We need to reengineer the voting process to make it easier for everyone. ...The main effect of the change is to abolish the anonymous vote, and enable coerced voting.During the 2020 election, many local election officials scrambled to implement state-mandated changes, such as providing no-excuse absentee mail ballots to all registered voters, as a means of ensuring that people could vote without risking exposure to COVID.
With no-excuse mail-in ballots, nursing homes can supervise balloting. So can unions and others. Securing the voter's identity and intent is impossible.
It is also impossible to hold the election on a single day, as democracies have always done.
More than 50 percent of eligible Californians voted in the state’s gubernatorial recall effort this month—an extraordinary turnout for an off-year special election and one that was partly made possible by the fact that every eligible registered voter was automatically mailed a ballot, whether or not they requested one. This week California signed permanent universal vote by mail into law.
Putin was recently reelected in Russia, and one of the complaints was that voting was over three days, making neutral observing impossible. California's recent election had 30 days of mail-in voting, and 10 days of in-person voting. Nobody knows how many votes were fairly cast.
Of particular concern is the possibility that those leaving will be replaced by believers in former president Donald Trump’s “Big Lie.” In fall 2020, prior to the election, Steve Bannon encouraged Trump supporters to try to become local election officials, according to Forbes. ...Here SciAm is being overtly partisan. Those Acts would be the most radical change to election law in American history.We need to keep pressuring state legislatures to adopt such transformative reforms, especially in states with more restrictive election laws, and tell Congress to enact federal protections, including the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act and the Freedom to Vote Act.
People go to the store or supermarket all the time... even in the ridiculous Covid era.
ReplyDeleteAnd yet...
asking someone to take the time to take their solemn duty as an American citizen seriously and go vote has become an unbearable burden to some because... fear, laziness, and quite frankly, outright ineptitude.
As for voter ID laws... which exist in many of the states who are loudly protesting them being in other states... I simply ask: If you can require someone to show positive ID to buy alcohol, enter the Capitol building in DC to visit Nancy Pelosi, buy a car, open a bank account of any kind, rent an apartment, use food stamps or EBT cards, apply for welfare, apply for unemployment, enter a military base,
check out a library book, go to a hospital, enter any federal or state building, go to a courthouse for jury duty or to pay a parking ticket, get on a plane, or a train, leave the country, enter the country LEGALLY, provide proof of residence, Or merely drive a car to any of these above,
THEN YOU CAN DAMN WELL PONY ONE UP AT THE VOTING BOOTH.
Spare me the absurd soft bigotry and bullshit where ANYONE regardless of their ethnicity is treated as if identifying themselves along with their home address is somehow racist, a undue burden, etc ad nausea. If you are unable to demonstrate who you are and where you live, you really have no business whatsoever voting, as it requires even less effort than deciding who to even vote for. Those who must vote in absentee should be required even more stringent standards, and yes that goes for people in nursing homes who are too feeble PHYSICALLY. If you are mentally too feeble for such requirements and proof of identity...if you even know what your name and address is, you simply shouldn't be voting because you are senile or mentally incapacitated.
As a country we have to decide between mindless convenience OR (exclusive) the legitimacy of the elections. In India they stain your finger you use to vote with, making multiple voting quite difficult, which is far more effort to stopping fraud in a developing country than the democrat party is even willing to consider at the moment.
If convenience is more important to you than the legitimacy of the voting process, the value of your choice through voting literally means nothing.