[ingliz]

including arriving in a timely manner

Voter suppression in a pandemic...

Mail-in ballots - Trump's puppet deliberately rendered the USPS unfit for purpose.

[Doug64]

Voter suppression in a pandemic...

Mail-in ballots - Trump's puppet deliberately rendered the USPS unfit for purpose.

I’m sorry to see you’re buying into the tinfoil hat brigade’s delusions. And it’s not like the Left hasn’t been reminding everyone for weeks to vote early enough that their vote would be counted, just how long do you think the mail could be delayed? Voters are adults, not children, and should be treated as such—and that includes recognizing their responsibility to vote in a timely manner.

[ingliz]

tinfoil hat brigade’s delusions.

Delusions? USPS customers in Chicago and elsewhere have reported mail deliveries up to weeks behind schedule.

"Chicagoans continue to face major delays getting their mail, but postal workers said they are up against challenges that make it harder and harder to do their jobs."

— ABC7 News

Elsewhere...

"The U.S. Postal Service is still experiencing mail delays despite taking steps to reverse the controversial changes that caused them, a new Senate report revealed Friday, raising concerns about the USPS’s ability to deliver election mail on time."

— Forbes Oct 9 2020

[Julian658]

Where did that come from?

Projecting much, methinks.

My bad: I thought vote suppression and blacks were always used in the same sentence.

[Doug64]

Delusions? USPS customers in Chicago and elsewhere have reported mail deliveries up to weeks behind schedule.

"The U.S. Postal Service is still experiencing mail delays despite taking steps to reverse the controversial changes that caused them, a new Senate report revealed Friday, raising concerns about the USPS’s ability to deliver election mail on time."

— Forbes Oct 9 2020

I don’t see how changes due to an attempt to make the USPS solvent equate to voter suppression, and were ordered reversed in September anyway so are hardly to blame for any current delays the mail might be suffering. And it seems plenty of voters have acted like adults by paying attention to the situation and getting their votes in early, states are reporting three times or more as many early voters as last year. So yes, people are capable of acting like responsible citizens.

[ingliz]

were ordered reversed

That's as maybe but the USPS has not been attempting to reassemble or replace the mail sorting machines removed in at least nine states, according to union officials.

Leaked email...

"Please message out to your respective Maintenance Managers tonight. They are not to reconnect/reinstall machines that have been previously disconnected without approval from HQ Maintenance, no matter what direction they are getting from their plant manager.”

— Kevin Couch, a director of maintenance operations, Email to middle managers

[Doug64]

@ingliz, how does an email laying out who has the authority to authorize reconnecting/reinstalling plant machinery equate to a failure to follow the judge’s orders? And that still doesn’t explain the massive flood of early voting that’s already taken place.

[Pants-of-dog]

@Doug64

If the judge ordered the Trump admin to facilitate mail voting, and the Trump admin deliberately chose to make mail slower and less effective in order to make mail voting as ineffective and difficult as possible, then that is a direct contradiction of the judge’s orders.

[ingliz]

acting like responsible citizens.

If you have 3 weeks of early voting and the voting document takes 2 weeks to arrive due to cuts to services (See Chicago) and a similar time to be delivered to the polling place, you have lost your vote. Obviously, not all ballots are so tardy but some are and in a close race, where every valid vote counts, it matters.

This, coupled with the ongoing Republican campaign to deny voters access to a ballot and recruit armed 'poll watchers', invites one independent observer to wonder if this is a free and fair election.

[Doug64]

If you have 3 weeks of early voting and the voting document takes 2 weeks to arrive due to cuts to services (See Chicago) and a similar time to be delivered to the polling place, you have lost your vote.

Yes, which is probably at least part of the reason why in Illinois the number of mail-in ballots returned is already almost three times greater than it was at this point in 2016. Clearly, the voters that actually care are paying attention.

[Pants-of-dog]

Personally, I think political parties that are trying to stop people from voting are anti-democratic.

[ingliz]

almost three times greater

True, the number of ballots returned are a tad under three times as many (+187%).

Early voting in Illinois...

In Illinois, all registered voters are mailed a ballot request form. They can also vote early in-person.

Mail-in ballots requested
3,025,240

Mail-in and early in-person ballots returned
1,978,549

But US Postal Service on-time delivery times for First-Class Mail have dropped again - now nearly as bad as the worst period this summer - and, with only a week to go, over 1 million responsible, mostly Democrat, citizens' votes have gone AWOL.

[Doug64]

@ingliz, actually, Illinois might not be the state you want to base your argument on. Checking their laws, they count any mail-in ballot postmarked on Election Day that can take up to two weeks to arrive. So Illinois won't have a full count until on or shortly after November 17.

And getting back to Barrett, this certainly didn't take long:

Amy Coney Barrett hit with impeachment calls over Pennsylvania election case

Anti-Trumpers are calling to impeach Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett less than 24 hours after she was confirmed, paving the way for Democratic presidential nominee Joseph R. Biden to add justices to the high court should he win in November.

Norman Ornstein, a political science scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, and Alexander Heffner, a PBS host, argued Justice Barrett should be “impeached promptly” if she doesn’t recuse herself from weighing in on an election challenge out of Pennsylvania.

“She won’t be convicted off the Court. But this lays the groundwork for adding a 10th justice as first balancing act of Biden and new Congress,” Mr. Heffner tweeted.

He said he endorsed Mr. Ornstein’s proposal to impeach Justice Barrett if she sides with the president and the Republican Party in the Pennsylvania case, saying President Trump suggested he wanted her to tilt the scales in his favor.

The GOP has asked the high court — again — to weigh in on the swing state’s election law, allowing mail-in ballots to be counted up to three days after Election Day.

During Justice Barrett’s confirmation hearing, Democrats on the Judiciary Committee asked her if she would recuse herself from election-related cases, suggesting she could side with Mr. Trump if there’s a contested election next month.

Justice Barrett, though, refused to say if she would not participate in any election dispute.

Progressives have said Mr. Biden will add justices to the high court if he is elected to “pack the court” in order to counter the 6-3 conservative majority. Mr. Biden, though, has refused to say if he would add justices and instead said he would create a committee to study what reforms are needed for the judiciary.

Meanwhile, Justice Barrett was sworn in at the Supreme Court Tuesday morning in a private ceremony. She will participate in the justices’ conference Friday and begin hearing oral arguments next week.

[Stormsmith]

I'm a little surprised,

This Barrett women is the utter antithesis of RBG, which would likely tick off RBG. I'm a tad surprised she hasn't talked God into letting her return.


@Doug64

Anti-Trumpers are calling to impeach Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett less than 24 hours after she was confirmed, paving the way for Democratic presidential nominee Joseph R. Biden to add justices to the high court should he win in November.

Interesting

[ingliz]

Illinois might not be the state you want to base your argument on

Perhaps not but that doesn't negate the gist of my argument - namely, that Republican party policy is to suppress the vote and they are suppressing the vote.

It's been their policy for many years...

“I don’t want everybody to vote. As a matter of fact, our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down.”

— Paul Weyrich, founder of the American Legislative Exchange Council, a consortium of conservative politicians and business groups founded in 1973

Elsewhere...

Wisconsin

360,000 so far unreturned mail-in ballots in a state where the postal service has been hamstrung by delays, some politically inspired.

[Doug64]

Perhaps not but that doesn't negate the gist of my argument - namely, that Republican party policy is to suppress the vote and they are suppressing the vote.

Republican Party policy is to enforce reasonable election laws easily adhered to by voters paying attention. And actually, in this case it does negate your argument. If you are going to argue that voters are being denied a reasonable opportunity to vote due to the extreme tardiness of the USPS, you need to point to a situation where that extreme tardiness exists and voters are still required to get their ballots in by Election Day. And that tardiness does need to be extreme, because politicians and the media have been banging the drums for months over the need get our votes in early to make sure they’d be counted.

It's been their policy for many years...

“I don’t want everybody to vote. As a matter of fact, our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down.”

— Paul Weyrich, founder of the American Legislative Exchange Council, a consortium of conservative politicians and business groups founded in 1973

Sure, I don’t want everyone voting, either—if someone can’t be bothered to pay attention to issues and events, I don’t particularly think they should be casting a vote. Mind, they have the right to cast that vote and I’ll fight any attempt to take that right away from them without just cause—such as serving a sentence, or IMHO extreme ignorance—but neither do I think we should go out of our way to to make things even easier for those that can’t be bothered to make an effort to vote.

Also, think of what Weyrich’s statement meant at that time (whenever it was). Every nation based on democratic institutions is going to have a base that shows up at the polls election after election even when times are dull or the election is a foregone conclusion, because it is their civic duty. These voters are also the ones most likely to pay attention to what’s going on politically and cast an informed vote, because that is also their civic duty. Then there’s a mass of citizens that only vote when things get exciting. These are the voters least likely to be educated on the context, mostly likely to base their votes on slogans and buzzwords—to quote Kipling, “lured by the loudest throat.” So what does it say about Republicans and Democrats, that Democrats do better when circumstances energize those that normally don’t bother?

[ingliz]

reasonable election laws

Reasonable my arse!

Some of the photo ID laws are nothing more than an unconstitutional poll tax levied on Blacks and Latinos - the implicit costs of obtaining the required identification falls disproportionately on the poor, of which a high percentage are the state’s African American and Hispanic voters in violation of the provisions in Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act (1965).

[Pants-of-dog]

Many Republicans think that disenfranchising black, Latino, and poor voters is reasonable.

[Rancid]

Many Republicans think that disenfranchising black, Latino, and poor voters is reasonable.

That's the only way they can win.

People say the polls are always wrong, but what if the polls are right, and it's just that Republicans are good at suppressing votes?

[Pants-of-dog]

Between voter ID laws, interfering with mail, stringent registration requirements, and a host if other tactics, I would not be surprised to find that the number of disenfranchised US citizens is in the millions.