politics

My friend is reporting it.

Thank you for the info! My friend called and you are correct. I edited the post to reflect this information!

Excellent point. I alerted my friend to your post. I don’t have the envelope, they just sent me the picture. They go to bed early but I’ll update you in the morning.

Just to be real, they really don't care about the popular vote. They care about the electoral vote. And even that isn't totally true. They care about the electoral victory. They long ago abandoned democracy; they don't care about having democratically granted power. They just want the power.

A little felony by blacking out a mail-in ballot is literally the least they're ready, willing, and able to do to win.

I continue to be incredibly frustrated by how little democrats have done to counter the fraud, voter suppression, constitutionally dubious laws, takeover of state election boards and volunteers, and armed, volunteer "ballot watchers" the Republicans have deployed.

The republican "ground game" that extends beyond simply GOTV efforts and campaigning and into the wide-ranging and widespread strategies and tactics to literally dismantle and inhibit the democratic process has been met with very little resistance by the democrats. Somehow they're going to be blindsided by this, cry foul retroactively, and then be hamstrung trying to play defense from behind. Wilfully ignorant, short-sighted, and incredibly dangerous idiocy for something so fundamentally important.

The democrats don't have to be unethical because the Republicans are, but they should have been being proactive and serious about countering these attacks on the democratic process. Instead the approach seems to be sticking their fingers firmly in their ears and going "lalalalala."

There's a neat post I came across some time ago showing how few votes can still win the electoral college.

Comment link

Direct link to website

Turns out, though unlikely, it is possible to win the election with less than 25% of votes through the magic of the electoral college and disproportionate representation.

They're the ones always claiming there's fraud. They must know something we don't.

This can happen if the envelopes get damp, but they should send you a replacement. Otherwise, someone could swap out your ballot and then just tape it closed.

Same thing happened to me in Pennsylvania. Will be watching very carefully on the ballot status emails to make sure it's still accepted.

cut it open and tape it back up

I'd call your local TV station or newspaper. Let them investigate and publicize it, and if it's all aboveboard at least it'll be out in the open.

Thank you for the info! My friend called and you are correct. I edited the post to reflect this information!

Thanks for this information. I alerted my friend. I’ll update the post if you are correct.

My friend reported it to the election board, but doesn’t want to report it to the news. I can’t make him and I don’t live in Virginia. If anyone wants to share this, my friend nor I will be opposed.

I don't believe there is, and if there was, it could be used for some really nefarious purposes!

I don’t know if all states have it, but Virginia does have vote history on their voter registration page. It doesn’t show what your vote was, but does show that it was received and counted.

For mail-ins, yeah, you sign it to do the final "I authorize this document to be my vote".

If you don't authorize it, it's not legally your vote.

something you have to remember about the US is that while it's a democracy, all the democratic practices were started in the 1800s, often with explicit intention to negate the votes of some discriminated group

Ughhhhhhhhh. Sorry, but I need to rant.

Those fuckers are so fucking sensationalist. They use the same simple-mined tactics as right-wing propaganda mills. A 20 minute video of theirs could be condensed into 5 without those tactics and actually do far more to push forward their "law based coverage".

I quickly put them in the "not worth the sensationalist propaganda" bucket after watching a handful of their videos