Seniors in retirement homes and others in the older cohort vote by mail in ballots and/or are also bused in by campaigns. (Even without mail-in advantage, they have nothing at all to do any and every day so it’s easy for them to go vote in person. Richer areas also usually have less wait time at poll places vs multi-hour waits that are standard for “everyone else”.) They tend to vote strongly for a candidate with an R by the name (even when the candidate isn’t a Republican, like the current candidate).
Younger voters all skew to vote Democrat.
Younger people tend to have one or multiple jobs and responsibilities.
Making it harder for working people to vote thus currently is an advantage to the R candidates.
There’s not much more to it. Reducing voter suppression only flips the red states to blue more quickly than they are already trending. Obviously that’s not desirable for red candidates.
I would not dismiss them without checking their facts at least. I apply the same standard to all sources. I just take into account known bias from OAN to NYT. I routinely check this site when evaluating a source I’m not sure the bias of. In short, I’m not trusting anyone and I’m not checking one or two sources from the same echo chamber to confirm what I want to hear.
The sources in that NYT article seem credible enough to me. Or at the very least, I cannot specifically point out where they are incorrect so dismissing them entirely seems rather short-sighted. I doubled checked for example their Oregon claim here .
My main reason for inquiry is that something doesn’t fit in the picture. Some republicans are warning of doom and gloom if we go vote by mail. Others seem perfectly happy to use or expand vote by mail. If it was so bad for them, why would they? So is it state specific, is it budget-related (some states don’t have the funds to implement a fraud-resilient system), unsubstantiated change-aversion, or yet something else? But what is certain is that the picture does not fit neatly one narrative.
Vote by mail has a lot of security issues, the main one of which is that other people can pressure / influence / bribe the voter and have confirmation that they voted a particular way. Secret ballot voting was adopted in the 1800s in response to various voting fraud. There’s also the risk that someone could intercept and place your vote by stealing your mail, or cancel your vote by destroying or losing your mail. None of these are easily solved.
These reforms — a secret ballot along with prohibitions on campaigning immediately outside the polling site — significantly reduced voter fraud and intimidation. Indeed, most jurisdictions across the United States followed Louisville’s and Kentucky’s lead, and by 1896 almost 90 percent of states had adopted the secret ballot. The secret ballot is largely credited with rooting out the most overt forms of voter intimidation.
How? By asking you to send them a picture of your ballot before you mailed it. They’d still have no proof that you sent your ballot nor any proof that you did not take a picture then requested another ballot claiming to have lost your previous one. Without guarantee, it’d be pretty much the same as buying someone’s vote and having them show up at the poll.
They could also steal mail before you get your ballot. There’s only a few people having handled your mail though so you could not do that on a large scale before getting caught. Plus if you did not receive your ballot in the mail, you’d simply ask for another one. If tons of those got lost, again it’d get suspicious. As far as intercepting mail, they’d have to know the way you voted otherwise they could end up intercepting the wrong mailer. If you dropped it in a regular post office box, it’d be extremely hard to tell and not worth the risks.
Not saying it cannot/won’t happen but if it’s not happened for local elections where it’d take less cheating in raw numbers to affect the outcome, what’s the evidence that it’d happen again on a large enough scale.
And even with voter fraud concerns, something doesn’t fit. If - despite the lack of evidence - this is such a strong possibility, why is only one party concerned about it? If it were easy, I’m sure both sides would partake statistically in equal numbers over such a large scale. I just don’t get it.
How? By simply having them give you their ballot, so that you can fill it out and mail it back yourself. That’s the whole point - in-person voting means that person has to show up and cast their vote themselves, while mail-in ballots list a specific person’s name but have no way to verify who actually filled it out.
By showing up canvassing your neighborhood when the ballots go out and “helping” you fill them out and offering to mail them for you, perhaps while giving you a few bucks or a free gift. The campaign worker can snap a pic of the completed ballot before it gets mailed so they can have proof to paid per vote delivered, and you rely on the laziness of the voter to not go to the trouble of requesting a new ballot and re-voting. Or you could fill it out in front of someone looking to pay for a given vote and then put it in a mail drop with them in order to earn your cash bribe. vote buying was a big problem a long time ago which is why we have a secret ballot, and politicians are no less greedy and unethical now than they were in the 1800s.
They could also steal mail before you get your ballot. There’s only a few people having handled your mail though so you could not do that on a large scale before getting caught. Plus if you did not receive your ballot in the mail, you’d simply ask for another one. If tons of those got lost, again it’d get suspicious. As far as intercepting mail, they’d have to know the way you voted otherwise they could end up intercepting the wrong mailer. If you dropped it in a regular post office box, it’d be extremely hard to tell and not worth the risks.
If they took your ballot and then mailed it towards the deadline, presumably the later ballot would override yours, assuming you bothered to request a replacement, and your vote wouldn’t count and you’d be none the wiser. There are hundreds of postal workers arrested each year for stealing / losing / hoarding mail. It wouldn’t be hard for an employee in the post office to just lose lots of the ballots from a strongly right or left leaning area to depress the desired voter turnout in a completely undetectable way. USPS is definitely not designed to be “secure” in the way that can protect an election central to our democratic process. Observe the failure modes of these security flaws are essentially undetectable after the fact, nor easily traceable back to the guilty party. That’s asking for trouble.
And even with voter fraud concerns, something doesn’t fit. If - despite the lack of evidence - this is such a strong possibility, why is only one party concerned about it? If it were easy, I’m sure both sides would partake statistically in equal numbers over such a large scale. I just don’t get it.
Look at all the evidence of election fraud just in FL. Absentee ballots are the main vulnerability exploited by ballot brokers, forged, stolen, filed for unknowing criminals or hospital patients, etc.
Here’s a searchable database of election fraud cases with over a thousand convictions in recent years.
Was Joe Biden’s virtual Tampa rally yesterday “for the birds”?
It would appear so. The event was plagued throughout with severe technical problems. But most noteworthy:
“We need to remember who we are. We’re the United States of America,” Biden said toward the end, a line he has often used on the campaign trail. As he spoke, a bird could be heard singing loudly in the background.
Trump and Biden both are trying to earn four years in the White House.
But they both appear simultaneously to be running another race, to see who becomes first to die:
Biden of course is the older man . . . but not by all that much. Their advanced ages and both of them being male are comorbidities for the virus. Nevertheless, Biden seems to me to be losing this race. Here is why:
Biden is wisely sequestered in his basement. And Biden is in reasonable shape, too.
Trump is constantly out among other people, any one of whom could expose him to the virus. This just happened as one of his personal aides tested positive. Perhaps every bit as important, Trump is FAT!! He clearly is not in shape. He is the most rotund POTUS since William Howard Taft! This puts Trump up at least one comorbidity over Biden plus, again, Trump has extra exposure to the virus.
So clearly Trump is more likely than Biden to perish in this pandemic and be first to die. And it could happen well in advance of the election. Biden might end up facing off against Pence on November third.
If Biden outlives Trump, I would count that as a win.
Leader types have a lot of pressure on them. Look at Boris. The guy is twenty years Trumps junior and he very nearly perished. I think if Trump becomes infected with the virus his survival chances are poor. And he might already be infected!
One more thing:
If Trump does become infected and manages somehow to survive, I believe that would positively impact his chances for an election win in November.
I dont know that a 90% probability of survival is all that poor…
In fact, since this is the appropriate thread, I’ll toss this out - if Trump were in fact to perish from Covid-19, there will be a tremendous amount of speculation that it was a covert assassination being dressed up as Covid-19.
Very good arguments against voting by mail. But there are still some holes in this argument.
First, a lot of the evidence of election fraud is actually evidence of attempts at election fraud. Meaning no votes were actually cast and the fraudsters were easily caught. That means the system in place has at least some safeguards that are working.
There is lack of evidence in all-mail voting states but you could counter that it’s just hard to detect. Fair enough but that’s basically down to being hard to prove a negative. Still if you look at Colorado which has all mail voting only, the number of fraud cases since it was implemented is insignificant. If you compare it to Texas - granted the two States have dissimilar voting populations -, there’s been fewer fraud cases (based on Heritage Foundation database).
Finally out of the States that require an excuse for requesting an absentee ballot, the ones with age (60 or 65) as a valid excuse does not make any sense. If those over 60/65 are sick/disabled/etc, they are covered by other excuses. So that age limit does not help prevent disenfranchising them. And I don’t think you could make an argument that those over 60/65 are intrinsically less likely to cheat or get taken advantage of by third parties.
In any case, I was wondering if early voting in person could be used instead of expanding absentee ballot programs. It’d not be more liable than the current system to voter fraud. But it could allow more time to hopefully reduce lines, allow extra time for cleaning machines and surfaces between voters, etc… that’d be costly probably but so is expanding voting by mail (which is the direction most states are looking to take lately).
Anybody who reads my stuff here will already be aware I’m no shill for Sally Yates. I detest Sally Yates. Period. And BTW, I’m no fan of Obama, either.
Nevertheless, truth must prevail. A huge amount of new material has been released in these last thirty-six hours. Trump is claiming an attack by the Obama administration back at end of 2016 beginning of 2017. Trump is wrong:
The releases clearly prove there was an attack on Trump’s presidency, both before and following the inauguration. There is no proof Obama is to blame.
At the time, Sally Yates was still running Justice. She was an Obama partisan and strong supporter. Yet Yates went absolutely ballistic when she learned of Comey’s plans to attack Trump. Remember, I detest Yates. But she behaved honestly in that crucial situation. In simple terms:
Based on the new evidence, it is Comey Trump should be blaming, not Obama. Comey has now been revealed as clearly dirty. But he was not acting on Obama’s orders else Yates would have known and remained silent. The new revelations indicate she was FAR from silent. She went NUTS, as she should have, when she learned what Comey was doing.
Through it all, Trump was trusting and giving benefit of the doubt. Said a less friendly way, he was virtually clueless. It was only much later that he finally dismissed Comey. And it happened FAR too late.
You seem to think an overweight man in his 70s has a meaningfully higher than 10% chance of dying from the virus. I don’t think the stats back this up.
In the 70-79 age bracket, death rates conditional on hospitalization have been around 8-10%. Men are perhaps 2:1 or 3:1 over represented in deaths, but that also means they are most of the sample already so you’d only increase by maybe 1.2x for that. I didn’t see any effect of obesity generally when I ran the numbers on some of the US cases, where 40% of deaths were obese but then again so are 40% of Americans . And of course some large fraction of cases never get sick enough to go to the hospital at all, so whether that’s 5x more or 20x more, you need to scale down the death odds by that factor (at least until your case is bad enough you have to be hospitalized). Guessing 5x for older people, that might give you a 2% chance of someone like Trump or Biden to die from the virus. Not odds I’d take causally to be sure, but not 20% or something, and that’s without getting whatever drug treatment is looking best in the trial data they’re not telling us yet.
I agree. I’m sure an autopsy would happen and before that he’d be like Boris Johnson sent to the ICU with ultra high security. Like all negatives it’d be hard to prove it was not assassination (and I’m sure lots of conspiracy theories would flourish). But yes considering age and health, for Trump, Biden, Sanders, and all the others over 70 running for election, it would not be too difficult to believe it was just normal infection. There are certainly plenty in that age group dying every day even while on ventilators.
Yes, but that just means that the dead people are likely to have had the issue. Correlation vs causality. The dead NYC people were no more obese than a similar aged group of random US people, which makes me think there’s no causality there or at least not a lot. Diabetes however was over represented among the dead by 1.5x more than their expected population fraction, suggesting that might be a cause of higher risk (or at least correlated with one).
I think you’re dead on with correlation vs. causation. Obesity is frequently associated with heart disease, hypertension, and diabetes. So the obesity may not be directly linked to higher mortality rate but its frequently associated diseases are. Provided POTUS was just obese but did not suffer from any of the other diseases, I don’t think he’d have much high chance of dying. But there’s little way to know if he actually has any of these conditions since medical reports from politicians are often not entirely accurate. So the only confirmed comorbidity is the potential coronary artery disease linked to high cholesterol (and Crestor treatment for) which is consistent with obesity and reported diet. Still if it were my odds, even only 10% would be a little high for comfort.
Especially when you’re thinking of being on the campaign trail and the difficulty to stay away from asymptomatic carriers for both candidates. All this will definitely make for an interesting campaign with much fewer rallies than usual.
. And of course some large fraction of cases never get sick enough to go to the hospital at all, so whether that’s 5x more or 20x more, you need to scale down the death odds by that factor (at least until your case is bad enough you have to be hospitalized). Guessing 5x for older people, that might give you a 2% chance of someone like Trump or Biden to die from the virus. Not odds I’d take causally to be sure, but not 20% or something, and that’s without getting whatever drug treatment is looking best in the trial data they’re not telling us yet.