I don’t believe it will change everything, but it will induce some salutary improvements if it’s done right. (And it would be my wager it won’t be). If done right, the following would be the case:

1. Postal ballots arriving after election day would be sequestered in a lock box with two keys, one key held by the Democratic county commissioner of elections, one by the Republican commissioner. After all votes are tabulated and results declared, the box would be opened in the presence of a municipal court judge and clerks from both side would mail these ballots back to the sender with a note that the ballot arrived too late to be tabulated.

2. Postal ballots which arrived before the drop dead date would be opened and have inside the mailer an outer envelope with identifying information and an inner marked only with the precinct. The ballots filled out would be in the inner envelope. Two member teams – one Democrat, one Republican – would check the signature &c against those on file, approving some ballots, and rejecting others. The approved ballots would go into locked cabinets. The cabinets would have two keys as described and be opened each day. The inner envelopes would be sorted into pigeonholes and the outer envelopes would be placed in plastic envelopes, sealed, and initialed by the pair of examining clerks. These cabinets would then be locked for the day. On election day, they’d be transported to a gymnasium and opened, with the ballots sorted to tables according to geography, and the tabulation under-taken by two man teams. After the election, the bulk of the rejected ballots would be returned to sender with a note that they were rejected. Some would be turned over to the sheriff for further investigation.

3. On election day, you’d have referenda, first-past-the-post contests, and ranked choice contests. The referenda would consist of ballot propositions, retention-in-office questions, and yes-no ballots on unopposed candidates. The first-past-the-post would be held when you had two candidates vying for one office. You’d use ranked choice for the rest. The first task would be to tabulate the results of the referenda and first-past-the-post contests and get those out of the way, as they require only one round of tabulation. Then you’d tabulate the first-preference votes of the ranked-choice contests.

4. The law would incorporate short-cut rules to offer dispatch to the process. One would be to allow the responsible board of elections to certify which candidates will be included in the second round of tabulation with certain precincts outstanding, if it be determined that there are not enough outstanding ballots in this set of precincts to change the line up. Another would be to have three tests to determine who is admitted to the subsequent round of tabulation. Rule one would be to eliminate the caboose candidate, rule two would be to rule that all candidates who fail to receive 2% of the 1st preference tally (blank and spoiled ballots not counted) are eliminated. Rule three would be that if there is a candidate whose 1st preference vote total exceeds that of the sum of all those candidates with lower such vote totals, all those with lower vote totals would be eliminated. If your contest has a single victor, you select the rule which allows you to eliminate the most candidates. (If you have a judicial contest where you have multiple candidates competing for multiple seats, only rule one or rule three would be used. If you’re electing a conciliar body from a multimember constituency, you’d have to use complicated Hare system tabulation).

5. Institute party registration. You could be a ‘no preference’ registrant, a Republican registrant, or a Democratic registrant. If you had a third party which achieved certain performance metrics in the most recent contests for the lower house of the state legislature, you could add an option to register as an adherent to that party. Political parties would be private membership organizations with dues set by formula in statutory law, and their internal government would be according to template by-laws found in corporation law or the election law. Political parties who compete well for the state legislature would acquire the status of ‘public organization’, which would incorporate benefits (less consuming ballot-access procedures) with constraints (supplementing members with registrants and submitting some nomination contests to primary elections among registrants).

6. Have state and county boards of elections classify every constituency as ‘competitive’ or not. In a ‘competitive’ constituency, the largest partisan body of registrants is < 2x the population of the second ranking body. Competitive constituencies nominate candidates according to a party nomination process, wherein major parties uses caucuses, conventions, and primaries to nominate candidates; minor parties use caucuses and conventions supplemented by designating petitions; and nonpartisan candidates make use of designating petitions. Designating petitions in these circumstances would be circulated only among no-preference registrants. In a pure petition contest, all aspirants would circulate in whichever was their preferred body of registrants. All candidates who circulated successfully would appear on the general-election ballot. Ballot order would vary from one precinct to another, with every aspirant having an equal chance to occupy the top position on the ballot.

7. The number of candidates a voter could rank could not exceed a certain number – seven perhaps.

8. Tabulation machines would use analog technology.

Alas…not enough of them voted…for Hillary.
Poor Hillary…
(Or maybe they said to themselves: “It’s not right. I’m basically illegal. I just got here. THEY want me to vote for THEM. That’s not right… I just can’t do that…”)

Isn’t it just “easier” to push hard on the Jan. 6 INSURRECTION, declare that half the country presents “a clear and [immediate] danger” to the country(!) and just essentially prevent—for national security reasons(!)…AKA PATRIOTISM—“the wrong people” from running for office…IOW essentially suspend elections?

And/or push hard on the “Climate Emergency”(TM) and declare that because of the “grave crisis” to America and the world—a crisis of the magnitude NEVER SEEN BEFORE!!—that “we’ll just have to, um, put off the elections—otherwise, how can WE SAVE the world (and America)???

Or a combination of the above.
(There certainly are enough crises to go around….Takes yer pick!!)

NEVER FORGETTING that if WE ARE FORCED to suspend elections we do so with indescribably extreme reluctance, great trepidation and profound sadness, yadda, yadda, yadda…BUT it’s ALL for the sake of the country and its citizens! And the World!
Oh, and for UNITY(TM)…

File under: TRUST US…

Is Trump Abe Lincoln or Dred Scott? A DC Jury will convict him of anything and everything.

I saw a scenario where the Dems remove Biden and name Newsome VP before the election and then have Harris resign. That probably won’t happen. Time is too short.

Trump as Speaker with both Biden and Harris removed is my current fantasy. As Judy Tenuta said so well: ” It could happen.”

I think my brother cares about a number of things other than himself. It’s just that his self-concept is bolstered by a political nonsense discourse.

Your state health department reports that the age adjusted homicide rate for Pennsylvania during the period running from 2015 to 2019 averaged about 6.1 per 100,000: 19.7 per 100,000 in Philadelphia County, 8.7 per 100,000 in Alleghany County, and 3.7 per 100,000 in the rest of the state. That would translate into 370-odd homicides in the rest of the state, or 5-6 per county.

Gordon, please see the writings of Edward Banfield on this very issue. The notion that 10% of the working-aged population is unemployable due to stupidity is a social fantasy.

It’s not a matter of time or effort. It simply cannot be done. And that’s 10 percent of the population.

I suspect this population is concentrated in cities, because there is enough support to survive there.