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I don't know what the design of safer e-voting machines or mail voting systems have to do with disadvantaging minorities... You are seeing ghosts.

Personally I'm seeing a very sudden change of direction. You were strongly implying that in-person voting was the only safe system, that voting by mail was less preferable and that e-voting in particular was fundamentally insecure; now suddenly you're saying you just wanted to improve them all along?

Dave
 
I live in the South as I see you live in Florida. My hometown is 50% Black and 50% White, I have not heard one Black say there was any difficulty in either registering or voting.

Okay. Facts care not for your anecdotes.

I'm not going to waste my time showing facts and figures as to Republican voter suppression efforts as if I actually thought for a second you'd either listen or believe them. The Republican party has openly admitted it can't win fair elections, which is why it is trying to rewrite the narrative as "Fairness is just the Democrats not wanting to lose."
 
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"Well I've imagined a way someone might cheat the system" isn't a problem that needs to be fixed.

If only it were that concrete. "Well a bunch of credulous, partisan and uninformed people think the liars who told them the system might have been cheated in ways it can't possibly have been cheated might have a point" is about the level of justification we're actually seeing.

Dave
 
If only it were that concrete. "Well a bunch of credulous, partisan and uninformed people think the liars who told them the system might have been cheated in ways it can't possibly have been cheated might have a point" is about the level of justification we're actually seeing.

Like I said the Republicans have openly admitted they can't win in fair elections, which makes it hilarious that we're even discussing it.

Their attempts now are to sell some narrative that if you're for fairness you only care about the Democrats winning.
 
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I don't know what the design of safer e-voting machines or mail voting systems have to do with disadvantaging minorities... You are seeing ghosts.

I am acknowledging history.

If your proposed changes have no impact on voter turnout among disadvantaged voters, I would expect them to find little support among the GOP in states where they could be implemented. But feel free to quote this back at me if I am wrong.
 
Again we're having this discussion as if members of the GOP haven't come out and directly said things to the various effects of "We can't win if black people can vote" multiple times.

Again that's why the apologists here are desperately doing everything they can to find some way of going "The Right can't win unless the game is rigged, ergo if you are against rigging the game you are just biased against us and only care about the Democrats winning."
 
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Okay. Facts care not for your anecdotes.
I can live with your approach.

I'm not going to waste my time showing facts and figures as to Republican voter suppression efforts as if I actually thought for a second you'd either listen or believe them.
This is a great way to dismiss my comment but allow you not to show facts. If you don't show facts, then by your own words... "Facts care not for your anecdotes"
The Republican party has openly admitted it can't win fair elections
"Facts care not for your anecdotes" Frankly, I don't care for the Republican Party
which is why it is trying to rewrite the narrative as "Fairness is just the Democrats not wanting to lose."
"Facts care not for your anecdotes"
 
I can live with your approach.

This is a great way to dismiss my comment but allow you not to show facts. If you don't show facts, then by your own words... "Facts care not for your anecdotes" "Facts care not for your anecdotes" Frankly, I don't care for the Republican Party "Facts care not for your anecdotes"

Oh let me be very clear. I'm under no obligations to show facts to you.

I'll write out Encyclopedia level posts to anyone arguing in good faith. I will not do so to people who I already know are going to go "Durrrr... nope... don't believe you."
 
There comes a point where "the perfect is the enemy of the good" crosses a line over into "seeking perfection at the cost of the possible." And when your only standard for evaluating whether a voting system is sufficiently proof against fraud is worrying that some people might believe, not only without evidence, but against the evidence, that there was or might be fraud, then you've crossed the line- you've demanded rigor for a system without a rigorous metric by which to measure its performance, and made the system unworkable for the purpose it was designed to accomplish.

The best voting system is the one that lets the most people vote without unwarranted interference. Knowing what the largest number of people want is the purpose of the system- it's just ridiculous to gum up the machine with the ghosts you can imagine for it.
 
Personally I'm seeing a very sudden change of direction. You were strongly implying that in-person voting was the only safe system, that voting by mail was less preferable and that e-voting in particular was fundamentally insecure; now suddenly you're saying you just wanted to improve them all along?

Dave
I've maintained, for a long time, that presential, traditional paper voting is the most secure, and I'd be surprised if many of you would have disagree with that... any other year. After reading Avi Rubin's declarations:

. "The only system that I know of that achieves software independence as defined by NIST, is economically viable and readily available is paper ballots with ballot marking machines for accessibility and precinct optical scanners for counting - coupled with random audits. That is how we should be conducting elections in the US, in my opinion."

... I now think that there might be a system that is close to paper voting in security, with the advantages of rapid counting of e-voting.
 
Yes indeed. I find gerrymanderintg particularly obscene, how can that be a thing? Such a blatant cheat... as for voter suppresion, I don´t know much about the issue. Of course voting should be facilitated, but I find it hard to wrap my mind around how requiring ID for voting can be an issue when here in Europe it´s just a given.

They pick ID forms such as drivers licence that not everyone has, which allows them to target specific groups of people who are less likely to have that specific type of ID. They also create other rules like the one in North Dakota a few years ago that required ID to have a street address, which doesn't seem that bad until you add in the fact that more over 20% of the States population lives on Indian Reservations which don't have street addresses.

It's not just ID that is used to suppress voting though. They put up more polling stations and open them for longer hours is places that are more likely to vote Republican. You can have people in predominantly black neighborhoods waiting all day in line to vote while in predominantly white neighborhood a dozen miles away people can breeze though is a couple min.

They also put polling stations in places that make it difficult for targeted groups to get to. Eg in the 2018 midterm election Dodge City in Kansas, a city of over 27000 people with a high percentage of democrat voting Hispanic population there was a single polling station set up miles out of town where there was no bus service.

Another technique used extensively by Republicans is for the party (not the government) to send out confirmation of voter status forms disguised as junk mail to areas that are predominantly black or heavily Democratic. If/when these people fail to respond to the mailing they use it as "evidence" that person doesn't exist or doesn't live there and is therefor ineligible to vote. Their names are purged from the voter rolls and come election day they find themselves either prohibited from voting or have their votes discarded.
 
I personally haven't taken Trump's claims seriously, he was obviously lying and obfuscating. I'm not trying to vindicate his claims, quite the opposite. My point is just that the imperfectly designed and insufficiently transparent voting system has helped boost the claims of fraud. And if it doesn't get corrected it could happen again. Do you want that in the next election? Wouldn't it be better to have a simpler, safer, transparent voting system that precluded any serious claims of fraud?
I am willing to presume you're not trumping yourself, but if so I think you've inadvertently signed on to the problem on their terms: first that the traitorous liars, rather than being squashed, must be appeased by resolving the doubts they claim motivated them, or else they'll do it all again; second that any actual improvement in the system would ever be enough to satisfy a cult whose distinguishing feature is to deny the most obvious facts; and third, that any solution they would consider acceptable would be fair to the minorities and opponents they've consistently, dishonestly and shamefully vilified.

The people responsible for the revolt made it clear that they will never accept an election in which they lose, and further a significant portion of those who support them have made it clear that anything that passes for a solution to the imagined problem of fraud would, if they have a voice in it, be characterized by voter suppression.

Other posters have noted that in their own districts they saw no voter suppression, but one reason for that in some cases at least is that the attempts to short circuit democracy have been overruled by the courts. If the advocates of voter suppression have failed, it's not for lack of trying.
 
Oh let me be very clear. I'm under no obligations to show facts to you.
If I provide an anecdotal observation, it is dismissed because it is not supported by fact. If you don't show facts, it is because you have no obligation to show facts to me. I actually took you for a smarter person until you posted that contradictory denunciation.
 
I live in the South as I see you live in Florida. My hometown is 50% Black and 50% White, I have not heard one Black say there was any difficulty in either registering or voting.

Exactly. I have a black friend and he told me racism isn’t a thing anymore and then we high-fived and went back to solving mysteries with the help of a talking dog from the future.
 
If I provide an anecdotal observation, it is dismissed because it is not supported by fact. If you don't show facts, it is because you have no obligation to show facts to me. I actually took you for a smarter person until you posted that contradictory denunciation.

Yes. Because I am an honest agent in this discussion, you are not. This is not complicated.

I'm not talking to you for your benefit.
 
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This is not the first time flaws in the voting process has been a topic of discussion amongst those who might care about such things.

Dead voters, hanging chads, Diebold machines, Russian interference, and most recently Mail in voting, have been topics throughout many elections- and have called into question the legitimacy of the wins of candidates on both sides of the aisle- over a span of decades.

The biggest impediment to setting up something fair and secure has been the short attention span of the populace- we only think about these things right after the election, and right after an election the newly elected react the most defensively regarding the election process-for fear their wins will seem illegitimate. So they stick their fingers in their ears and scream "la la la I can't hear you" when the topic is being discussed, long enough for the next event that captures the publics' attention to occur.

Now would be an ideal time for the Democrats to take the initiative on establishing some safe, fair, secure, accessible, and uniform voting process for the Nation. Instead, it seems, they must insist the system is perfect, and that any calls to address the obvious problems with it is just an attempt to discredit their win.

A month ago I would have been shocked had someone said that getting into the Capitol while congress was in session required little more than breaking a window and walking down a hallway, now I know that the building was not quite as secure as I had assumed it was. Do we wish to wait until a foreign power actually changes the results of our election to make the election process more secure?

Biden could address a real problem, whilst simultaneously demonstrating confidence in the legitimacy of his own win, and a willingness to reach out to the loonies who need to be brought back to a level of reasonableness, by making "election reform" a centerpiece of his admin.

Here’s the thing about your terrible analogy: We know the security of the Capitol was breached. We have concrete evidence and we’re currently rounding up the perpetrators. It didn’t happen in secret.

What the election security concern trolls are alleging is two-fold: Both that elections are not secure and that if the security is breached, it happens in total secrecy and is somehow untraceable.

The 2020 election was probably the most scrutinized election in U.S. history.

Do you have any evidence that there were actual security issues that actually impacted the results in a significant way?
 
Yes. Because I am an honest agent in this discussion, you are not. This is not complicated.

I'm not talking to you for your benefit.
ha ha what a presumptuous and inaccurate comment. But it is good to know that you are an "honest agent" that doesn't need to provide facts, your good word is enough.
 
I've maintained, for a long time, that presential, traditional paper voting is the most secure, and I'd be surprised if many of you would have disagree with that... any other year. After reading Avi Rubin's declarations:

. "The only system that I know of that achieves software independence as defined by NIST, is economically viable and readily available is paper ballots with ballot marking machines for accessibility and precinct optical scanners for counting - coupled with random audits. That is how we should be conducting elections in the US, in my opinion."

... I now think that there might be a system that is close to paper voting in security, with the advantages of rapid counting of e-voting.

Interestingly, that quote says nothing about mail or in-person voting (i.e. how the paper votes get to the counting station); it simply addresses the question of how votes should be counted. So you're fine with voting by mail now, are you?

Dave
 

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