Vote by Mail is NOT a secret ballot (2 Viewers)

Pat Hartman

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Project veritas has some interesting new tapes on voter fraud in Minneapolis. Home district of one of our personal "favorites" - Ilan Omar

 

Vassago

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I know it may seem to be a stupid question. But I can't resist anymore.
If someone votes, why keeping his/her vote private is so important?
I personally don't care if the whole world know whom I voted to. I believed in someone and I voted for him. Why should I try to keep it a secret?
Is it that important to keep your vote private?
I wanted to address this. We've had instances of voter intimidation through threats. "If Trump doesn't win, I have to lay off x number of employees" as an example. Yes, it's illegal, but people who commit crimes are often ignorant. I think the fact that ballots are secret is what makes the democratic process work as well as it does in an age where there is so much unrest between the two party system. We desperately need a third party to be recognized at the same level. Biden or Trump? This is the worst election since the last one. They are both absolutely awful. :(
 

Isaac

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I also often wonder if we would benefit from more parties/candidates. Someone living in a nation that has that reminded me, though, that that means when the chips fall, you end up with a leader governing the country, a leader who (maybe) only a small chunk (15, 20, 30%) of people even wanted.

I admit, though, I'm not sure the above scenario is any worse than the way we are, where we end up with one candidate that roughly 50% of people voted for, but most people were choosing the 'lesser of 2 evils', and--quite likely--only about 20% of the overall population truly supports in any serious way.

When it comes to which side, in ALL the actions/behaviors/communication/messaging--taken as a whole--is making the other side feel more fearful of retribution, bullied, or retaliated against, there isn't even a question that it's the Democrat side doing that. Both sides do it to some extent, but absolutely no question that currently, it is "Trump supporters" (if you want to call it that) who have borne the brunt of the thing (to the extent that the 'shy Trump voter' effect is widely known).
 

Anakardian

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So this thread popped up and waved at me.

I never understood the obsession with central automated counting of votes you seem to have in the US.
Coming from Denmark, let me tell you how it works here. I know the scale is a bit different but at the front end it should be comparable.

There is no need to register for voting. If you are allowed to vote, you get the paper with instructions on where you need to go to vote.
On the election day, you go to the indicated place, usually the local school where a large room is temporarily converted to house the setup.
You find the right table and hand over your bit of paper and answer the security question or use a picture ID to identify yourself.
They then hand you the ballot and send you on to the row of cubicles where you can put you cross on the paper.
Exit on the other side and put it in the box.
Then go home.

Once the voting has closed at 2000, although people in line will still get to vote, the area is cleared of blank ballots and tables moved around to make room.
Once the boxes are opened, they are first sorted into the different parties.
A seecond person checks they are sorted correctly.
Both people check that they are valid meaning, only the allowed number of crosses, no other symbols are present etc.

They then count the ballots for each party twice before reporting the result to the central administration.
In most cases, the result it in for the entire country before midnight and around 2200 we have a pretty good idea about the distribution of votes between the parties.

The next step is to count the persons who were voted upon in each party to determine exactly who was voted in, usually the next day.
Again, this is counted by a second person as well.

If any count is not agreed upon between the first two, they both count it again.
If they still disagre, another group repeats the count and so on.
Having more than a second count is pretty unusual.

You can vote by mail if you wish. To count, it must be received before the election opens in the morning. It is upon you to ensure thee vote is received in time.

Did I mention that we had 13 parties to choose between at the last national election?
And all counting is done by hand?
 

Isaac

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I like it!


To count, it must be received before the election opens in the morning. It is upon you to ensure thee vote is received in time.
..and that too.

In this country we have one party who believes that all the lazy, procrastinating voters who can't even follow a set of four simple instructions:

look at the calendar,
vote,
sign,
mail,

must be accommodated in a thousand different ways to help make out for their mistakes. it is ridiculous.
 

Anakardian

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Of course we have our problems as well but i have never heard about anything not rsolved in a couple of days.

The biggest trouble is if someone dies betwen the ballots are finalized and the election.
At that point there is no going back and acciddents still happen.

I forgot to mention that the place you vore is mannedd by representatives of the parties in the election. They all have to provide manpower to set it up, man it during the day, count vots and put everything back into storage.

It tends to be quite civilised with lots of coffee and cake.

Just for the giggles, i looked at who was done counting the fastest during the last election. It took them 33 minutes to finalize the count of the 306 votes. The number of voters vary from about 30 to about 21500 depending on the area they cover. The small ones are islands with just a few handfuls of people.
 

Isaac

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i have never heard about anything not rsolved in a couple of days.
Well I'm pretty sure that that probably has to do with the volume. Which kind of calls into question your earlier comment that you think the front end processing outcome should be about the same.

How could it be the same with drastically different volumes? Higher volume is always where automation has shined.
 

Steve R.

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There is no need to register for voting. If you are allowed to vote, you get the paper with instructions on where you need to go to vote. (emphasis added)
You made a very important point. In the US you are required to register to vote. Registration, in theory, should be clear cut. What has been happening in the US is that the Democrats, by abusing the legal process, have done everything possible to essentially allow virtually anyone to vote without verifying whether the voter is legitimate or not. As some examples, Democrats claim that it is not necessary for the potential voter to verify that they are US citizens or to show identification at the time they register to vote and at the time they actually vote. Democrats also have opposed the clean-up of voter registration roles.

With this years elections, unsolicited ballots are being mailed out indiscriminately to all addresses in support of mail-in voting. What that means is that whoever receives one of these unsolicited ballots can simply mail it back-in. The vote counting people will have no way to determine whether the returned ballots are legitimate or not. Moreover, according to JusttheNews five states do not even require signature matching for the mail-in ballots. As you do in Denmark, it may be a good suggestion for the US to only mail ballots by certified mail to those who are allowed to vote.

Democrats, by obstructing the proper vetting of the voter, are creating opportunities for fraud in the US election process. The great irony of this is that the Democrats claim to want the voting process to be honest.
 
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Pat Hartman

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Democrats also have opposed the clean-up of voter registration roles.
It is positions like this that make me question the sanity of the Democrats and sometimes myself for opposing them. And of course the ever popular view that the death penalty is 100% wrong regardless of the crime but it is perfectly acceptable, even desirable to allow abortions in the delivery room when the mother is in labor. Not to mention that it is criminal to allow graffiti to remain too long on your building but it doesn't seem to be a crime to put it there in the first place. In cities like San Francisco, it is OK to defecate on the street. In many large cities, it's OK to camp on the sidewalks and public parks but don't you dare smoke in public unless of course you're smoking dope and you're homeless.

I think we're fully into the good is bad and bad is good. What I can't understand is how they got so many people to drink the Kool-Aid.
 
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Isaac

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I think we're fully into the good is bad and bad is good.
Yes.

What I can't understand is how they got so many people to drink the Kool-Aid
Media, repetitive exposure, education.

Democrats have constantly sought to federalize (or even constitutionalize) their ideology, for fear that localities might dare to express their more unique preferences, thus actually representing people.

As for Denmark, all I can say is we have 42x more votes to tally on Election Day. While I would love both coffee and cake, smiles all 'round, and a beautiful utopian homogeneous group to boot, I'm not sure it's realistic for us.
 

Steve R.

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Democrats have constantly sought to federalize (or even constitutionalize) their ideology, for fear that localities might dare to express their more unique preferences, thus actually representing people.
Very well said. As a current example, the Democrats objection to Amy Coney Barrett nomination to the US Supreme Court is not based on qualifications, but on ideology. Biden unbelievably implied that if he were in a position to make a US Supreme Court nomination that he would make a selection based on political ideology. Democrats apparantly do not want judges appointed to a court based on qualifications, but political ideology. A third world view point of the purpose of the law.
 

Pat Hartman

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The Democrats want Justices that will write new laws that they can't get Congress to pass. That's why they want activist judges on every court.
 

Anakardian

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How could it be the same with drastically different volumes? Higher volume is always where automation has shined.
See thats where you get the issue. Many places where you vote in the US go for large volume and few people. This means machines are needed with the results we have seen so far. Discussion of that is an entire field unto itself so lets not go there.

We have gone for decentralised and small places to vote.
Yes, it needs more people but they are all volunteers that get nominated to serve that duty.
If the samee strategy was used in the US, it would probably give the same result.

Although, based on the media coverage, shots would probably be exchangeed during the counting as both sids needed to agree on the numbers.
 

Anakardian

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In the US you are required to register to vote
Another major difference.

We have a central registry for all persons living in denmark andd thus we know who is allowed to vote.

Basically it means we have a unique id for each person that follows you from birth to grave and beyond.

Many reasearchers, especially of the medical kind, loves to dig into the different registers we have because they alle reference this id.
 

Isaac

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See thats where you get the issue. Many places where you vote in the US go for large volume and few people. This means machines are needed with the results we have seen so far. Discussion of that is an entire field unto itself so lets not go there.

We have gone for decentralised and small places to vote.
Yes, it needs more people but they are all volunteers that get nominated to serve that duty.
If the samee strategy was used in the US, it would probably give the same result.

Although, based on the media coverage, shots would probably be exchangeed during the counting as both sids needed to agree on the numbers.
I guess maybe I'm not understanding.

No matter HOW you have the polling places, we would still need forty-two times the amount of manpower than you do in order to count it manually. I mean, if you're saying basically: Yes, but it's worth it - then OK, that's an interesting theory. Maybe?

You'd be surprised how small many voting places in the US are. I live in a city of about 4 million (not huge but not a small town!), and the last time I went to vote in a presidential election there was no line at all, and only about 10 people in the voting place (a small school gymnasium converted for the purpose). But I guess there are other cities where more volumes of people have to congregate, it just depends.

My parents live in the midwest (really far north), and where they vote, there are rarely more than 5 people in the building at a time, on Election Day of any year. They always vote in person (and wouldn't want to do it otherwise), as it's not that big of a deal to get in the car and drive 3 miles to do a 5 minute activity, for something so important...........But, a lot of people here have become so lazy about voting, you practically have to create a software that reads their mind while they're in their pajamas in order to persuade them to vote. Democrats view anything 'less' than that accommodation as "suppressing the vote" :)
 

Anakardian

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We have about 5 million in the entire country so there is a difference in scale right there.
The question is, do they count the votes on the site or ship it off to a central place to count?
 

Pat Hartman

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The American system might seem chaotic to a country as small as Denmark where the population is homogeneous. Mostly Danish, educated within a single education system, and probably practicing the same religion. Part of our chaos is by design and part as a result of our generous immigration policy. Our constitution created a federalist system where some power is held by the Federal Government and some is assigned to the 50 State Governments and whatever is not specifically assigned, in theory, belongs to the people although the Democrats are working their fingers to the bone to change that.

So, no matter how much Trump wanted to "control" the response to COVID, he actually couldn't without declaring Marshal Law and usurping power from the states. He would have essentially had to make himself a dictator for the period of Marshal Law but he could have done it by declaring a health emergency. How do you suppose the left would have liked that? How do you suppose the right would have felt? Let me tell you - not even a little bit happy. What Trump did instead was to block flights from China and later from places in Europe, activate the army to build and staff field hospitals in large metropolitan areas, activate our two hospital ships and send one to NYC and the other to California, and encourage industry to retool so they could rapidly produce ventilators and much needed PPE for our health care workers. He also got them working on bringing the supply chain for medications closer to home once he realized China could kill us by withholding critical medicines. Some of this he did by invoking the war powers act but most by arm twisting. The issue of the war powers act and why he didn't want to use it except where absolutely necessary is that WE would need to pay for everything industry produced at our order. Whereas, using arm twisting, we could get first dibs on production but not be responsible for buying everything. You probably heard the Democrats yelling about this back in February and March. To hear them talk about it, Trump was wrong! for not invoking the war powers act to requisition everything. Trump is a businessman and he actually looks at government money as HIS money and he's not inclined to waste it unlike the rest of the government work force, especially Congress so he did as much arm twisting and flag waving as he could and then requisitioned what he needed to thereby saving us MILLIONS of dollars.

The theory behind the distribution of power in the US is to allow people to choose. If you prefer the heavy taxation and onerous regulations of states like California, then go there and enjoy the sunshine. (oh! sorry, the SCIENCE says beaches are dangerous so they're closed). If you prefer more personal freedom and lower taxes, move to a different state. That leaves us with 50 ways to do a lot of things and voting is one of them. I'm beginning to think that its time the Feds stepped up and laid down some basic standards such as, your mail in vote needs to be received by 12:01 election day so that your vote could be counted that day, not FOURTEEN days later as some states allow. The Congress can do this if the standards only apply to voting in Federal elections. The states could still do whatever they wanted for state and local elections if they wanted to run them on separate days from Federal elections to avoid confusion.
 

Pat Hartman

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Somehow, I don't think so. I implied that he respected my tax money and didn't spend it frivolously, not that he was taking it for himself but as usual, you can twist anything with judicious editing :) I always watch Rachael Maddow after Trump gives an important speech and I am constantly amazed as I listen to her interpretation of what Trump said (God forbid we talk about his actual words. The people are too stupid to understand his words or take them at face value, they need Rachael to "interpret" what he actually meant). You'd never know that we listened to the same speech.
 

Isaac

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Somehow, I don't think so. I implied that he respected my tax money and didn't spend it frivolously, not that he was taking it for himself but as usual, you can twist anything with judicious editing :) I always watch Rachael Maddow after Trump gives an important speech and I am constantly amazed as I listen to her interpretation of what Trump said (God forbid we talk about his actual words. The people are too stupid to understand his words or take them at face value, they need Rachael to "interpret" what he actually meant). You'd never know that we listened to the same speech.
I agree, that demonstrates the primary skill set (in a debate context) of all anti Trumpers....being witty in twisting words or simply fabricating the appearance of non-existent context, or removing therefrom.

I'm pretty sure everybody knows that it's Democrats who play fast and loose with others' money (especially if you've done well by working hard)
 

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