American election
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Early voting expands across the US, almost 20 million have already voted.
Pennsylvania, one of the most hotly contested battleground states has rejected 372,000 requests for mail-in ballots.
More than 22m Americans had voted early by Friday, either in person or by mail, according to the US Election Project. At the same point in the 2016 race, about 6m votes had been cast.
…long lines, with some people waiting for up to 11 hours for an opportunity to vote.
Would i wait all day in a tiring queue to spoil my ballot paper…ummm…i doubt it
I wouldn’t either, not even for one hour. But who are the people that are so determined to vote? Are they Trump or anti-Trump voters? Are there any figures on this? Have the Republicans been encouraging and organising their supporters to vote by post?
As an observer has pointed out, not one on these long lines is wearing a MAGA baseball cap
And indeed the political experts claim that it is indeed Democratic Party voters who are predominant, by 2 to 1
But it will be still election-day that is crucial, as that is when the majority of Republicans intend to vote.
According to Steve Bannon, Trump should declare he won on election night before all votes are counted and that is why Clinton says Biden cannot concede on election night (mis-quoted that Biden shouldn’t concede at all)
Found this on Twitter! 44K likes! Not sure the tweet is still up…..posted some more memes, to be told Tweet has been deleted? Oops. Maybe my Broadband at the time?? Just looked again and it’s there! 😊
We're still being looted. pic.twitter.com/GdVMT1SFDx
— Rep. Jamaal Bowman Ed.D. (@JamaalBowmanNY) October 15, 2020
Looked up see who he is. He’s the official Democratic Party candidate for a New York district in the US House of Representatives. Perhaps someone thought that this was going too far for that party of capitalism.
Anybody know anything else about him?
He is part of the Justice Democrats, the AOC-wing
K Street is a major thoroughfare in the United States capital of Washington, D.C. known as a center for numerous lobbyists and advocacy groups. In political discourse, “K Street” has become a metonym for Washington’s lobbying industry since many lobbying firms were traditionally located on the section in Northwest Washington which passes from Georgetown through a portion of downtown D.C.Since the late 1980s, however, many of the largest lobbying firms have moved out; as of 2012, only one of the top-20 lobbying firms has a K Street address.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K_Street_%28Washington,_D.C.%29
A spot of direct action in New York:
Wow so this morning the Brooklyn Housing Court woke up to its doors spray foamed and bike locked shut, and then this document was released in a telegram room. It looks like people are not tolerating evictions any more. pic.twitter.com/PdKJsQwinF
— Read Let This Radicalize You (@JoshuaPHilll) October 16, 2020
Something I don’t understand. Why are they queuing to vote by post? I thought the whole point of postal voting was that you didn’t have to go to a polling station but could vote from your home.
In any event there is something odd, even undemocratic, about postal voting in so far as people can vote before polling day. This means that they vote before the campaign is over and so cannot take into account anything that happens between then and polling day. For instance, here in Britain in general elections, before all the candidates’ election addresses have been distributed free by the post office in accordance with electoral law.
There is nothing wrong in principle with postal voting even if it is open to more abuse than in-person voting. The problem is the timing. Logically they shouldn’t be allowed to be posted before polling day. That would of course delay declaring the result but would be fairer from a democratic point of view,
The fear is that the mail-in vote will be sabotaged by Trump and the Republicans as overall the Democratic Party are the beneficiaries of postal votes.
His Post Office appointee tried to slow down the mail processing times, the designated drop off points for postal ballots have been reduced.
The election campaign is all over. People have already decided who they are voting for. The debates merely entrench existing views, not change opinions. There are no longer any swing-votes to garner.
The problem is that there are no unified federal regulation of election in America. Each state decides much of the eligibility. For example there is the variety of shut-off dates for mail votes. Washington State has almost three weeks after election day for mail votes to be counted whereas Louisiana , they have to be returned the day before the election date.
https://apnews.com/article/how-soon-us-election-results-ba17f0528c1742187f275b634b06c1d1
I have a blog post in the pipeline concerning write-in votes. Basically there are only seven states that accept such votes unconditionally, nine reject them out-right and the rest only if they meet certain pre-set conditions.
The symbolic action makes a point but the theoretical justification of it must surely win a prize for being the most “woke”:
“We believe … that maintaining control of who has access to housing is a form of oppression that is intentionally leveraged as part of a greater oppressive system that disproportionately affects Black people, people of color, disabled people, trans people, sex workers, neurodivergent people, people that identify as LGBTQIA+, and others.”
But in any society, including socialism, there must be some decision-making body or procedure about who has access to housing— in socialism it will be democratic, presumably some local council.
But they are in effect demanding something to be implemented under capitalism, a housing authority that distributed housing strictly in proportion to their number in the population. A classic redistribution of poverty.
“I have a blog post in the pipeline concerning write-in votes. Basically there are only seven states that accept such votes unconditionally, nine reject them out-right and the rest only if they meet certain pre-set conditions.”
So, some states are more democratic than others. Of course the lack of uniform election regulations is due to the fact that electors are not voting directly for the presidential candidates but for the state’s delegates to the Electoral College. And this is not just just a fiction as a candidate can win the Electoral College despite getting less of the popular than their main rival. It happened in 2000 and in 2016.
Be interesting to know which are the seven states which permit write-in votes unconditionally, but presumably, to be a valid vote, you have to write in a name rather than a concept like “World Socialism”? Or do you?
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