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Democracy is in trouble....

Bob001 said:
90% of votes in 2020 were cast on paper ballots that can be stored and recounted. I agree it should be 100%. That could be accomplished by conducting elections entirely by mail.
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Mail-in ballots, particularly as they are currently run, are horribly insecure. Paper isn't magical in that regards. It's probably better than internet voting, but it's still bad.
 
Ziggurat said:
Wow, that's a stupid argument. When a system benefits someone, their incentive is to not question it. Anyone who won their election benefited from the current system.
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"In a fair system where the Republicans aren't allowed to cheat, they can't win! Therefore wanting a fair system where nobody cheats is an nothing more than an incentive for the Democrats that they don't want to question."
 
Voting with paper ballots and counting them manually in front of observers is obviously very hard to tamper with. Mail voting doesn't seem quite as safe, but I ask from ignorance, how is it guaranteed? Do voters get a personal code that they can check with a published list of votes or something like that?
 
Ziggurat said:
Mail-in ballots, particularly as they are currently run, are horribly insecure. Paper isn't magical in that regards. It's probably better than internet voting, but it's still bad.
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Okay, on what basis do you claim they are horribly insecure? That's not the experience of the five states that conduct elections entirely by mail. Where's your evidence that any substantial number of mail ballots anywhere are fraudulent?
 
No Other said:
1. Arab Spring was mishandled. We backed the Syrian Rebels plus we had our *** handed to us in Libya.
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Nah. This is fiction invented by the right wing media, and accepted by right wing nutbars without an appropriate level of skepticism.

No Other said:
2. Taxes soared under Obama.
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Again, more right wing fiction. In fact US tax revenue in Obama's last budget is nearly exactly where it would have been if you take the last pre-recession Bush budget and extrapolate it out based on population and economic growth. Of course that still resulted in budget deficits due to the unfunded spending programs implemented during the Bush Presidency.

No Other said:
3. Highest rate of deportations... it is still the highest.
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Deportations that were made based on Bush era rules that Obama reversed. Seems like a Bush problem that Obama fixed.

No Other said:
4. Did not fill judicial nominations with any urgency and that allowed Trump to stack the courts.
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I'm not sure how you can blame Obama for Congressional Republicans blocking every nomination that came up only purely political grounds. Again this is a case of Republicans putting politics over country, noting else.

No Other said:
5. Recessions always occur but the recovery of the 2008 was the slowest since WWII.
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The 2008 recession did not resemble any post WWII recession. Normal recessions are caused by overbuilding production capacity, and all you need to do is wait for demand to catch up. 2008 was a fiscal crisis and deflation spiral where the Fed was pushing on the sting with monetary policy. It's a rare case where fiscal policy was actual needed to address the downturn, but of course Congressional Republicans blocked any fiscal stimulus as a political play.


No Other said:
7. The national debt went from $10T to $20T.
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That's kind of inevitable when your predecessor leaves you a $1.5 trillion deficit. US Budget Deficits dropped though Obama's term only to skyrocket to new heights under Trump.
 
Ziggurat said:
November 28, 2016.
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Thread title “Trump Claims Millions of Illegal Votes Cast” and the context is you defending Republican voter suppression tactics in response to a Trump conspiracy theory, not you making serious or good faith arguments about election security.

I have always been consistent about this.
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Yes, I will give you that. You have been consistent in your peddling of conspiracy theories about election fraud.
 
Abooga said:
Voting with paper ballots and counting them manually in front of observers is obviously very hard to tamper with. Mail voting doesn't seem quite as safe, but I ask from ignorance, how is it guaranteed? Do voters get a personal code that they can check with a published list of votes or something like that?
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States do it differently. But ballots are only mailed to registered voters, the individual ballots and envelopes are tracked with bar codes, signatures on the envelopes are matched with signatures on file, and there often is an on-line mechanism to check whether individual ballots have been received. It's not like somebody can copy a zillion ballots and drop them in a box.
https://www.brookings.edu/policy202...ail-work-and-does-it-increase-election-fraud/
https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/why-vote-mail-option-necessary
 
Ziggurat said:
#7 (massively increase national debt) is exactly what Republicans claimed he would do.

And it's not like Democrats didn't claim Trump would do stuff he never did. I haven't forgotten claims that he would start a war with Iran, for example.
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Predicting that debt will increase when there is a large structural deficit is hardly rocket science. Actual responsibility for this debt lays with the Republicans who created those structural deficits with unfunded spending programs and tax cuts without corresponding spending cuts.

Anyone who cares about budget deficits will should never consider voting Republican. They can't help but create deficits but now and in the future. Borrow and spend is in their nature.
 
Abooga said:
Voting with paper ballots and counting them manually in front of observers is obviously very hard to tamper with. Mail voting doesn't seem quite as safe, but I ask from ignorance, how is it guaranteed? Do voters get a personal code that they can check with a published list of votes or something like that?
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Their name is on the return, and often there's supposed to be a signature match check. That's supposed to make sure they don't vote multiple times, and that they really sent in the ballot. But it's really not secure. The voter registration itself could be invalid (though in-person polling is vulnerable here as well), and signature validation isn't universal and doesn't work even where it is implemented. There have been other problems as well.
 
Ziggurat said:
Their name is on the return, and often there's supposed to be a signature match check. That's supposed to make sure they don't vote multiple times, and that they really sent in the ballot. But it's really not secure. The voter registration itself could be invalid (though in-person polling is vulnerable here as well), and signature validation isn't universal and doesn't work even where it is implemented. There have been other problems as well.
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Okay. But that doesn't happen.

Republicans stealing election, that keeps happening all the time. But you aren't concerned with that. Just like you clamed up until your god-kind left office to show your face in the political discussions again.
 
Ziggurat said:
Their name is on the return, and often there's supposed to be a signature match check. That's supposed to make sure they don't vote multiple times, and that they really sent in the ballot. But it's really not secure. The voter registration itself could be invalid (though in-person polling is vulnerable here as well), and signature validation isn't universal and doesn't work even where it is implemented. There have been other problems as well.
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And yet in the five states where elections are conducted entirely by mail, even the losers are not claiming any substantial fraud. Your speculations about what might be possible carry less weight than the facts about what actually happens.
 
Bob001 said:
Where is there any evidence that any election fraud occurred in 2020?
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There has been systematic fraud by Republicans in States like North Carolina the last few elections, I'd be surprised if there didn't turn out to be cheating by Republican Governors this time as well.
 
Ziggurat said:
It's funny that you don't see how your own name applies here.

The system is insecure. People don't have faith in it. You can keep trying to blame whomever you want to for that, but blame won't fix it.
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Oh please, the system was fine until the MAGA people seized onto this particular Facebook conspiracy as a way to keep sucking Trump's dick. Of course the process seems opaque to morons who never paid attention in Government class.

Come on, man, you're better than this.
 
lomiller said:
There has been systematic fraud by Republicans in States like North Carolina the last few elections, I'd be surprised if there didn't turn out to be cheating by Republican Governors this time as well.
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It's pretty clear that Repubs have engaged in extensive voter suppression, cancelling registrations, closing polling stations etc. But I haven't read about any allegations of fraud in actually counting the ballots. Links?
 
Ziggurat said:
The security of a system is not judged on what has happened, but what can happen.

The system isn't secure. There are too few mechanisms in place to actually detect and prevent fraud. That is true even if no fraud has occurred to date. Our elections are much more insecure than those of most other developed countries.



Again, you can keep blaming whoever you want to blame, but blame won't fix the problem.
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Blame won't fix that problem or many others, but in order to fix a problem you have to find it. Although it's true that there's a difference between what happens and what might happen, we might at least consider that when a thing consistently does not happen despite warnings that it might, the problem we first must face is not the diminishing possibility of what might happen, but the shameful lies and traitorous disaster that most certainly did.

I don't have faith in god but that does not mean I ought to be allowed to burn down churches.
 
Butter! said:
Oh please, the system was fine until the MAGA people seized onto this particular Facebook conspiracy as a way to keep sucking Trump's dick. Of course the process seems opaque to morons who never paid attention in Government class.

Come on, man, you're better than this.
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Yes, everyone gets more upset when their own ox is gored. This is not news. Nor is it an actual argument that the system is fine. The system is not fine. It needs reform. And I have been saying this, consistently, for years, regardless of who won any particular election.
 
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