Mailed ballots that arrive on time but in envelopes without dates handwritten by Pennsylvania voters should be counted, a federal judge ruled Tuesday in a case that’s likely to end up before the U.S. Supreme Court.
The ruling by U.S. District Judge Susan Paradise Baxter is expected to be appealed to the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals before it ultimately reaches the high court, whose final word on what are often referred to as “undated ballots” may help determine the outcome of the 2024 presidential race and other key upcoming elections in the swing state.
Republicans will take all measures possible to reduce the number of votes, because they are more likely to lose when people vote. It’s that simple.
If you look through the material provided to people assigned to manually tally votes, they make it very clear that as long as the intent of the voter is clearly indicated (eg, they filled in one bubble, then drew an X through it, filled in another bubble and circled it and wrote the word THIS with an arrow pointing to it, you’re supposed to count the THIS vote rather than throw it away as a spoiled ballot.
Here, the postmark is a sufficient indicator that the ballot was submitted on time.
Republicans will take all measures possible to reduce the number of votes, because they are more likely to lose when people vote. It’s that simple.
How is it that simple, exactly?
Logically, it doesn’t make sense. That’s not how statistics work. Increasing sample size at that scale does effectively nothing whatsoever.
Anecdotally it doesn’t make sense at all. I’m reasonably sure in an anecdotal sense that it’s the exact opposite… We live in a county of 3k people. The polls are within 20 miles of exactly 240 of them. It ain’t exactly convenient to vote in rural areas. If you made voting magical and 100% mandatory, you’re gonna get a massive bump in rural votes, and guess where those votes will go. The “leave me alone” type is more likely to be a Republican vote, and the “activist” types are more likely to vote Democrat. It all heavily suggests that what you’re saying is a just an incredibly well-established and accepted myth.
If you flip to the dark side with that logic, it defies the countering myth just as readily. The myth that voter fraud favors Democrats… I’d assume fraud is probably a hell of a lot easier in rural areas. I could, personally, as an example, on election day, give you a by name list of dozens of people who won’t go to the county office to vote. It’s too far, they work 40 miles away in the opposite direction, they got 12 hour shifts with an hour commute on each end and there’s just no way in hell they’re gonna double that commute. An unscrupulous individual in a rural setting has far more ability to fudge some votes, and guess what those votes will be… Those votes would also be more countable. It won’t be dead uncles and aunts, it’ll be actual registered voters.
I’m not buying it, not from either side… I believe what you’re saying is in fact the bona fide motivation, for both sides, but I think the assumptions behind it are total vaporware. They’ve been sold a bill of goods, and they’re making continued payments on it…
I’m going to try to match your communication style here.
As the saying goes, if you were right, I would agree with you. I’ve been using mathematics professionally for a few decades now, particularly in the analysis of information propagation of human behavior and that sort of thing.
First of all it only doesn’t “logically make sense” if the sample you’re pulling is a random sample. It isn’t. When you disadvantage voters in order to suppress the vote, you don’t disadvantage them all equally. You leave polls open in rural districts and consolidate them in urban ones. You require ID cards because it’s harder for some people to get them than others. I suspect you’ve actually never studied statistics.
It has been demonstrated statistically and repeatedly that actions that reduce voter turnout - off year elections, ID cards, long lines - preferentially discriminate against Democratic candidates by disadvantaging Democratic voters. It is why they work to limit early voting and vote by mail. If your made-up reasoning about rural voters was at all correct, republicans would be the ones pushing for longer voting windows and mail in voting. They’re not. It is time to revisit your hypothesis in the face of what actually happens in the real world.
Here’s an article, and here’s the pull quote for you:
“In fairness to the Republicans, voter suppression has a long history in the United States that is not located in one party, but it’s located in one ideology, and that ideology is white supremacy,” Mitchell continued. “So for much of the post-Reconstruction period, until say 1970 or 1980 or so, that was either primarily the Democratic party – think of the old Dixiecratic south – or in both parties.
“It is only in the last 40ish years that it has become a Republican issue.”
Voter suppression targets minority voters, who for the past half century or so have been primarily Democrats. It’s why republicans have challenged and overturned key provisions of the Voting Rights Act. It’s why they try to cast doubt on the integrity of the vote without providing any evidence.
Here’s a Wikipedia reference. Here’s one from Rolling Stone.
Or just take a look for yourself about which party is trying to pass bills that reduce turnout, permit party-driven redistricting, and reduce the ways in which votes can be cast.
One of my favorite quotes is by physicist Wolfgang Pauli “This isn’t right. It’s not even wrong.” It’s used for ideas that are so ludicrous that they actually fall outside the realm of comprehension. Your idea doesn’t fall into that category. It’s simply wrong.
I think a better way to look at this is Republicans are obviously doing everything they can to make elections seem untrustworthy or irrelevant.
Among supporters, this means they won’t oppose antidemocratic measures like making sure the majority of your county don’t have a convenient polling place (I, of course, don’t know this is the case, it’s an example).
Among detractors, it encourages a sense of hopelessness in areas that are red or starting to turning red to purple.
This makes it easier to overturn or manipulate elections without popular opposition.
Every single time you supress a legitimate vote you weaken the idea that every vote counts.
If the ballot arrived on time, why should it matter what date is hand-written on it? Our state doesn’t even require that, just a signature to determine that the person voting is the person registered.
Because then Republicans can justify throwing it out if it doesn’t favor them. It doesn’t have to make sense as long as they can have it declared legal.
That’s the thing though… the date is on the outside of the envelope. They would be discarding ballots blindly. Makes no sense.
They aren’t really discarding them blindly though. There’s currently a preference among democrats to use mail in voting compared to Republicans. It used to be the other way around, but many Republicans, Trump especially, continue to tell their followers not to use mail in voting. So yes some of the votes they throw out will be republican votes, but more will be democratic. So throwing them all out throws out more democratic votes than Republicans and helps them. Similarly in states where democrats are making more use of early in person or drop off voting, republicans are trying to restrict those methods.
Republicans are constantly trying to implement “fair” rules that disenfranchise many voters but are blatantly crafted to proportionally decrease democratic votes more than Republican ones. Another good example is Texas’s ridiculous rule of one ballot drop off box per county. Meaning the small rural counties that vote heavily republican get one drop box, but there’s less people so this isn’t too much of a problem. Meanwhile, heavily democratic Harris County (containing Houston) with 4.8 million people, more than a lot of entire states, is only allowed one single ballot drop off box too. I think you can see how this “fair” rule that applies to everyone is crafted to hurt democratic voters more, like all the republican voter suppression efforts. They look for any discrepancy between how republicans and democrats access voting, and then pounce on those.
You have to love how the SCOTUS GOP branch sees no problem with this because they don’t see it as a violation of the Voting Rights Act. They miss, however, whether this requirement serves any actual purpose other than to create an artificial barrier to participation.
But…but…but…sTaTeS rIgHtS!
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Mailed ballots that arrive on time but in envelopes without dates handwritten by Pennsylvania voters should be counted, a federal judge ruled Tuesday in a case that’s likely to end up before the U.S. Supreme Court.
The plaintiffs in this pair of lawsuits — including the Pennsylvania State Conference of the NAACP and the Democratic campaign committees for U.S. House of Representatives and Senate candidates — argue that ballots in return envelopes without any handwritten date or with an incorrect one should not be disqualified from the 2022 midterm elections and future races in Pennsylvania.
While those handwritten dates are required by Pennsylvania state law, they are not used to confirm whether a person is allowed to vote.
Counties have included ballots arriving in undated or misdated return envelopes in final vote tallies for past elections.
The Republican National Committee and other GOP groups have joined the case in opposition to counting ballots without handwritten dates or those that are misdated.
Three of the high court’s conservative justices — Justices Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch — have indicated that they’re not convinced that disqualifying ballots for missing handwritten dates violates the Civil Rights Act.
The original article contains 353 words, the summary contains 196 words. Saved 44%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
