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Notes -
Supreme Court roundup thread? They dropped four opinions today that have some pretty wide ranging implications. Some more than others.
In Chatrie v. United States a 5-4 court (with Roberts and Barrett joining Kagan, Sotomayor, and Jackson) holds that geofence warrants constitute a "search" under the 4th amendment. This does not necessarily resolve the case in favor of Chatrie, though. The government did have a warrant in this case, although it's not clear whether the warrant was "reasonable." SCOTUS here is mostly pushing back on the holding by the Fourth Circuit panel that a search had not even occurred under the fourth amendment, due to the third party doctrine.
In Watson v. Republican National Committee a 5-4 court (with Roberts and Barrett joining Kagan, Sotomayor, and Jackson) the court holds that federal laws specifying an election day do not pre-empt state laws that permit counting ballots received after that day, so long as the ballots are sent by that day.
In Trump v. Slaughter a 6-3 court holds that the "for-cause" removal provision for FTC commissioners is unconstitutional, overruling Humphrey's Executor. This was pretty widely anticipated, since the Supreme Court has gradually been expanding the President's power to remove officials since Trump's re-election.
In Trump v. Cook a 5-4 court (Roberts and Kavanaugh joining Kagan, Sotomayor, and Jackson) holds that the President may not fire members of the Federal Reserve Board of Governor's at-will. The for-cause provision regarding firing members of the Feds BoG is constitutional and sets a "substantial threshold" for what constitutes cause.
Most online discussion I've seen has been focused on the latter two decisions and their apparent inconsistency. Apparently, Congress can only insulate executive branch employees from Presidential termination some of the time and those circumstances do not depend on the wording of the statute or anything else Congress has any control over. Roberts is the author of both opinions and he tries to square the circle by arguing that the United States has a long history of independent central banking but I don't think he's very convincing. The Federal Reserve itself is a mere 1 year older than the FTC (founded in 1913 vs 1914) so Roberts tries to reach back to the First and Second Bank of the United States and nevermind the fact there was an 80 year period where the United States had no central bank between the Second Bank of the United States and the Federal Reserve. Some of the syllabus even, in my view, departs from anything that could be called a legal argument to argue that this is good policy:
The court has also said tomorrow will be the last opinion day, in which we will presumably get the four remaining opinions (including birthright citizenship) so maybe I'll have to do another one tomorrow.
Watson is pretty terrible; it allows bad actors to keep adding backdated votes after election day until they get the result they want. Vastly increases the ease of such fraud.
I don't feel like this is viable, you basically need to enlist an entire post office as your accomplice when you get them to put a false date in their post-marking machine and run a bunch of ballots through it for you, and post offices have security cameras.
How hard would it really be to fake a postmark?
Well the basic problem I see is illustrated by the Mitchell and Webb moon landing conspiracy sketch:
"So, first off, we're going to need to build a massive rocket."
"Why would we need to do that? We're not actually going to the moon."
"Yes, but when they ask how we got them there, we're going to need to be able to say, we sent them there on that massive rocket you saw."
I would be extremely surprised if the USPS doesn't track the amount of volume through each post office. It would be insane if they didn't. So when somebody asks "where did all of these ballots come from," your conspiracy is going to need to be able to say "they were mailed from this post office, look at the postmarks," and this would become a pretty embarrassing thing to say if you can go to that post office and it turns out they didn't process nearly enough volume to account for all the ballots that supposedly passed through that post office. So that post office needs to actually process approximately enough mail-in ballots to actually account for everything that showed up at the counting location.
And that's just one logistical issue. The secret ballot doesn't mean there's no tracking of ballots sent out and returned at all. The record of who you voted for is unknown, but if you voted is public. So in order to generate a bunch of additional fake votes you have to figure out a bunch of registered nonvoters to pin it on or else you end up with a massive clump of votes received>voters who actually voted. But if you have a bunch of registered nonvoters to pin it on, then you have to coordinate them to cover up that they didn't actually vote when people check, in which case is it not easier to just have them vote if they're in on the conspiracy? So ok maybe you make up a bunch of fake people who can't expose they didn't really vote because they aren't real, but then the double check finds they aren't real so nothing has been fixed!
The easiest weak point I can think of would be in the counting process, just saying "yep this one for A is actually for B" but then you have to find a way to hide it from the other monitors and dispose of the real ballots without anyone noticing, because of course if you just mark it down wrong the double checks can find that too you have to replace real ballots with fake ones.
Election fraud can work out in countries that are already lying about all their other logistics and where no one really bothers to meaningfully contest the results anyway (since they all know it's rigged), but it's going to be way harder when numbers don't start to match and people are willing to challenge it in the US.
Homeless people. You register them to vote at the homeless shelter, getting them to sign the registration form with an X, then the party loyalists staffing the homeless shelter just fill out the ballots when they arrive at the shelter. The homeless shelter is rewarded with government funding when their party has power. There is essentially zero possibility that there is anybody working at any homeless shelter who is not a dyed-in-the-wool Democrat party loyalist, there's essentially zero chance of this operation getting ratted out. It actually feels extremely reasonable to me that this would be the explicit mechanism by which the Democrats keep their electoral majority secure in California. This also explains a great deal about how California can continue to spend billions of dollars on homelessness without actually achieving any sort of meaningful reduction in homelessness.
And yet it fails the very next part
A whole bunch of people saying they were signed up at the homeless shelters and that they didn't vote yet somehow votes were submitted in their name would be noticeable. And if these homeless people were willing to lie and say they actually did vote, then it would be easy to just get them to vote to begin with.
There's already an easy and known explanation for it, spending doesn't matter. Housing supply and demand matters and California is extremely NIMBY. It's why West Virginia has some of the worst drug rates but low homelessness. Homes are cheaper (because they have a much larger supply:demand ratio) so even most of the addicts can afford a place.
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