Can we agree that neither party trusts the voting system(s)?

[Chuck Naill]

I am reminded that during the pandemic, many on the right felt the medical professionals were not reliable sources of information. It seems, and I hope so, that Anthony Fauci is no longer in the news. Perhaps he can relax and live out the rest of his life without threats on his life.

[TSherbs]

Kari Lake won a case! Being sent back to lower court. We'll see what happens.

[Chuck Naill]

Wow!!

[Chuck Naill]

Well, I have now read the ruling. Looks like lawyers having fun.

[TSherbs]

This isn't so much about the "voting system," but it is about disinformation campaigns that become criminal to try to suppress voting in certain areas (in this case, Florida, mostly):

Guilty: Conspiracy to defraud voters: https://www.politico.com/news/2023/0...cheme-00090042

[Chuck Naill]

I’m being made aware of republicans efforts to limit college students from easy access to voting because they are more apt to be liberally minded.

[TSherbs]

I’m being made aware of republicans efforts to limit college students from easy access to voting because they are more apt to be liberally minded.

This was attempted in New Hampshire (next to me), but the effort failed. The New Hampshire GOP was trying all it could to move those younger voters out of the state.

[TSherbs]

Mike Lindell just got fact-checked to the tune of $5,000,000. He's such a huckster.

https://www.cnn.com/2023/04/20/polit...ion/index.html

[Chip]

If you can't win fair and square, change the rules.

North Carolina Gerrymander Ruling Reflects Politicization of Judiciary Nationally

When it had a Democratic majority last year, the North Carolina Supreme Court voided the state’s legislative and congressional maps as illegal gerrymanders. Now the court has a Republican majority, and says the opposite.

Michael Wines
April 28, 2023

Last year, Democratic justices on the North Carolina Supreme Court ruled that maps of the state’s legislative and congressional districts drawn to give Republicans lopsided majorities were illegal gerrymanders. On Friday, the same court led by a newly elected Republican majority looked at the same facts, reversed itself and said it had no authority to act.

The practical effect is to enable the Republican-controlled General Assembly to scrap the court-ordered State House, Senate and congressional district boundaries that were used in elections last November, and draw new maps skewed in Republicans’ favor for elections in 2024. The 5-to-2 ruling fell along party lines, reflecting the takeover of the court by Republican justices in partisan elections last November.

The decision has major implications not just for the state legislature, where the G.O.P. is barely clinging to the supermajority status that makes its decisions veto-proof, but for the U.S. House, where a new North Carolina map could add at least three Republican seats in 2024 to what is now a razor-thin Republican majority. Overturning such a recent ruling by the court was a highly unusual move, particularly on a pivotal constitutional issue in which none of the facts had changed.

The North Carolina case mirrors a national trend in which states that elect their judges — Ohio, Kentucky, Kansas, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and others — have seen races for their high court seats turned into multimillion-dollar political battles, and their justices’ rulings viewed through a deeply partisan lens.
Continue reading the main story

Such political jockeying once was limited mostly to confirmation fights over seats on the U.S. Supreme Court. But as the nation’s partisan divide has deepened, and the federal courts have offloaded questions about issues like abortion and affirmative action to the states, choosing who will decide state legal battles has increasingly become an openly political fight.

The new Republican majority of justices said the North Carolina Supreme Court had no authority to strike down partisan maps that the General Assembly had drawn. “Our constitution expressly assigns the redistricting authority to the General Assembly subject to explicit limitations in the text,” Chief Justice Paul Newby wrote for the majority. “Were this court to create such a limitation, there is no judicially discoverable or manageable standard for adjudicating such claims.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/28/u...e=articleShare

[TSherbs]

Gerrymandering is a cynical, ugly power ploy. Gross.

[Chip]

Gerrymandering is a cynical, ugly power ploy. Gross.

Computers have made it way easier. I took some digital cartography courses in which we learned to fiddle electoral maps for a desired result.

[TSherbs]

Gerrymandering is a cynical, ugly power ploy. Gross.

Computers have made it way easier. I took some digital cartography courses in which we learned to fiddle electoral maps for a desired result.

No doubt both parties have a cadre of wonks doing the same.

The balkanization of America continues.

[dneal]

Nearly half of Democrats think there was cheating in 2020.

The thesis stands.

IMG_0100.jpeg

[Chip]

Your definition of cheating is one-sided. Did you consider the possibility that quite a few people think that cheating (such as gerrymandering) by Republicans, and the effect of that slave-era artifact, the electoral college, handed Trump more votes and states than he deserved?

Real, as opposed to imaginary, cheating.

[dneal]

My definition? It’s a Rasmussen poll.

One sided? They include both sides, and independents.

Real or imagined is irrelevant to what people think or believe. Trust is based on belief. The Rasmussen poll is a survey of belief.

The thesis stands, and your speed reading seems even worse today. You appear like an F1 driver who brags about their speed, but crashes in turn 1.

[TSherbs]

Kari Lake has a court date on one count:
https://www.newsweek.com/kari-lake-h...-court-1800530

[dneal]

I thought these Dominion systems were 100% safe and secure, and the ‘experts’ who pointed out problems were MAGA kooks.

CNN: Georgia won’t update vulnerable Dominion software until after 2024 election

Washington
CNN
—
Georgia election officials have been aware of existing vulnerabilities in the state’s voting software for more than two years but continue to insist the system is safe and won’t be updated until after 2024, according to a report that was unsealed this week as part of a controversial court case in Georgia.

The report’s findings focus on weaknesses in software for certain Dominion Voting machines. Those weaknesses were previously verified by federal cybersecurity officials, who urged election officials across the country to update their systems.

A lawyer for Georgia’s top election official, Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, recently told a federal court that officials would forgo installing Dominion’s security patches until after the 2024 presidential election.

[Chip]

Wouldn't surprise me that they don't want to reprogram voting machines pre-election because they worry about MAGA kooks (led by Trump) using surreptitious videos and such to claim a rigged process.

[dneal]

Elizabeth Warren must secretly be a MAGA person. She’s been bitching about election integrity since she got on the public stage.

From her site:

Our elections should be as secure as Fort Knox. But instead, they’re less secure than your Amazon account. State and local officials take their jobs seriously, but they often don’t have the resources to secure their elections. Even then, it’s hard for local officials to defend against attacks from foreign governments. In the 2016 election, the Russian government tried to infiltrate at least 39 state election systems and at least one election equipment company. They tried to spear-phish more than 100 local election officials’ email accounts. They even successfully broke into several voter registration databases.

The harsh truth is that our elections are extremely vulnerable to attack: Forty-two states use voter registration databases that are more than a decade old. Laughably, in 2019, some still use Windows 2000 and Windows XP. Twelve states still use paperless machines, meaning there’s no paper trail to verify vote counts. Some states don’t require post-election audits. And ten states don’t train election officials to deal with cybersecurity threats. This is a national security threat, and three years after a hostile foreign power literally attacked our democracy, we’ve done far too little to address it.

[TSherbs]

Judge strikes down To Florida voting restrictions:

https://www.politico.com/news/2023/0...orida-00104601