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I live in Virginia, where we do have vote by mail. I vote in person, where they at least check my ID, in a district that routinely votes
90% Dem. Among my Republican friends, those less-connected to official party politics they are least likely to vote. I would estimate50% of my friends who are Republicans and regularly opine about politics actually vote. I vote in every election but not out of any principled reason. And I don’t think my vote counts for much. But when I meet so many Virginia and DC Republicans who are in politics, I much prefer truthfully saying I voted to lying or inventing a complicated explanation for why I don’t. My local precinct is cute and it’s a pleasant drive. My boss has never given me a problem about taking an hour to vote. I think there’s a charge code for it but I’ve never asked.I hear all sorts of interesting things from my friends in Virginia politics. A friend who would know swears that Jason Miyares was presented with evidence of Democrats committing election fraud and he balked, saying that allegations like that are exactly what he had to protect Virginia from. Not the activities alleged, the allegations themselves. Obviously this isn’t any kind of proof that amounts to anything, let alone proving anything in a discussion here. I’m just adding this for color.
I know a lot of people with different views about the possibility of mail-in ballot voter fraud. I think most people assume some is happening, but probably not “a lot”. I think that Democrats would keep winning elections without it, especially in California. But I also think that they’re certainly doing some, because it helps them keep their grip on power. It’s the same tendency as unions taking a cut of their members’ wages and donating it to Democrats, who get elected and give the unions sweetheart pensions and deals. It’s been going on a long time. It’s part of Tammany Hall and Ellis Island. It’s how part of Truman and LBJ became VP.
The more of this you allow, the weaker your Democracy gets. California in a meaningful sense is ceasing to be a Democracy. The idea of Democracy is that the people choose in fair and free elections who is supposed to govern them. This is increasingly not how elections are conducted. When you allow ballot harvesting, the edge goes to whoever can spin up the largest political machine. The machine is always present in Democracy when it gets larger than the size of a few thousand Athenians raising hands on the public forum. But when we confuse elections with the ballots cast in those elections, the balance tilts toward the machine. We, informed citizens debating what kind of society we should live in, lose power to whoever can stake out the nursing homes, homeless shelters, welfare ghettos, and immigrant slums. The fraud is just a stalking horse. Democracy is already in trouble before it gets that far.
I’m not especially attached to Democracy, but I think it’s probably a good idea and we should fight for it. I’m not going to lecture anybody about the importance of voting or counting every ballot. But I think that overall it works. The system pioneered in California and spreading to Illinois and Virginia and New York clearly does not work. It gets you corrupt officials who can’t even build a train because everything is looted for parts. Karen Bass is a Communist who was trained in Cuba who allowed a beautiful part of a beautiful city to burn, and she can’t even be voted out of office because Democracy has already degraded to a bureaucratized ritual of hand sanitizing.
To address a few of your other points quickly: signature verification is a joke because nobody knows half the time what a signature is supposed to look like and when a ballot is rejected it can be “cured”; chain of custody means that even after a ballot has been ripped apart so that the voter’s name isn’t attached to his vote, you can prove it started life as a legitimate ballot, and if it’s not done it makes a mockery of postmarking ballots, and it’s frequently never done; postmarking itself is not a sacred human institution, robots aren’t staffing the post office, it would be cheap to fake; and it remains extraordinarily convenient that, after all this, Karen Bass has the same vote share, but Spencer Pratt’s goes down and Raman’s goes up.
If a stack of ballots arrived today, nobody knows from where, and they looked official and had the right postmarks, they would be counted.
If the same thing happened with a stack of $100 bills, your local gas station or 7/11 might accept them. But the FBI would find you, because we’ve made it incredibly difficult to counterfeit. But not for ballots. Ballots are sacred.
Okay, so it sounds like you and your Republican friends don't vote by mail. Yet you are still suspicious that the people who vote by mail are not the same as those who vote in person?
I don't even disagree that there's a lot wrong with the system. I'd rather we tossed the ballots that arrive after election day (although these account for less than 1% of ballots). I'd rather we had some kind of voter ID in place. I'd rather we had the count by the morning after election day. But Pratt not getting elected is not evidence of fraud. The guy was a long shot in a city full of libs.
The signature is available for comparison from voter registration. The rejection count I gave is ballots that were not cured.
A unique identifier on the ballot compromises secrecy. I'm not aware of any state in the union which does this.
The envelope has a unique identifier.
To be clear - you are claiming that the post office is falsifying postmarks?
People were voting in person and by mail all through Election Day which produced 1. Bass 2. Pratt 3. Raman. After Election Day suddenly the ballots start surging for Raman, so that she might pass Pratt, but they don’t start surging for Pratt.
There’s no good explanation for this that isn’t just an ex-post facto. And you cannot prove that these ballots are legitimate because California deliberately implemented a system that made this impossible.
That’s not what chain of custody means.
That’s a completely different sentence.
Results changing with more ballots coming in is not evidence of fraud. Sorry, that just makes no sense.
Pratt's second most favorable ballot drop ever came on the third btw, so that part isn't even true.
What would constitute proof?
Sure. Are you under the impression that California doesn't have chain of custody for ballots? In what way? Be specific.
It's a different sentence because you are merely hinting rather than speaking plainly. Please explain what it means that the post office isn't staffed by robots if postmarks aren't being falsified.
Raman was in 3rd place until after Election Day. She was 3rd place in mail-in ballots, she was 3rd place in in-person voting. Until magically she’s winning close to 40% in some of these ballot drops. Come on, that’s obviously evidence of fraud. That’s literally how it works, you make more ballots to change the outcome. The way California conducts elections is categorically different from the mathematical idea that ballots would be distributed randomly that you allude to.
What’s the alternative explanation? It’s legal for activists to go harvesting ballots after the election? Everything is the result of legal ballot harvesting? This is not in any meaningful sense a democratic system, this is just an elaborate charade over a one-party state. Maybe you get what you wanted. Trains that never get built and homeless shelters in the streets. The money is being siphoned off by a political machine that thinks of California as a paypig, although they will spend a little on you come election time to convince you that late-arriving ballots always break for a one-party state. The later the ballots arrive, the more they demand whatever outcome produces a one-party state.
That's not the idea I'm alluding to. That's a reductio ad absurdum of your position. If you find it reasonable, you're missing the point.
There's quite simply no reason to expect that every ballot drop is going to look the same.
Like many agendaposters, you are confusing my opinion of the object level issue (the fraudulence of the election) with my opinion on the meta level issue (who I'd rather win the election). It is, in fact, possible to dislike the result without throwing my toys across the room.
I can't help but notice that you didn't engage with any of my requests for clarification on the unclear claims you made. Did you actually mean something by them?
No, the point is that obviously late-breaking ballots are for Raman because they are being harvested. California has implemented mass legalized fraud. They print millions of ballots and then ballot harvesters are allowed to chase them. Those chased ballots are blessed by briefly touching the hand of a registered voter, who may not even be a citizen. Sometimes this blessing is not even needed. If a ballot is not postmarked or signed correctly, it goes into a pile to be cured.
This is the basic reality of the system California has set up. It’s good that you approve of it, although not necessary because you have not been consulted: were you to vote in a way contradicting the wishes of California’s political machines, they would simply harvest ballots until yours was obsoleted.
What’s your objection exactly? An irrelevant question about the post office? A truism about math? If someone at the post office wanted to forge ballot postmarks it would not take a vast conspiracy of the entirety of USPS. It only takes a couple of guys making small changes. That’s the entire point of California’s election system, they have created a process where the political machine has total authority.
Look, I’ve been polite, if you want to preen as if your opinion makes you a more mature person than me, you’ve picked the right forum in which I can’t respond in kind. I guess that’s your only consolation prize when you defend a system in which your opinion is not consulted and does not matter. They’ll rob your pocket book to build trains to nowhere for union jobs that donate back to the machine, they’ll burn your house down if it fills someone’s pension to leave your fire hydrants empty. And when you try to vote against it (if you ever do), you’ll accept the explanation that votes delivered at 4:00pm under a full moon in Aquarius always break for the fifth-place Democratic candidate at the exact rate he needs to win. You’re too mature to throw your toys across the room, right? So keep playing with them.
Please explain how ballots get harvested after election day, and the evidence for this in this case. Surely there's more evidence than "later drops favor a candidate that hurts the guy I heard was Based"? I don't think there's any way Pratt could lose that wouldn't result in you claiming fraud.
You can't cure a ballot with a late postmark.
I'm starting to think that you don't read my responses at all.
My objection is that conversation with you goes like this:
You: bold or vague claim X
Me: evidence against the claim, or clarification of what exactly you're saying
You: ignore this
You, some time later: why are you nitpicking irrelevant nonsense like claim X?
I've encountered this argument style many times. Usually, it indicates someone with a, let's say, fluid relationship to the truth. You lay out a gish gallop of claims, many of which are wrong or vague, and refuse to acknowledge or clarify until you get cornered, at which point you make objections to your claims seem like nitpicking. This doesn't look like truth seeking behavior.
Okay. Do you have any evidence, any at all, that the post office is falsifying postmarks? By the way, USPS isn't staffed by robots, but postmarks sure are applied by robots.
I would say seething about how I get what I deserve isn't very polite.
I have described it many times. Ballot harvesting is legal in California. This is how your elections are run.
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