I wish I hadn't mentioned the pension, because it takes away from the immediate and much worse problem that the governing party is trying to stay in power by preventing members of the other party from voting.
You could steal the vote from 500k Republicans in just Alabama and 150k Democrats spread across Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania and have a net swing of 0 EC votes lost and 50 EC votes gained for Republicans.
You just have to create policies (like closing polling place, making vote by mail difficult, create voter id rules that exclude college students) that have small partisan differentials in a few swing states, which is why the greatest effort and impact is in urban centers in the midwest (followed by Latinx populations in the southwest like AZ and NM, and African American populations in the southeast like FL and GA).
> The R Street Institute, a think tank dedicated to free markets and limited government, recently released a study titled “Why conservatives should embrace sensible measures to expand absentee balloting.”
> The study cast doubt on claims that Democrats benefit from expanded mail-in voting, pointing to three states Trump carried in 2016 — Utah, Arizona and Montana — where about 70 percent of voters cast ballots through the mail.
GOP leadership is just totally unhinged.
Unless there's a swing back to restoring democratic norms there's no reasons the coming years are going to be much different, no matter who is elected president.
If Biden is able to take office I expect work to be done to try to salvage things.
Absolutely nothing prevents that from happening again. The economic, social, and political forces that disadvantaged large swathes of the public, riling them up enough to make them take a chance on Trump, are all still there. If anything, the fact that the COVID-19 recession is likely going to hit full force during the next administration and make their situation even worse makes voting for demagogues even _more_ likely. Biden isn't going to be able to wave a magic wand to fix the world even if he wins, which is not a given.
We're in for a bumpy ride.
But that climate, the white collar criminality, the nation wide rampant electoral schemes, the inequality haven't changed. What gave birth to Trump winning the 2016 election is still there. If I understand correctly, there's no reason republicans would support a democrat president trying to salvage thing considering they didn't prevent the swift acceleration in deterioration during the last four years.
Maybe Trump was an unknown as far as the governance he would provide but it was known what kind of individual he was (and to an extent what would happen if elected, in broad lines).
I don't know, I am in the final chapter of Sarah Kendzior "Hiding in Plain Sight: The Invention of Donald Trump and the Erosion of America" and things do look grim indeed.
As a consequence, it'll take a lot more than one term to undo everything that Trump has done in one term, and the way things were before Trump wasn't really peachy either.
One Trump term is going to require at least a decade to undo, and that's if it remains at just one term. Now add climate change on top of that and the future looks pretty grim.
I cannot believe that no one foresaw an election in a pandemic and said, “let’s build an app for this”
since trump lost the popular vote in 2016, isnt your grand republican conspiracy both categorically false and totally meaningless if it werent?
Do you really believe that someone winning in the previous election is a guarantee that they would not try to suppress the vote in the current or future elections? If not, what point were you trying to make by bringing up the results of the 2016 election?
This is so absurdly dramatic. Just about everything is back open and ppl agree that wearing a mask basically removes all risk. If ppl want to vote, they can get off their ass and go vote.
And from a security standpoint, how can you say this with a straight face? Some of the hardest modern struggles in the tech industry revolve around security...and you're over here acting like mailing in paper ballots, with no authentication/encryption/verification is a secure practice. All it takes is one or a few bad actors to skew the results. Look up cognitive dissonance, I think it's hitting you hard here.
It's funny you open your reply about "absurdly dramatic" then lay an equally absurd claim about vote-by-mail having a problem with fraud.
Your reply also conveniently ignores the historical pattern of voter suppression coming from the Republican party.
It seems in America, some constitutional rights are more protected than others.
I'd worry a lot more about computerized election systems before voting by mail. I think people are too worried about individual votes/errors. 0.0x% of ballots being lost/not counted/etc. is a problem with any election system ("hanging chads", signatures not matching well, ...), not just voting by mail. The question should be how hard is it to pull off a large scale disruption/fraud without being detected.
Meanwhile, rigged voting machines that flip votes have been caught on camera countless times. Zero effort has been made to do anything about that.
Most elections aren't close enough for the outcome to be swung by the kind of paper ballot fraud that a single person is capable of committing. Unlike electronic hacks, paper ballot fraud doesn't scale.