A good idea for Pennsylvania vote counting (plus: changing your vote)
Not that the plan would ever be implemented. But it’s a very good idea, and it might actually make for a more fair vote count. From commenter “David”:
Since ballots can still be received 3 days after the election date, can we have a moratorium on counting any votes in PA until all the ballots have been received?
ADDENDUM: Until this year, I had no idea that some states allow you to change your vote. This could actually end up being meaningful:
The laws allow residents in seven states who have already voted for select candidates by mail to change their minds, usually within a specific time frame after the first ballot has been cast. In some states, voters can resubmit ballots several times.
The seven states are Arkansas, Connecticut, Delaware, Michigan, Minnesota, Wisconsin, and New Hampshire. The procedure varies in each, and in Minnesota the deadline to do this has passed (14 days before the election). It often involves requests by mail. In Wisconsin, there are only a couple of days left (deadline is October 29).
Our election process has been purposely degraded and been made vulnerable to massive fraud and/or locking in votes early (before too many harmful revelations come out) under the banner of voter inclusiveness.
But how will they be able to hit the correct number of post election fraud votes if they don’t know what the target is? That’s how the system has worked in California for decades. And the results are plain to see. (Is sarcasm really the lowest form of wit?)
TommyJay:
Montage is surely shocked. Don’t call me Shirley.
I agree with the embargo on counting until all deadlines for receiving votes has passed, but it won’t happen.
:
As for changing your vote, here is how the conversation is likely to go:
“I want to change my vote.”
“Ok, sir, why do you want to change your vote to Biden?”
“I don’t want to change my vote to Biden, I want to change it to Trump!”
“Well, sir, you can’t do that.”
I’ve been an election observer for the first time in my life this cycle.
I’m affiliated and trained by EIP (Election Integrity Project) which I recommend and which you can help fund with a tax-deductible contribution LOL. “True The Vote” does similar work.
My strongest take-away from the experience so far is that “signature verification” is Evil with a capital “E”.
1) The ballots come in and are manually compared by low-paid workers.
They are comparing photos on a screen: ballot vs whatever “official” signatures are available usually the one from when you registered to vote or from your Dept of Motor Vehicles. Although the workers are not handling paper, at least, it is a mind-numbing job.
2) It is highly inaccurate. People’s signatures vary a lot on a good day. I feel sure that workers start to glaze over and just pass, pass, pass after a while.
3) It is susceptible to fraud. If someone dumps a bunch of bad ballots into the bag, you can’t depend on signature verification to notice that something is amiss.
If nothing else this political season, please consider finding the name/address of one of your elected officials and write them to ask for their consideration to change this aspect of voting.
It is not too much to ask people to drop off a ballot at a local station and provide ID. It just isn’t. A county can take the funds currently used for high speed photo equipment, computers, monitors and salaries and re-direct them to staff who can go pick up and authenticate ballots for shut-ins.
Thank you.
The preceding was a Public Service announcement.
JimNorCal:
I’m not so sure that signature verification works the same way in all the states. California has a universal mailing out of ballots to all registered voters. Pennsylvania seems to have a situation that’s a 2-step process, in which a voter must request a mail-in or absentee ballot first (and I’m pretty sure the voter must sign the request).
Therefore, I believe that California must dig up other signatures to compare, whereas Pennsylvania has recent ones on file for every voter mailed a ballot.
I think the system is bad either way. In person voting is by far the best, but of course that can’t always happen. But mail-in voting has gotten to be an enormous share of the votes, and I am fairly certain there will be a significant amount of fraud this year that might even decide the result.
Neo,
How exactly would not counting the votes until all ballots are received help the process?
In well over 95% of elections the late arriving votes make no difference. In other words, few elections are so close that they rely on those late arriving votes to declare the winner. Statistically, you can predict most states with 10% of the vote counted – the networks call the election in many states this way. In fact you already know the way 40 states will vote right now.
Let me add that as long as the ballot is post marked by election day all [legal] votes should be accepted. Recall that Al Gore wanted to not count late arriving votes in Florida many of which were military ballots. The GOP – rightfully – raised a fuss.
Also, what do you mean by “locking in votes early”. Are you saying you don’t like people to vote too early? How far in advance would you allow people to vote if you could? In order to get more people to vote in some states you have to allow at least a week of voting. Mainly because there are fewer polling places in some areas and it’s best not to have voters standing in line for 12 hours. Voters have been in hour long lines in both red and blue states [Ohio and Texas notably] for the past two weeks. The more the merrier. I wish 90% of eligible voters would vote.
neo: CA went 100% mail ballots this year but it was already at 75% in previous years. Other states are in the “many” to “all” mail ballot category.
It is convenient to fill out a ballot at home instead of standing in line. Frankly,
it beats laboriously marking a ballot at the precinct where other, more thoughtless, people are busily reading the names, Propositions and Measures for the very first time.
For me, it’s really the authentication that the right person is delivering the right ballot which is currently in doubt.
JimNorCal —
the authentication that the right person is delivering the right ballot
It’s hard to square that with universal mail-in but NOT signature verification.
Perhaps we should mail out all ballots to voters for pre-marking but then you have to stand in line to show that your ID matches the name on the ballot to turn it in and have it counted.
Montage —
Let me add that as long as the ballot is post marked by election day all [legal] votes should be accepted.
And yet Pennsylvania has declared that ballots that are not postmarked must be accepted up to three days late. Would you agree that the PA Supreme Court decided incorrectly?
JimNorCal:
I go for fraud protection over mere convenience.
But are you not also concerned about the fact that the voter rolls are messed up, and ballots sent out to people who are dead or who have moved (or multiple ballots to one person), and this is another weak spot? As is the mechanism of the mail, where we see episodes of dumped-in-the-trash ballots?
Montage:
Do you really not understand? I find that rather hard to believe.
If there is voter fraud, and if it is to be successful, one must know how many extra votes to provide. If regular voting is closed and the voting numbers are known, and it is a relatively close race (as it possibly will be in all or some swing states), one only has to “come up with” a certain number of ballots to win. But one has to know how many are required. If all the votes aren’t counted till the 3 day limit is passed, then it will be much harder to know how many to fraudulently manufacture within those 3 days of grace.
Obviously – it goes without saying – the technique would be difficult or impossible to pull off in states in which one party or another has a substantial lead. That was actually the basis of the title of a 2012 book by Hugh Hewitt entitled If It’s Not Close, They Can’t Cheat.
As far as early voting goes – yes, I am in favor of a time limit. Actually, there’s already a time limit, it’s just a far more generous one than I would set. I would set the time limit as a couple of weeks. Voting is supposed to occur on a single day. The campaigns are geared for that. I also believe that voters need the most information possible, and the closer the vote is to Election Day the more information they have. Obviously, some people need to be able to vote absentee, but I think that should happen in the usual way: they have to officially request voting that way, and the ballot has to have many ways to authenticate that it belongs to the person who requested it. What’s more, no ballot harvesting, unless it’s by a close relative who’s helping out another relative. Definitely no mass ballot harvesting.
Neo,
I do get it I just don’t have a conspiratorial mind. The state of PA has 67 counties. General elections are run by each county. It would have to be an extraordinarily coordinated effort for election officials to hold [or create?] a bunch of ballots that they think are Democratic votes and only release them if the election is close and Trump is leading. I don’t know what happens behind the scenes but I’m told it’s not easy to create ballots out of thin air.
This might be one of the biggest difference between us. I’ve been voting since the 1980’s. Even in elections that had a result I hated I still trust the system and the people who run the elections to get it right.
Bryan Lovely,
I would agree if the ballots are not post marked by election day [before the polls close] they should not be counted. But given the fact that mail delivery is slow I do think ballots should be accepted.
Montage:
Wrong again. I, like you, trusted the system for most of my life. But I no longer do.
You won’t find a great many posts from earlier elections where I talk much about voter fraud. Yes, there were some instances, but I thought they were small and almost never consequential.
And of course, I’ve been voting longer than you
But over time, more and more of the built-in safeguards against voting fraud have been dismantled. That’s key, and in particular this year they have really been dismantled even further with COVID as the excuse. And now, the way the left talks (and the way they’ve behaved, with Russiagate and all the rest), it is clear they would do anything they can, legal or illegal, to defeat Trump. Anything.
And in particular I worry about Philadelphia.
From Wikipedia:
A 52.5%-47.5% lead isn’t small. I believe the percentages at the end of election day had a multiple percentage point spread. I used to naively believe that they could only move a couple or few 0.1’s of a percentage point with fraud.
While I will concede that the whole topic of vote integrity is complex, sometimes a simple concept can help cut through some of the clutter of complex topics. My meager contribution would be the notion that our voting system should insist on the necessity of absolute vote secrecy and confidentiality on every single vote. Not just some of the time or if the voter cares, but every vote.
That way, if some operative is offering $200 for a vote, how would he know if the voter actually complied with the deal. I believe it is not possible to have truly secret mail-in ballots.
montage, neo,
I grew up in Chicago. Unlike you both I have always known fraud is rather easy and common in elections. The phrase, “Vote early and often” is said to have been coined by Chicago’s late, mayor Richard Daley, who also said, “The policeman is not here to create disorder. The policeman is here to preserve disorder.”
montage, surely you’ve heard the theories on how voter fraud in just a few precincts in Chicago’s Cook County elected Kennedy President over Nixon?
This is a decent article about the history of election fraud in Chicago https://blockclubchicago.org/2018/10/24/chicago-and-rigged-elections-the-history-is-even-crazier-than-youve-heard/
I can vouch that all the things mentioned here were common and out in the open when I lived there. Ward bosses bussed people to the polls, fed them, gave them beverages (sometimes alcoholic) often handing them pre-filled ballots to turn in. Patronage jobs were distributed based on how many Democrat votes Ward bosses could manufacture in each precinct. And woe to the Ward that didn’t deliver favorable Democrat percentages! Streets would not be plowed when it snowed. Garbage would go uncollected for weeks. And yes, dead people did vote, or at least ballots were cast in their name.
Rufus, American elections are so corrupt that it is one reason why over the years I stopped caring about who got elected. Starting in 2007, before the Age of Hussein or the Obamanation/Abomination.
I also started getting intel and Source that the Republicans and Demoncrats were being blackmailed by a central authority. There goes that “democracy” and the “republic” died a long time ago.
Wrong again. I, like you, trusted the system for most of my life. But I no longer do.
Of course, like many things, this topic was something I got pushback up from most regulars here. They either said voting fraud did not happen or that it wouldn’t matter because of Trump’s victory.
It is a kind of naivety and defense system. What would you do if some secret combination had stolen ALL your Presidential elections and selected, not elected them? Nothing you can do, so better not think about it.
I would say that the prevalence and ease of committing voter fraud is just another reason why Trump MUST be re-elected.
If he is, I would assume that he will try his hardest to find a way to repair this corrupt travesty.
Think of it as another “wall”. (Perhaps even a type of “fire wall.) Nobody, no party, should be able to get away with such massive subversion of the republic.
(No guarantee,alas, that this assumption will prove correct….)
(Wow! Can’t believe my comment got picked up.)
Montage —
One more incident about “found” ballots that were just enough to change an election is Al Franken’s election and the boxes of 170 ballots found in someone’s car on the Indian Reservation. That shifted the Senate and gave us the ACA, the first step to make health insurance so expensive that Single Payer would be the only option left. PA may have 67 districts, but you don’t have to flip them all to flip the State. You may have to flip only 1 or 2 to turn the entire election. A sports caster I listened to used to say “If you aren’t cheating, you aren’t trying.” Well, Democrats are certainly trying.
I was considering voting for the Full-Tilt-Boogie-Loonie Party…but I got over it. Decided that would be STUPID.