a non-messy election is expensive and time consuming and even our electoral officers were getting their numbers cut, because compared to getting the bins collected it doesn't rile up voters in the same way so it's and easy way to cut budget.

I made close to 600 CAD in one day in the last Canadian federal election.

If this were in any other country, the UN's election monitors would cry foul. And not entirely unreasonably. Even assuming that the election is entirely legit and no one involved at all means badly, with a process like this, what reason does anyone have to believe that?

Ultimately, you can't have a functioning democracy if you can't convince the losers that they lost a fair game. In order to do that, it is imperative not to have procedural problems during the elections, let alone systematic procedural problems.

I'm trying to figure out

A) How this wasn't caught and prepared for way in advance?

B) Why there isn't an established backup protocol to handle this eventuality?

C) Why is this treated as normal an unavoidable by the respective authorities handling it?

There's no surprises here. The date is known well in advance, there's various tried 'n' true approaches to the process. The list of excuses for botching it is pretty short.

The only explanation that doesn't require incompetent and malfeasance is a basic shortage of labor or materials or something due to ongoing supply chain issues.

EVEN THEN, such an issue should have been noted in advance of the election.

You should probably add

D) Did this actually happen?

I don’t see a source, and ymeshkout seems to be questioning the conclusions on sharpiegate.

Using a throwaway account for op-sec. I'm a regular lurker and inconsistent poster here. I'm a believer that there is some persistent Democrat election fraud in Philly, Chicago, Atlanta and a few other blue cities in the form of organized ballot harvesting in ways that are, let's say, creative. I don't think the same is structurally possible in Arizona for Democrats in volumes that would matter enough to predictably swing an election.

Maricopa, despite being a Democrat stronghold, is not THAT Democratic. There are precincts in Philly and Chicago that return 95%+ for Democrats. Arizona, you might get 70% D in certain precincts in Maricopa, and the 30% that vote R are damned proud about it. Because AZ is purple and this is the west, we like to fight about politics with our neighbors. Do you think that the Republican poll watchers in Maricopa jurisdictions will take bribes to look the other way? No, they raise holy hell about it if they get a sniff of malfeasance.

I'd go out on a limb and say that the problems in Maricopa are just normal human fuckuppery, and not some sinister ploy by Katie Hobbs and her ilk to steal the election. If you voted early on-site in any Maricopa jurisdiction, guess what. You filled out a paper ballot and stuck it in a lock box, just like the voting locations with automated tabulators are having people do today. You even used a sharpie-type marker to do it. So I think the concerns are overblown and we'll end up with Governor Kari Lake anyway.

There are worries about chain of custody.

In most jurisdictions, on-site tabulation wasn't done until relatively recently, unless you go back to the days of lever machines. My own precinct in Pennsylvania didn't have them until the 2020 primary. Before that, it was all electronic and all you got was a plastic card that you'd literally throw on a pile on a table when you were finished. At least then, I guess, you could make the argument that the poll worker didn't know what was on the card. Before that, though, we used punchcards, and you'd drop the ballot into a box and trust that it wouldn't be tampered with. Before that it was hand marking paper. Hand-delivering ballots to the local board of elections was the norm throughout most of American history, especially in more rural locations that didn't tend to have mechanical voting machines.

The vibe I'm getting is that the red wave isn't happening. The republicans might not even get the senate. I'm watching /r/conservative and they are not happy with Trump, that sub has definitely taken a hard turn towards Desantis so that makes me optimistic that he can win the primary for 2024.

Depends on how you classify a wave, but looks like Oz and Masters will both lose. Walker is in a dog fight and may end up losing. That’s three very winnable races where Trumps guys are struggling mightily.

I really thought that Oz would win easily after seeing Fetterman's verbal impairment. Not sure what to make of his imminent win.

The obvious interpretation is that Pennsylvanians will pick a brain-damaged stroke victim over a rich Muslim carpetbagging snake-oil salesman who lives in New Jersey.

Yeah probably right. I guess I just couldn't help myself adding it to the litany, being just four years after Trump tried to work a "total and complete shutdown" of Muslims coming into the country "until our country's representatives can figure out what is going on."

I think the more obvious interpretation is that people vote for the party first, especially for non-presidential races.

Minus the Muslim thing, this is a perfect take.

Yeah, very few people like parachute candidates who show up out of nowhere to try and get a seat. That was a bad call.

Unless it's a safe seat guaranteed for you by the party apparatus so that you can ascend the cursus honorum in your plan for running for the Presidency and your name is Hillary, of course.

deleted

Honestly I'd have done the same if I were a Pennsylvania Democrat. Senators aren't like governors or presidents, where you need someone competent, charismatic and strategic. A brilliant Senator can get valuable committee chairs, sponsor smart legislation, build legislative coalitions, etc., and that's ideal, but 90% of the value of a Senate seat is just mechanically voting how the party leader tells them to vote. Brain-damaged barely-coherent stroke victims are fine. Same with congressmen and SCOTUS justices. Anyone who votes for a living has a pretty easy job.

The reason you want to nominate good politicians for Senate seats is so that they can win elections. But having them run in against rich Muslim carpetbaggers who live in a completely different state apparently also works, if the other party is dumb enough to nominate them.

Either no one saw it or VBM has basically re created machine politics. I’m guessing the latter.

Which is massive contrast to the absolutely crushing performance Desantis just put forth with Rubio.

To DeSantis's credit, he did just get his state through a godawful hurricane with what appears to be quite competent and rapid organization and work. That would buff anyone's poll numbers. Masters, Oz, and Walker didn't get that chance (not that I think any of them, other than mmmmmaaaaaayyyyyybeeeee Masters could have done remotely as well in DeSantis's shoes)

I have to think being the national face of reopening for business after covid didn't hurt his numbers either.

He also appeared on stage with Biden, and praised Biden's response and got praised in return. That's the kind of thing squishy moderates like to see as well. He probably didn't need them, but it certainly doesn't hurt.

Trump should be dead. He’s not a winner, he doesn’t bring coattails. His most endorsed candidates are not crushing it.

Versus Desantis turning Miami-Dade red. I have to conclude Desantis is the front runner now. And he’s a real conservative and not one that plays one on tv

If the Walker seat isn’t for control of the senate then I assume he’s dead in a run off.

I hope you're right, but I worry about how much of the GOP primary vote even follows these races closely enough to understand that Trump ruined everything. Seems pretty plausible that >50% of GOP primary voters don't follow that closely and will nod along when Trump publicly blames the rest of the party with some unintelligible claim.

Trump singlehandedly ruined what should have been a GOP controlled Senate in 2020 and it doesn't seem to have cost him anything with them: he led them like lambs to the slaughter in this year's Senate primaries.

nod along when Trump

I don't think the dems should get too cocky quite yet but when you let a capital P Populist be one of the main unifying draws for an entire presidential cycle, its gonna have a lingering effect. The q-anon truthers and Trump loyalists aren't going away.

Lets play with a hypothetical: is it actually good for republicans in 2024 if trump gets hung out to dry by the court battles he's entangled in? Is it possible we see Desantis backers and trump supporters battling in the usual online spaces (or does that already happen, i don't frequent the trenches of serious republican think tanks)?

Lets play with a hypothetical: is it actually good for republicans in 2024 if trump gets hung out to dry by the court battles he's entangled in?

If somehow the court battles disable Trump so that he loses the primary or doesn't even run? Absolutely! Trump is a terrible politician who repeatedly demonstrates negative coattails. He won a general election once, by a hair, in 2016, against a historically unpopular candidate, following two terms of Democratic control of the White House. He is ineffective even when he is in office, and he is so polarizing that he generates historic energy among the Democrats to oppose him.

DeSantis is the alternative. He's a brilliant politician who knows how to win, who knows how to govern competently, and who knows how to use the levers of government to secure his partisan goals. He walks on water. The only thing he may be unable to do is defeat Trump in the GOP primary.

But I don't think the court battles will disable Trump. Every time the Dems go too far and get too petty in persecuting him, he looks like a martyr and the GOP electorate rallies around him. The Dems are not stupid. They can see this effect play out, and will use it to their advantage. All they have to do is persecute him as loudly and unfairly as possible. I genuinely think this is the reason that Garland started this ridiculous investigation over classified information at Mar-a-lago. They can drag that out for the next two years, constantly keeping him in the headlines as the victim of Democratic overreach to manipulate the 2024 GOP primary and secure him as their opponent.

Even if Trump loses the primary, I don't put it past him to sabotage the GOP in the general election, possibly as a third party candidate.

The GOP is cursed by Trump's existence at this point. The best outcome for conservatives is if Trump dies of a heart attack as soon as possible.

One problem here is that literally every single one of the Republicans who won their primary with Democratic financial support lost the general election, and while 'election denialism' was one prong of that approach, this tactic is neither new or specific to that matter; it's just been drastically upscaled and unusually successful.

Maybe Democratic strategists decide that it's too risky of a weapon otherwise, or it doesn't work without Trump also putting his thumb on the scales, but I'd... be skeptical. I think even if Trump not on the stage in 2024 we still have a combination of Blue-tribe media, Dem official groups, and a wide variety of 'non-political' groups trying to hit the same magic, and I don't think it's reasonable to assume they'll fail.

This is my real concern. It seems possible that Democrats have realized they can use their advantage in political activism and media bias to determine who the Republican candidates are going to be. I'm not sure how you can counter this, short of reforming the primary process.

The primary process has been undergoing a reformation. I've seen caucus states move to primaries and closed primaries moving towards open. So moving but not in the direction away from media involvement. In-party activism can be pretty effective within caucuses though.

DeSantis backers and Trump backers have largely been allies up to this point but there are some cracks starting to show. With more conservative Reps rallying to Desantis' flag and wishing that the Trump crowd would just shut up/stop giving the opponents ammunition. All eyes are on AZ atm, if Lake pulls off the upset this will strengthen the Desantis Camp and solidify a "Trumpism independent of Trump".

is it actually good for republicans in 2024 if trump gets hung out to dry by the court battles he's entangled in?

No. Seeing your side lose in public is bad. Full stop. People hate a loser.

Is it possible we see Desantis backers and trump supporters battling in the usual online spaces (or does that already happen, i don't frequent the trenches of serious republican think tanks)?

It's more like ideological evaporative cooling in my experience. You don't see anti-Trumpers arguing with Trumpers, you just see Trumpers take over a previously Republican forum (local parties, gun clubs, etc) and the anti-Trumper grill-class types just kind of edging out of the room. Like if this forum went full fedposting, I wouldn't loudly argue about it, I'd just stop posting. That's what you're seeing at the local Republican level.

How did Trump ruin everything? (Genuine question)

Admittedly I'm not following the midterms super closely but I'd like to consider myself slightly better informed than the average voter.

In this year's primary, he endorsed Masters, Walker and Oz -- three neophyte politicians with manifest weaknesses -- over their more experienced competitors. All three prevailed in the primary, and all three seem to be headed for defeat tonight. All three races should have been eminently winnable.

In 2020, he made delusional claims that the election was stolen from him, and he publicly pressured Pence to basically abuse his power as VP to steal the election for Trump. This occurred before the two senate runoff races in Georgia, both of which should have gone GOP (based on fundamentals and based on the expectation that thermostatic turnout would favor the GOP as being energized to oppose Biden's recent win), but both of which ended up going to the Dems, giving Biden control of the Senate.

The degree to which this is "delusional" is one of the key points of disagreement between the Laptop Class and everyone else. The sentiment that "not only do we need to win but we need to beat the margin of the steal" has been bog standard mainstream GOP sentiment since at least 2010 when Obama and Barbara Boxer "joked" about accidentally misplacing ballot boxes from red leaning districts and siccing the IRS on anyone donating to the Tea-Party

Some of the specific claims Trump - in particular the Dominion voting machine conspiracy theory - almost certainly qualify as delusional, and the main reason why they might not is that Trump could have known they were false all along, making them dishonest rather than delusional. IIRC Trump made various claims to have won a landslide, which would also count as delusional - the plausible Trump win scenarios were squeakers.

The "bog standard mainstream GOP" claim that the normal run of petty incompetence that we see in American elections represents co-ordinated fraud by Democrats on a large enough scale to flip multiple states with 5-figure leads (which is what would have been needed to steal the 2020 presidential election) is clearly false and clearly sincerely held by significant numbers of sane people, so whether or not it is "delusional" is a boring argument about the meaning of words.

Thank you for the explanation!

Yeah it seems like a bust for the GOP. Maybe they'll eke out a win in the Senate but it's a far cry from the +3 GOP pickups that RCP has been predicting.

It's two things:

Thing number one is abortion. Very unusual for a party to win a major nationally salient policy victory while the opposing party controls the Presidency and both houses of Congress. The usual loss by a president's party in their first midterm is thermostatic backlash by voters to that president's policy wins. Here, the GOP winning abortion in SCOTUS upends that logic. Retrospectively the GOP won the biggest policy issue of the past two years, and prospectively it looks a lot more like the GOP holds the whip hand and needs to be checked by centrists. I know the usual pro-life posters on this forum take the line that it's all worth it to save the fetuses, but boy is it demoralizing for a pro-choice conservative like myself.

Thing number two is Trump. If things go as they seem to be going, this is now the second federal election in which he will have singlehandedly handed Senate control to the Dems: last time by contesting the election and putting on his insane January 6 carnival and publicly encouraging Pence to steal it for Trump while two runoffs were pending in Georgia, both of which the GOP should have won but both of which they lost, and this time by intervening on behalf of terrible candidates in Pennsylvania (the multimillionaire Muslim snake oil salesman who lives in a palace in New Jersey -- chosen to run against the guy that central casting delivered as the avatar of the blue collar salt of the earth) and Georgia (the barely literate guy with ten thousand illegitimate children, credible allegations of familial abuse, and a history of paying his estranged exes to get abortions -- chosen to run against the unimpeachable family man pastor). And the show isn't over: he's about to announce his run for 2024.

a history of paying his estranged exes to get abortions

But isn't that a good thing, from the side of the pro-choice? It means no unwanted children are born to be neglected and abused, it means he is taking financial responsibility for paying for the abortion, and the women are free of unwanted burden of motherhood?

I can see criticising the guy for being a hypocrite if his party is anti- abortion, but I don't get the logic of people (and I don't just mean you, I see this all over) being at the same time loudly pro-choice and complaining about the threat to abortion rights, and then use "he paid for his girlfriend's abortion" as a criticism.

I see the main argument trotted out time and again that restrictions on abortion will mean forcing women to have babies they don't want, which means the unwanted children will be abused, so abortion is a good thing. Unless you can show these women didn't want to have abortions or would not have aborted the pregnancy even if it had been Joe Blow, ordinary guy and not Football Star who was the father, what is the problem here?

"He shouldn't be paying for abortions if he's running for a political party that is anti-abortion?" What are his own views on it - has he said 'abortion is wrong'? Then you can get him for hypocrisy, and for being a sinner.

But by the same token, you cannot be both pro-choice and a conservative, because that's how the battle lines have been drawn up. If you're conservative, you must be anti-abortion, and if you're pro-choice, why are you voting Republican?

But isn't that a good thing, from the side of the pro-choice?

No. Although it is impossible to say this in Blue spaces because of wokestupid purity spirals, pro-choice normies want abortion to be safe, legal and rare. Herschel Walker's behaviour made it significantly less rare.

There are also a lot of people, not all of whom are religious conservatives, who think that having unprotected sex outside committed relationships is inherently discreditable, quite apart from whether or not an abortion happens as a result.

But isn't that a good thing, from the side of the pro-choice?

No. It's a scummy look. The median view is that early stage abortion should be safe, legal and rare. Median voters aren't happy when an abortion happens; they view it as a necessary evil in cases where the mother isn't able to care for the baby, there are complications in pregnancy or fetal development, where it would derail the family's future, etc. It isn't meant to be a form of contraceptive that wealthy playboys can use to cover their tracks when they want to rawdog a bunch of women without a vasectomy; that pattern of behavior is somewhere between misogynistic and psychopathic, and no one respects the man who uses it that way.

I don't get the logic of people (and I don't just mean you, I see this all over) being at the same time loudly pro-choice and complaining about the threat to abortion rights, and then use "he paid for his girlfriend's abortion" as a criticism.

Pro-choice voters aren't the target audience here, because pro-choice voters weren't going to vote for him anyway. The intended audience is pro-life voters, and the intended effect is to get them disgusted enough to stay home.

Georgia Republican Senate nominee Herschel Walker said as recently as August that he opposes any exceptions to a ban on abortion, despite stating the opposite during his first and only debate against Democratic Sen. Raphael Warnock last week.

https://www.cnn.com/2022/10/19/politics/herschel-walker-abortion-opposition/index.html

Come on dude, first Google result. This wasn't a hard one to research. I even typed in walker abortion position because I was too lazy to figure out how he spells Herschel.

Not sure that Jan 6 impacted the Jan 5 runoffs too much, although I like the rest of your analysis.

You're right, thanks for the correction. The 2020 Georgia runoff was the day before the January 6 shitshow, but well after Trump claimed the election was stolen and lobbied Pence to steal it for him.

Right, there had already been a considerable amount of circus.

Georgia (the barely literate guy with ten thousand illegitimate children, credible allegations of familial abuse, and a history of paying his estranged exes to get abortions

Man, I can tell you don't have much insight into the actual Georgia electorate to realize why Herschel Walker has quite possibly the most positive name recognition of any native Georgian in history.

If you think that's how anyone would define their perception of the guy who brought UGA football a national championship and won the Heisman, I don't know what to tell you.

Brian Kemp, noted Trump enemy, is running away with the governorship tonight, while Herschel is fighting tooth and nail at the finish line. So the possibilities are that Stacey Abrams is the photo negative of Walker in terms of popularity, Warnock's two-year tenure gives him an incumbency advantage equal to the magnitude of Walker's titanic stature, or voters look for different qualities in Senators than they do in football running backs. My bet is on the third, particularly when Herschel's laundry is aired out in a competitive campaign (and surely one should expect a brain-damaged running back to have dirty laundry).

Stacey Abrams is the photo negative of Walker in terms of popularity

Without casting aspersion on any of your other points, this is very possible. Between the minor corruption scandal over her shoveling money at her campaign manager to fight a doomed election denier lawsuit and her frequent gaffes, she does not cut a particularly dashing public figure. Insofar as she is an effective Democratic operative, it seems to be within deep blue bubbles and within activist and organizing circles.

I’m not gonna put money on it til I see some better crosstabs, but if the break from predictions is more on the basis of education than by gender (with the recognition that abortion isn’t as overtly gendered as people expect), I’m gonna point to the student loan relief thing pretty heavily. It was an incredibly obvious and high-value give, timed almost immediately to the election for optimizing turnout, and I think skipping over it is missing a major component

Which is also not great, since it’s dubious as a policy and law matter in ways that something like abortion policy isn’t, and that may have corrosive effects when the next close election finds a President looking for 20k USD giveaways.

Yesterday I estimated 70% GOP 51 Senate and 30% 50-50 Dem keep. Looks like even that was an overestimate for GOP performance, even though I had been very skeptical of the wilder 53+ GOP Senate projections. If Dems actually pick up a Senate seat, the GOP will be left only with copium that perhaps the Senate loss will enable DeSantis to prevail over Trump in the 2024 primary and go on to produce a true red wave (especially if the economy will be stuck in a recession at that point).

I wonder if ten years from now the GOP will look back and view Trump's 2016 win was a pyrrhic victory, one that ultimately resulted in a decade+ of Dems in power. So far Trump's SCOTUS appointments still make it seem like a net win for conservatives, but that calculus likely changes if Trump wins 2024 GOP nomination and loses in the general, with at best a 5-4 conservative majority, if not 5-4 liberal one, by 2028.

Desantis has a massive amount of leverage right now to try and get Trump to back down, presumably in exchange for something.

If his tenure as governor is any indication he will make good use of such leverage.

I am curious to see his Trump containment strategy.

He just proved he doesn't need to be tied to Trump to win elections, so hard to see any way Trump can hurt him in the near term.

Well he just saw a bunch of his preferred candidates take an L, whilst Desantis (who runs the state Trump lives in) just blew the doors off his opponents.

I like to think Trump is rational enough to read this portent.

i for one hope to see some Desantis vs Trump debates, i can only imagine them being entertaining.

I wish I'd publicly stated my agreement with @huadpe's bearish outlook.

It is an astroturf. Nothing has changed re: Trump v. DeSantis. His "Florida is where woke goes to die" speech was based though.

Maybe I'm easy to please, but DeSantis's victory speech seemed quite good to me (assuming that one is simpatico with his ideology). Considering that the most common critique I had previously seen of DeSantis was that he lacked magnetism and charisma, this seems like a pretty big moment for him.

Fraud Subthread Mosh Pit

I 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.”

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.”

I expect more of the usual retarded 2000 Mules stuff and more forwarded emails from my boomer parents about how THOUSANDS of people born BEFORE 1850 participated. This stuff tends to be so stupid that it seems like it must be a deliberate distraction, but a lot of people keep falling for it. I don't discount the possibility of hard cheating (certainly the security measures aren't very strong) and I basically agree across the board with Darryl Cooper's take on stolen elections, but I am indeed not looking forward to the coping and seething.

I don’t see how ballot harvesting isn’t a concern. Not in the “fake ballots” but in a “kind of quid pro quo not really secret ballot old times machine” way

Well, this is embarrassing. I didn't realize 2000 Mules was more about harvesting than fake ballots or similar. I personally regard ballot harvesting as a form of corruption that obviously shouldn't be allowed.

Ballot harvesting is legal in most states but subject to different rules (except in Alabama where it's unconditionally a felony). I think the idea is that ballot harvesting can be used as a way to introduce fraudulent ballots, but isn't necessarily per se fraudulent by itself.

I would say in some states (family member voting isn’t what most have in mind). Also I believe that some states that allow harvesting require hoops that limit the general usefulness.

With that said, my objection (and many others objection) isn’t necessarily that ballot harvesting is introducing false ballots, but instead that ballot harvesting permits a kind of quid pro quo that the secret ballot was intended to prevent. I’m not saying people are obvious about it but you have activists target areas you know vote X; those activists help people in the community, then come election time they go to the people they help (probably with the candidates name on their person) and ask “hey have you voted — I’d be happy to help you vote and to make it easier I can drop of the ballot myself.”

Now is that fraud? No. Is it even quid pro quo? Not necessarily. But is it highly questionable? I think so.

But is it highly questionable? I think so.

To me it seems virtually indistinguishable from just campaigning or GOTV efforts. What are the minimum changes you'd want to see for the practice to no longer be questionable to you?

Minimum changes is to make that illegal. The reason why it is different is that it changes (1) the ease of which someone can cast a ballot (I might not be willing to go to the precinct but if I don’t really have to do anything) and (2) the activist actually sees who you vote for which puts more pressure into the quid pro quo.

In short, I think it is a terrible process that should only be legal for immediate family members.

the activist actually sees who you vote for which puts more pressure into the quid pro quo.

If there's anyone watching strangers' ballots be marked and taking them to ballot boxes, that's massively illegal and they should be serving jail time, excepting maybe some cases where people legitimately need help filling out their ballot (mainly thinking some elderly/blind people here), which should be handled very carefully.

My understanding of "ballot harvesting" claims is merely that activists were delivering the ballots, with similar GOTV concerns that activists can selectively give rides to the polls to only people they expect to vote the way they want.

More comments

It seems obviously different to me, because the interlocutor can confirm that you have in fact voted, and even who you voted for. If a door-to-door GOTV person comes by, I can simply lie to them that I really do plan to vote and go about my day. Or even take their offer for a ride to the polls, then get a guaranteed secret vote.

If they are harvesting, I can't lie to them and tell them I will vote. They can pester me and use social pressure until I actually vote for they person they want me to. They can track that information unless I rudely try to conceal what I am doing, which is itself suspicious. They can report this information back to their bosses. Or to my boss for that matter.

ETA: Minimum change I would want would be for any such harvesting to be noticed at least 48 hours in advance and required to allow partisan witnesses.

the interlocutor can confirm that you have in fact voted, and even who you voted for.

Do you think these people are opening the ballot envelopes and resealing them? Or do you think there's a lot of people going door-to-door insisting on committing a felony (violating the secret ballot) with witnesses?

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If they are harvesting, I can't lie to them and tell them I will vote.

I'm obviously not aware of the specifics of your jurisdiction, but could you not claim that your ballot was already postmarked and in the mail or an official drop box? At least for the mail, proof-of-receipt wouldn't be expected to show up immediately.

That said, I'm generally against ballot harvesting except maybe households making a single trip to the neighborhood post box. In addition to the already-mentioned concerns, partisan harvesting operations present lots of chain-of-custody concerns and the possibility of a badgering and/or "accidentally" losing ballots.

Oh, I'm aware that it's legal, I just don't think it should be. I find nothing redeeming about the process and see no valid reason for it to exist at all.

That's not really fraud though. Same as concerns over last minute COVID-related election law changes. It's just complaining about rules you don't like, which is fine, but every election is going to have rules some group of people doesn't like. It's basically the Stacy Abrams model.

Likewise, well aware, hence why I said that I expect more boomers going around complaining about dead people voting and stolen ballots and a bunch of other stuff that the evidence for is non-existent or super thin. I think arguing about rules is a worthwhile thing to do and I think ballot harvesting is a great example of the sort of thing that should be reigned in, but focusing on things like that requires letting the more aggressive claims of "mass fraud" go.

i watched 2000 mules when it came out, IIRC the best evidence they had was video of a grandpa dropping off 10-20 votes for his family, which is a lot of votes but not quite the type of proof one would hope for when the crime in question is supposedly systematic and widespread.

They also had some phone telemetry stuff showing that some people came and went from the area of a polling station repeatedly, but i don't think they have any way to know the difference between a door dasher and a secret squirrel.

Would it be reasonable to be suspicious when two thousand cell phones have a pattern of pings along paths from nonprofits to three or four different dropboxes at 2am?

Would it be reasonable to be suspicious when two thousand cell phones have a pattern of pings along paths from nonprofits to three or four different dropboxes at 2am?

If the movie showed that actually happening, yes. But they only speculate that it's happening and fail to follow-up that speculation with confirming evidence, which should've been trivially easy given the amount of video footage they boasted of having.

They don’t “speculate” in the sense of disclosing uncertainty, they outright state they have the data. The book actually lays out that data.

They don’t “speculate” in the sense of disclosing uncertainty, they outright state they have the data. The book actually lays out that data.

They speculate that their data reflects a conspiracy of vote fraud. What they never show is a single actual person going to multiple ballot dropoffs. Not just in one night, but ever. Their "4 million minutes" or whatever of video either fails to corroborate their claim or they decided not to show that it does, which is very weird.

I didn't know that there was a book, too. I doubt that it proves anything more than the movie did, beyond possibly doubling their profits on their uncorroborated speculation.

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I literally don't know. In a vacuum that sounds like a lot of cell phones but i have absolutely no context for whose phone or what these paths look like. Can you show that these cell phones aren't cars that simply pass the geofence closest to the nonprofit, then pass a fence near the poll, all while never getting out of their car?

You certainly could -- I don't think the "Mules" people did that work though. (Or if they did they didn't show it)

Well maybe don’t be too embarrassed. 2000 mules combined harvesting with fake ballots. That seems silly to me.

Isn't the problem that you can't check because of the way things are set up? Combined with a massive tradition of voter fraud in urban areas (for which, there is no real reason it should have ended) it makes the case very easily for the fraud side. The presumption appears to favor fraud, not select against it.

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.”

Would any of these be conceded as voter fraud even if they are proven true?

Over the last couple of years, there was more than one appeal to semantics on what was / was not fraud, to dismiss irregularities/concerns as not fraud, and thus accusations of fraud baseless.

Fraud implies malicious intent, not mere incompetence or bad luck.

Yes, but we have a system where they are, in most states indistinguishable. If Maricopa county had actually generated a 100k swing, how would you know it happened? How would you know if it was incompetence or malice?

A swing of that many votes in one jurisdiction produces tons of impossible-to-hide statistical anomalies.

Why was Chicago able to keep its fraud undetected for the better part of a century until they fucked a co conspirator who flipped? There were multiple such anamolies detected in PA in 2020, they were all thrown out in court and are considered by the MSM to constitute "no evidence of fraud."

Coordinating mass secret criminal action is virtually impossible.

Except it has been done in the US in this exact field forever, and it was almost never detected until everyone was dead.

For election fraud. I'd like you to explain why its stopped happening, what year exactly for each major political machine, and why the FBI doesn't conduct sting operations like NYS did back when they found that they had a 98(ish)% success rate in impersonating voters.

Fraud implies malicious intent, not mere incompetence or bad luck.

The thing about this framing, however, is that malicious fraud would always try to present itself as incompetence if caught, while only incompetent fraud would fail to do so, thus demonstrating it's incompetence.

From a systemic rigging perspective, incompetence itself can be the method by which a malicious actor might operate. If you are politically biased human resource allocator, sending your most competent, capable, and credible vote-facilitators to your partisan base to gather and protect the votes, but sending the lazy, the incompetent, and all-round worst mailman who leaves the back of the truck unlocked to go collect from the enemy neighborhood is... well, not fraud, by definition, but it's a definition that proves too much. 'I'm not facilitating fraud, I'm just bad at election security' is a distinction without a difference.

Now, there's no clear line that covers the premise of election shinanigans that fraud overlaps with- or at least, I don't have one that's broadly agreed upon- but that's what makes it such a useful (or hated) motte-and-bailey. Fraud is whatever the person making the argument needs it to mean at the time, from both directions.

Incompetence is a way better cover story than an attack vector. Actual incompetence is unpredictable, so for something as important as a hypothetical election rigging scheme why would you risk sending a bunch of gomer pyles when you could send a bunch of super cool spies who just pretend to be retarded.

The motte here is that conspiracies require some number of agents to facilitate them and there have been 0 vote switchers discovered, idunno what the bailey even is. From my limited perspective the rightists, especially the trump aligned, are the ones constantly building up fantastical narratives about the vote and then retreating towards reality when questioned.

"Voter fraud" typically seems to refer to people voting who shouldn't be allowed to vote, including most felons, noncitizens, children, or the dead. Also, people voting more than once, or intentionally counting ballots incorrectly.

Liberals will often levy accusations of "voter suppression" which tends to run in the opposite direction: People not being allowed to vote who should, making it unreasonably difficult for them to vote, or failing to count their votes. Examples include not having voting places where certain groups can access them (particularly the poor, who may not have reliable transportation), undersupplying voting locations (so that lines are very long, which again can be a larger burden on the poor who can't take time off work), the fiasco around Florida's felons from last election, discarding ballots for minor errors and not giving voters the chance to correct them (as alleged in PA, mostly around missing a date) or being told they can cast a provisional ballot (I think this was alleged in Detroit; voters had to know to request one).

I would say that "fraud" definitely does not refer to accidents and misunderstandings, or to things that have a completely benign and likely explanation just because someone who lost claimed fraud.

Will any of them be conceded as legitimate, if proven false?

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.”

Browsing red-leaning spaces I'm already seeing demands for an inquest, and suggestions that Florida just so happened to see significant GOP gains around the same time they started to crack down on election integrity as evidence that "Yes, the Dems have been cheating" and that the vehemence of their opposition to similar measures elsewhere and attempts to tar anyone who questions observed irregularities as an "election denier" as evidence that this is not an isolated incident but explicit policy at the national committee level.

I won't be surprised if Republican states and legislatures start pushing more and more similar measures through in the next two years.

Neither would I.

If nothing else, the alacrity of the count in Florida should call other states methodology into question. Even granting partisanship, it seems hard to make a serious argument that taking a long time to count votes is good, actually.

That's a lost cause in some places, though. All the election deniers in 2020 pointed to Florida and wondered why Pennsylvania couldn't have their counts done as fast. The state responded that Florida allows precanvassing and Democrats tried to get a precanvassing bill passed but Republicans in the state legislature were more interested in trying to get the mail-in vote law that they unanimously supported in 2019 repealed than in trying to make Pennsylvania's laws more in line with Florida's. This is pretty much a lost cause now with Shapiro winning the election, and with Democrats making gains in the state legislature there may be some movement on a precanvassing law in the future.

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.

Even if it was negligence rather than intent, the Secy of State has a lot to answer for.

Funny story there. The current Secretary of State just so happens to be running for Governor, and Maricopa county is where the bulk of her opponent's supporters reside.

Adding to this- Harris county in Texas delayed opening the polls due to incompetence, decided to keep them open late to make up for it, and then had the state Supreme Court toss out all the ballots cast after 7 pm local time.

With this being the only county where democrats outperformed their polls in the state, republicans are calling this evidence of fishy elections and I would expect another voter integrity bill giving more power to the attorney general and Secretary of State.

Yeah can easily count the ballot boxes from democrat voting areas first and then whoopsie, no time to count ballot boxes from republican areas.

Not fraud per see, but in the bag of (dirty?) tricks, I'll throw in 'supporting the primary candidates you plan to call a threat to democracy.'

This is pure strategy, though, and not election-day fraud. I view it as highly troublesome, as any sort of managed opposition strategy by incumbants is by definition state-meddling in opposition parties, but this is a broader tension between political parties in zero-sum competition than what you're referring to.

Washington Examiner article on Democratic influence in Republican primaries-

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/campaigns/democratic-meddling-republican-primaries-effective

Maricopa county still has to count hundreds of thousands of ballots and as the article notes this is already being regarded by many republicans as likely fraud.

Maricopa leans red (34% Republican vs 30% Democrat) and was predicted to break strongly for Lake, but Lake's opponent in the election is Katie Hobb who is the current AZ Secretary of State and thus in charge of supervising the election. The oddly localized breakdown of election infrastructure in a county that is simultaneously AZ's most populous, and one where her opponent was expected to do well, has a lot people speculating about intentional sabotage.

It's not a good look.

How about a thread of ballot measures of Culture War interest and their results? You can find a list of all measures on the ballot in every state here.

Abortion

Four states (CA, KY, MI, VT) had measures on the ballot related to abortion last night. Three of these (CA, MI, VT) were attempts to enshrine abortion as a right in their state constitutions. All three passed. One (KY) was an effort (similar to KS earlier this year) to amend their constitution to clarify it does not contain a right to abortion. This measure failed. One thing I want to draw attention to is the difference in margin between the KY Senate race and this ballot measure. Rand Paul easily cruised to victory with a margin (according to the NYT) of 890k votes to 550k votes (61.6-38.4). By contrast this ballot measure lost 700k votes to 632k votes (52.55-47.45). Even if every single Booker voter also voted No on the amendment there would still have to be another 150k Paul voters (10% of the electorate, 1/6 of Paul's voters) who also voted No. So it seems like there may be a substantial number of Republican voters who are turned off by the party's position on abortion.

Slavery

Involuntary servitude as punishment for a crime was on the ballot in five (AL, LA, OR, TN, VT) states last night. Of those, four of them (AL, OR, TN, VT) passed their ballot measures prohibiting involuntary servitude as punishment for a crime and one (LA) did not.

Drugs

It was a pretty mixed night for drug legalization on the ballot. Five states (AK, MD, MO, ND, SD) had marijuana legalization initiatives. Two of those (MO, MD) passed and three (AK, ND, SD) did not. Colorado looks set to approve a ballot measure decriminalizing certain psychedelics (including psilocybin and DMT) statewide.

Nondiscrimination

One final ballot measure I want to call attention to is in Nevada. There they passed a constitutional amendment that "prohibits the denial or abridgment of rights on account of an individual's race, color, creed, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, age, disability, ancestry or national origin."

to amend their constitution to clarify it does not contain a right to abortion.

It's interesting to me that even something this tepid generated a strong pushback. Passing the amendment would've done nothing on its own, but instead just would have laid the groundwork for future legislative effort. This further highlights just how much of a losing position banning abortion is on the overall policy spectrum.

It was a pretty mixed night for drug legalization on the ballot. Five states (AK, MD, MO, ND, SD) had marijuana legalization initiatives. Two of those (MO, MD) passed and three (AK, ND, SD) did not.

The rejections were very surprising to me. I figured that after a decade of seeing states legalize marijuana as NBD, this would have continued the momentum. I guess this is a blind spot of mine, as I just cannot comprehend the desire to keep sending people to jail for smoking weed.

I guess this is a blind spot of mine, as I just cannot comprehend the desire to keep sending people to jail for smoking weed.

I might have voted no on marijuana legalization, depending on how the law was constructed. I hate all the tacky billboards and ubiquitous stores in my state promoting a vice (even if I indulge myself on rare occasion). Evidence suggests that marijuana use is increasing, and I believe the downsides are understated. Finally, no one is actually going to jail for smoking weed.

You know, Clinton got a lot of undeserved criticism for saying he wanted abortion to be "safe, legal, and rare". Honestly, it's a great formula for a lot of things including marijuana.

We went from legal prohibition to the current gross free-for-all.

In a perfect world, there would be some government owned drug store in a non-descript building, open at inconvenient hours that sold the products people would otherwise purchase from street dealers.

Finally, no one is actually going to jail for smoking weed.

you sure about that?

Date has been screwy lately due to reporting issues, but 2019 FBI data says there were 1.5 million arrests for drug abuse violations, and about 480,000 arrests were just for marijuana possession. In my experience cops don't tend to be shy about upgrading to distribution charges, so presumably if someone was dealing they'd get arrested for dealing rather than just possession. I have no idea how many of half million people arrested were actually sent to jail, how many were subsequently convicted, or how many had a clean record (why is this relevant?). Still, that is a remarkable sample size to draw from.

I've known a handful of people who have been arrested for marijuana possession, and not a single one has spent more than a few hours in a cell. The one guy in college who had "distribution" amounts got some community service and a few years of probation, for everyone else it was a fine.

how many had a clean record (why is this relevant?

I have heard many times that drugs are an easy way to get someone to plea, instead of having to go with some harder to prove charge. Similarly, I've known a dealer who was released with some fines/probation repeatedly, paired with escalating threats that he was running out of chances and needed to turn his life around. Basically, I think many of us assume the courts treat "normal taxpayer who smokes weed sometimes" differently than a known public nuisance.

I don't have any reason to doubt the specific cases you're familiar with, but we're still working with a pool of half a million arrests. A third of all drug arrests are just for marijuana possession, so it's a bit wild to claim that "no one is actually going to jail for smoking weed". I'd need to see way more systemic evidence before that claim starts to approach plausibility.

We know that Biden's recent pardon freed no one, which is a bit of evidence that should have shifted everyone's priors toward no one goes to jail for simple possession.

More comments

Fair, anecdotes and all that. But arrests != charges, much less jail time. As a more general proxy point, Biden's recent pardoning of all federal marijuana possession charges did not release a single prisoner.

You're a defense attorney - have you ever seen a person get jail time for just possession?

More comments

I know that this is moving the goalposts, but even with little to no jail time an arrest and drug conviction can absolutely derail a person's life. A felony conviction will cost you several rights off the bat like the right to vote, own a firearm, and serve on a jury. Careers in government and health care will be permanently off limits as well. Most other traditional, high paying careers will become vastly more challenging to pursue as will renting a place to live (background checks are routine). Needless to say if you ever interact with the justice system again, e.g. in a child custody case, criminal convictions will be held against you.

All that is to say that just because someone isn't sitting behind bars doesn't mean that they aren't being punished.

for a first offense

I could've sworn I was next to the goal posts a moment ago.

I hate all the tacky billboards and ubiquitous stores in my state promoting a vice

Donuts ... low mileage cars ... alcohol ... fast food ...

I don't believe you have thought through your statement unless you're looking for a blanket ban on sin advertising.

I don't believe you have thought through your criticism.

There's a major difference between prohibiting things that are already legal and legalizing things that are currently prohibited. De novo, there are a lot of things we would change that don't make sense to change now. Most famously, if alcohol was invented today, it would rightfully be banned or heavily restricted.

Consistency is and ought to be sacrificed for pragmatism.

In a perfect world, there would be some government owned drug store in a non-descript building, open at inconvenient hours that sold the products people would otherwise purchase from street dealers.

Of course, this being the government we're talking about, the prices will be in excess of the street dealers, and you'll have 10 round milligram limits on products because anything over that is "high-capacity assault" weed. Which is... exactly how it works north of the US.

Finally, no one is actually going to jail for smoking weed.

Too many things are felonies, and selective enforcement exists (making a "concerned citizen calling about" heckler's veto into law is just inviting and incentivizing bad behavior).

The fact that a law exists that can put you in jail for a relatively-harmless thing is a massive liability even if nobody enforces it. And that liability affects the people who respect the law the most (or don't have the risk tolerance to break it), which also happen to be the people who wouldn't be adding to the current problems people who are anti-weed complain about in the first place.

If it's not going to stop, and considering the number of people currently breaking the laws around it, it isn't; might as well not fuck up the ability for everyone else to enjoy it.

A major flaw in the ‘weed isn’t going away’ argument is that laws against it in the USA aren’t seriously enforced.

Yah if that’s the case people will still keep buying from street dealers.

In a perfect world, there would be some government owned drug store in a non-descript building, open at inconvenient hours that sold the products people would otherwise purchase from street dealers.

In all fairness, this is what we had for medical for a while in PA, if in practice but not law, simply because sourcing problems and ambiguity in the law meant that the dispensaries had practically no product, at least not the specific products a lot of people wanted. The end result was that most people with dubious medical cards just kept buying from street dealers while people who legitimately needed it for medical reasons and had no prior contact with the drug culture were hung out to dry.

Maybe I've gotten desensitized to it but I live near several dispensaries and never notice anything. The parks are also chockful of people openly smoking joints, and hilariously the only thing that ever really gets scorn is cigarette smoking.

Regardless, if you hate the smell of marijuana you can just enforce public consumption. Criminalizing possession is enforced by putting people in jail, so I don't understand this round-about way of defending against a nasal assault.

One concern I have with legalization is that it is much harder to prove DUI than with booze, and unlike with booze there is no "constructively impaired" limit like with BAC. I've already had one hit-and-run that hurt me and totaled my car due to the plague of reckless and dangerous driving near me. Got the license plate and still wasn't even able to recover my deductible, since I didn't get a face ID to prove who was driving.

I agree that proving impairment is harder but I'm not convinced that marijuana DUIs are a serious problem. I've handled dozens of them by now and the modal police report is something like "vehicle sat through two green light cycles without moving" or "vehicle drove 10 miles below the speed limit". They're really good cases to go to trial because although it's obvious the people are high as fuck, there's virtually no evidence they were actually a danger in any way. I definitely cannot say the same about alcohol. Also, some states do have "constructively impaired" limits, Washington for example has a 5 nanogram per se limit.

Nasal assault? Well you've got the language down. You would hate Australia, there are all sorts of plants and trees that just smell like pot. There's a bushland near me that smells like a perpetual Dutch oven for a week or two every couple of months. I also notice some people have body odour which smells like weed, which would make for some embarrassing police interactions. Unless you are very serious about nasal assaults - serious enough to ban basically everyone from the Middle East, North Africa and South Asia from an public place, at least for summer. Because the smell of weed isn't great, but it doesn't make my freaking eyes water like a trip on the bus or to kfc at midday.

I can, simply because lots of boomers who don’t think it’s a serious crime don’t want to be around it or to have to deal with cannabis culture the way we now have to deal with gay pride, and imprisoning the odd pot smoker while giving slaps on the wrist to substantially more of them keeps it far enough out of the open that no one who doesn’t want to deal with it does so.

There’s also game theoretic reasons for cultural conservatives to keep it legal, and I expect that those are likely to weigh more heavily on conservative state legislators in the future.

It depends on the wording of the marijuana legalization initiatives.

The Ohio Marijuana Legalization Initiative was an Ohio initiated constitutional amendment on the ballot for November 3, 2015, where it was defeated.

Voting yes would have legalized the limited sale and use of marijuana and created 10 facilities with exclusive commercial rights to grow marijuana.

Voting no was a vote to leave current laws unchanged. Possession or use of marijuana for any reason remained illegal.

Issue 3 was accompanied on the ballot by Issue 2, which was added by state lawmakers concerned that the amendment would have granted a monopoly to the facilities.

Link.

There they passed a constitutional amendment that "prohibits the denial or abridgment of rights on account of an individual's race, color, creed, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, age, disability, ancestry or national origin.

Will 5-year-olds be able to vote in Nevada next election? Is there any way to interpret the text of the amendment that wouldn’t preclude denying a person the right to vote on account of their age being only 5? Does anyone actually read these things?

The voting age should be lowered to at birth, with parents given the right to vote on behalf of their children before their age of majority.

I'll bite. Why? Are there any benefits to this policy? Is it just pro-natalism?

Just pronatalism.

Is there any way to interpret the text of the amendment that wouldn’t preclude denying a person the right to vote on account of their age being only 5?

Yes. But I imagine everyone will just ignore that knot, much like how Brown v. Board of Education wasn't interpreted to outlaw girls' bathrooms when it struck down separate but equal facilities. The law in text and the law in practice are two separate things.

Well, the actual holding of Brown was that "Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal." That is presumably not the case re boys' and girls' bathrooms. Moreover, the test for the validity of laws which discriminate varies based on the basis of the discrimination.

Will 5-year-olds be able to vote in Nevada next election?

Almost certainly not.

Is there any way to interpret the text of the amendment that wouldn’t preclude denying a person the right to vote on account of their age being only 5

The amendment by itself? Maybe not. In the broader context of the Nevada constitution? Definitely. You just interpret Article 2 Section 1 (which sets the minimum age for being an elector) as controlling.

Does anyone actually read these things?

Yea, definitely.

Perhaps I'm underinformed on how amendments affect the interpretation of the previously ratified constitution. Does the amendment need to state a specific section being modified, or does the fact that it is more recent automatically give it supremacy in interpretation?

Reading Article 2 Section 1 carefully, it doesn't actually state that electors must be 18 or older, it says:

"All citizens of the United States (not laboring under the disabilities named in this constitution) of the age of eighteen years and upwards, who shall have actually, and not constructively, resided in the state six months, and in the district or county thirty days next preceding any election, shall be entitled to vote for all officers that now or hereafter may be elected by the people, and upon all questions submitted to the electors at such election"

It enumerates the positive right for people 18 and over to vote, but does not explicitly deny the vote to those under 18. Given that there is a brand new amendment specifically saying that the state can not deny rights on account of age, it seems to me that the only way to harmonize these two sections is to extend the right to vote to all ages.

If it's like any other constitutional right, exceptions will be subject to strict scrutiny.

Will 5-year-olds be able to vote in Nevada next election?

They can bring a suit, but the court will just stall for 13 years then proceed to declare the issue moot.

It works every time a young adult brings a suit related to taxation without representation; no reason it won't be what happens here too.

Yes, there is a way: By interpreting "equal protection" as it has been interpreted for 100 years: Not to mean the right to be treated identically, as you incorrectly assume, but rather to be treated in the same manner as others in similar conditions and circumstances, and to prevent govt from drawing distinctions between individuals solely on differences that are irrelevant to governmental objectives

Guns

This election we saw measure 114 in Oregon, which would require permitting for guns, which includes receiving consent from the local police department and mandatory firearms training. The measure passed by about 9000 votes.

I find this pretty outrageous; there has been both an uptick in crime in Oregon and also a reduction in police morale so there's this perfect storm of random deranged break-ins and confrontations and police who take 20+ minutes to respond.

I know movie plot threats / just so stories aren't a good way to do law, but I'm immediately reminded of this story: https://www.usnews.com/news/best-states/oregon/articles/2022-06-29/eugene-woman-attacked-with-acid-for-third-time-since-march

She appears to be a non-white woman going to university here in Oregon that is being targeted with some kind of honor violence (acid attacks seem honor violencey), though she doesn't know the perpetrator, she just describes him as white. The first two attacks were reported to the police who (my reading between the lines), did not take her seriously. She came to Reddit to ask for advice; by the time she was attacked the third time the intruder tried to set her on fire in her home. She had a gun by this point, and went for it, and the intruder fled before she could fire at him.

I'm trying to imagine in an alternate timeline telling her, after her second attack, that no she can't have a gun yet. She needs to be a good girl and ask the police (the same police who thought she was making this story up, mind you!) for permission to have a gun, and then go through firearms training. Then she can have one. Hopefully the psychopath who is targeting you doesn't murder you in the meantime! It's for safety!

I don't own a gun myself and I don't fetishize them, but I do think they're an important tool for protecting yourself in a dangerous society and my heart breaks that we would be so condescending to tell decent people, who are in the midst of personal security crises like this, that they're not trusted enough to get the tools they need to defend themselves immediately.

Stated another way, politicians are doing a great job at convincing us that society is safer, and it's tempting to believe them. It's even more tempting to believe this because nowadays worrying about crime is racist coded. I don't blame people for believing it. Yet finally, something happens that shatters the illusion: you're the victim of violence or are being credibly threatened and ... in this worst moment we add insult to injury and infantilize the victims further.

Measure 114 also includes a ban on sale or manufacture of >10 round magazines, with some bizarrely limited grandfathering. On the upside, a) it's surprising it won so narrowly given the polling and the extremely blue and generally gun-unfriendly state, and b) it's very unlikely to survive in complete form after SCOTUS review. On the less pleasant side, that's going to take six+ years, and the law has a very broad severability clause, and much of the worst overrearches are clearly written to be politically expensive to challenge (in part for the difficulty of standing) and incredibly scary to extant gun owners while being challenged.

Which is a pity, because it's not like it's far off from something that could have been acceptable, even if not ideal from a gunnie perspective. But it's hard to see :

A firearms training course or class required for issuance of a permit-to-purchase must include:

...(C) Prevention of abuse or misuse of firearms, including the impact of homicide and suicide on families, communities and

the country as a whole...

As anything but a mandate for anti-gun propaganda, and it's not even likely to be the most objectionable part of the final version of the training reqs.

extremely blue and generally gun-unfriendly state

Not quite an accurate picture, Dems were worried Oregon would become a purple state this election and brought all the big names out last month. There's large contingents of hardcore right and left wingers with most people falling in the middle based on geography, before 2016 things tended to default towards moderately libertarian at the state level and red/blue at the county level to reflect this. Before 114 Oregon had pretty permissive gun laws - will-issue CCW, no restrictions I can think of outside of FFL for all transfers, and very healthy hunting/gun cultures.

I've seen plenty of sheriffs and ACAB types in agreement against the may-issue permitting for the obvious reasons, tons of people against the magazine changes, and everyone informed on gun laws knew this was going to be shot down in the courts based on existing case law. Lots of people don't feel safe in the cities right now either and have become gun owners in the last few years too.

My guess is this only passed because of uninformed people who want to do anything about gun control.

Stated another way, politicians are doing a great job at convincing us that society is safer, and it's tempting to believe them.

There has never been a safer human being than a Western person currently alive.

Just because politicians are vile lying possible lizard people doesn't mean that they sometimes, on accident, don't tell the truth.

Of course I believe I should own a gun without a permit - because the bad juju still exists all over. Every home should own a shotgun.

There has never been a safer human being than a Western person currently alive.

Agreed, to be clear, I'm not discounting the Pinker Better Angels / Enlightenment Now dialog about this being the safest time to be alive in history. Indeed, we should be happy about the progress! At the same time, that doesn't mean you can just pretend crime doesn't exist. The fact that crime is lower since the 1990s doesn't mean it's orders of magnitude lower. You probably need to be just as vigilant as your parents were.

Acid attacks are indeed an honor violence thing--IIRC, they emerged from South Asia as a form of punishment for women. Why a Native American woman is being attacked like this, I can't even imagine.

As pointed out below, being in the West is objectively safer from the bird's-eye view, but it's still an outrage that something like that could happen here in America.

Why an indian woman is being attacked like this, I can't even imagine.

Are you sure? While we don't have a picture of the victim, if her skin's significantly darker than average, I would assume that someone intellectually deficient enough to get infected with the "throw acid on women you don't like, who appear to be from the places you hear about people getting acid thrown at them" meme could easily confuse the two.... especially if you don't see many people originally from there.

In any case, it is outrageous that someone could be prosecuted for daring to possess the tools from which to defend oneself from this. The attacker always has the advantage, and that's just the way it is; making sure the defense has the best tool available is therefore necessary for a society that refuses (or is unable) to take sufficient proactive actions against crime. And aside from maybe Singapore and those really rich European micronations (where you don't get in unless you have something to lose), no society does.

If we're talking about racism, may-issue permitting laws have a long history of explicit racism, serving as ways of preventing black people from owning guns. Referring to may-issue laws, Frederick Douglass said "…while the Legislatures of the South can take from him (the black man) the right to keep and bear arms, as they can … the work of the Abolitionists is not finished.”

Stated another way, politicians are doing a great job at convincing us that society is safer, and it's tempting to believe them.

I don't really think the right to own guns is in any way contingent on the safety of society. Rather, as Douglass alluded to, the right is about freedom from bondage and tyrrany. It may well be that gun ownership makes society less safe, but more free, and that is a tradeoff I'm gladly willing to accept.

I assumed “involuntary servitude” was some sort of editorializing, but no, that’s actually the language used. Huh.

Makes sense when you look at the text of the 13th amendment: "Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction."


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