Open Thread

I’m making what is probably a heroic assumption: that the current stupidity over mail ballots will be abandoned for some new nonsense, probably as soon as Trump is no longer around to stoke it. Or, failing that, that California will continue to make widespread use of mail ballots.

My latest experience is from last Tuesday (the California primary). The polling place I worked covers some 5,000 registered voters. I was one of 7 poll workers at that location. We were open for 13 hours (7 AM until 8 PM). In that time, we had about 125 people come in to vote in person, and another perhaps 180 dropping off their mail-in ballots. Whole lot of nothing happening.

It seems pretty clear that we are going to have to rethink how we do Eection Day in-person voting. The county had only 5 locations for Early Voting. Do we cut way back on the number of physical polling lications on Election Day? We have already cut back from one polling place per precinct; now each polling place has from 3-6 precincts, with ballots for each. So that wouldn’t be particularly radical.

Or do we do in-person voting at all? Other places have shifted to 100% mail voting — several states, the entire country of Australia. There don’t seem to have been major problems. Certainly continuing to expend the resources currently required for the tiny number of voters using in-person is not reasonable. It may be that the biggest issue getting in the way is inertia: we’ve always included in-person voting; how could we change???

But I’m wondering if a bigger problem might be the incoming generations of voters who are accustomed to doing everything electronically. Do they demand getting rid of physical ballots altogether? Not to put too fine a face on it, but electronic communications just aren’t as secure, and the audit trails (e.g. for recounts) are less robust. You may assume things are secure. But an amazing variety of supposedly secure systems use cryptographic methods that were long since deprecated because they have known flaws. Plus, quantum computers will break even the best current cryptography. PQC (Post Quantum Cryptography) is being worked on, but is still in its infancy.

“Great and frightening changes.” Count on it.

If you want people to vote “in person” you have to come up with effective incentives. So, being of the lefty sort, here’s my “litmus test” (LOL!):

Voting should be a national holiday (three day weekend). There should be a precinct on every block….we should increase dramatically the membership of the House of Representatives. First past the post rules should be abandoned. End the Senate filibuster. Expand the Court…tax the rich, expropriate the expropriators…one big union, one big strike….wait, wait…stop me before I go over the edge into “unpopular” policy positions.

Voting should be a national holiday (three day weekend). 

At which point voting plummets, as people leave town. Just as they always do for 3 day weekends. If you’re going to make it a holiday, make it mid-week. Ideally Wednesday.

Not to put too fine a face on it, but electronic communications just aren’t as secure, and the audit trails (e.g. for recounts) are less robust.

xkcd has a comic where airplane engineers explain why airplanes are indeed the safest form of travel, and civil engineers explain why it is almost literally impossible for an elevator to fall down the shaft, and software engineers… run screaming from the idea of online voting.

Colorado’s system sometimes loses points when evaluated by experts because a very small number of disabled voters are allowed to submit their ballot online. I don’t know the details, but believe there’s significant effort in qualifying each election and individual one-time credentials are delivered by US mail.

“If you’re going to make it a holiday, make it mid-week. Ideally Wednesday.”

Needz moar “block party” also too.

The three w/o a permanent list are AK, ID, and WY. All three require you to sign up once each year, which covers all elections in that year.

Says something that notoriously ultra-liberal states like Idaho and Wyoming do no excuse mail-in voting.
/s

Says something that notoriously ultra-liberal states like Idaho and Wyoming do no excuse mail-in voting.

Utah went full vote by mail several years ago. Their system is a new contender near the top of the lists of expert ratings for security, accuracy, and ease of use (their Secretary of State and county clerks made multiple trips to Colorado to ask about what worked and what didn’t). The Republican legislature and governor have now passed a bill to roll that back over a period of years. As far as they rolled it was a permanent no-excuse mail ballot list starting by 2029. I understand that surveys suggested if they made mail ballots any harder than that, there would be a wholesale turnover in the ranks of the legislators.

This is heartbreaking. Nothing good has come of this and “the weak suffer what they must” – as usual.

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/07/world/middleeast/iranians-despair-war-economy-inflation.html?unlocked_article_code=1.oVA.pucr.G9dfcBeCvZR9&smid=url-share

The war on Iran and in the Middle East, the situation regarding American electoral procedures, it’s all bad and depressing news. So to add to the misery, and as a warning to anyone who still needs one, here is a piece from June’s Atlantic on misogyny on the right:

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/2026/06/conservative-masculinism-misogyny/686939/?gift=cx0iluuWx4Cg7JjlT8ugCWbHysHysdvdIZizTv3MLqw&utm_source=copy-link&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=share

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/crime/ex-dominion-employee-s-lawsuit-got-so-heated-a-judge-had-to-order-everyone-not-to-bring-any-type-of-weapon-to-depositions/ar-AA24Z444?ocid=winp2fptaskbarhover&cvid=f5cfc7c7317547bd9230fe08296976b4&ei=50

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/the-federal-agency-overseeing-voting-security-is-about-to-get-gutted-by-republicans/ar-AA24LGCR?ocid=msedgdhp&pc=HCTS&cvid=6a2153755c7747df9d771560d16d922e&ei=191

https://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/raffensperger-who-wouldnt-steal-election-for-trump-loses-governor-race-to-two-election-denialists?utm_source=brevo&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Top%20stories%2005202026

https://x.com/danpfeiffer/status/1293895907079909376

Political strategist Dick Morris did make this claim, defending an administration executive order routing the oversight of mail-in ballots through the U.S. Postal Service as a “brilliant move.” [1, 2]
His argument regarding this strategy centers on the following points:

• Centralized Authority: Morris contends that the President has absolute power over the U.S. Postal Service, which allows the administration to police mail-in voting via internal postal rules rather than relying on state-by-state legislation. [1]
• Increased Oversight: He argues this route can fundamentally change election security and counter potential irregularities by ensuring stricter control and transparency. [1]

Critics, however, argue that operational changes at the postal service and the injection of political oversight could undermine confidence in fair and timely mail delivery. [1, 2]

For further context and perspectives on both sides of the issue, you can explore discussions and reactions directly on Facebook or follow the evolving debate across various political platforms. [1]

Watch this manufactured crisis get stirred up to come to a head weeks before the election:

https://www.foxbusiness.com/economy/usps-halts-pension-contributions-warning-looming-cash-crisis

The MAGA Christian conservative republican movement is choosing BULLETS over BALLOTS. Only two letters separate the two in American electoral history. It’s going to be very easy going forward to confuse the two.

This comes just in time for genocidal conservatives to steal the election and enforce the corrupt, crooked outcome:

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/trump-s-sweeping-gun-rule-rollback-sparks-fierce-debate/ss-AA24XWw3?ocid=msedgdhp&pc=HCTS&cvid=6a24091a250d4a61aa6b69c43ab8d867&ei=353

And for those here and lurking who believe this will not end in savage violence, we’re already there:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FiXb90S_dZ8

In every election cycle, the despicable murderous conservative movement’s candidates run ads of them shooting off guns to pander to the vermin in the Republican Party.

They aren’t shooting at squirrels.

They are trying to kill me.

Access to polling stations to be made as easy as practicable, with a limit – 30 minutes say – on time spend waiting to vote, and polling stations situated with facilitating voting as the main criterion.

and

Voting by mail to be allowed. States may choose for themselves the deadline for posting or receiving these votes.

I’ve probably written this before — it’s a hot button for me — one of the reasons western states have been moving to vote by mail for the last 30 years is the greatly increasing cost and other difficulties of achieving the first item here in an area with a very rapidly growing population. Colorado found it was getting very difficult to find suitable venues, to continue buying (and storing) more and more equipment for those venues, and to staff them. “My” precinct location moved every election, often by miles.

Increasingly common in vote by mail western states is the vote center model. A small number of locations where in-person voting can be done, aimed at edge cases: mail ballots lost at the last minute, same day registration, those sorts of thing. “I prefer to cast my vote in person” draws the warning, “It may be time-consuming for you to get to a vote center and then wait. If you want it to be easy, well, we send you a mail ballot.” For the primaries this month, my county of 380,000 people and 2,600 square miles will have three vote center where you can vote in person. For the general election when higher turnout is expected, a couple more will be added.

I urged my Democratic Senators to vote against the bills named for John Lewis when the Dems held Congress because of language like that in the second item. Not “to be allowed.” Vote by mail is the current gold standard for security, accuracy, and ease of use. The legal language has to make vote by mail a first-class option (in the way that’s used in programming languages). Nor can the language require states to do both vote by mail and precincts on a scale where either could handle the entire election.

Interestingly, the first thing that happened to the John Lewis bill, when Biden got elected and there was at least a chance the bill might actually be passed and signed, was that it got pulled from the floor calendar and sent back to committee. Every appearance of the term “precinct” was replaced by “vote center.” Every appearance of the term “absentee ballot” was replaced by “mail ballot”. It wasn’t enough, but the East Coast/Midwestern sponsors had suddenly discovered western Blue states had been building a new, better system and some of their representatives weren’t going to vote to backwards.

I’ve had far too many union grievances where a “should” in place of a “shall” effectively negated the negotiated protections.

I spent an unpleasant couple of years where my job included providing feedback to and interpretations of a couple of developing international telecommunications standards. Should. Shall. May. Must. OTOH, years later when I worked for the state legislature, more experienced staff remarked favorably about my fixation on getting should/shall correct.

Warning: abrupt change of topic

As you have probably heard Trump has plans for a Triumphal Arch. (Referred to variously as the Albert Speer Memorial Arch, the Jeffrey Epstein Memorial Arch, etc.). You can get a taste of what it looks like here
https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:yhwb4flopeavzkwbybtojo2s/post/3mnpxze4i2c2g

The good news is, the National Park Service is taking public comments on the plan. https://parkplanning.nps.gov/document.cfm?parkID=186&projectID=136973&documentID=151576

I doubt even a flood of negative comments will stop it. But failing to make negative comments can make it look like you approve. Think “Silence gives consent” — so if you don’t consent, don’t keep silent. You have until June 15 to comment.

Be aware that anyone who posts negative comments to the Park Service regarding the grotesque Nazi arch that cock blocks Abraham Lincoln will be subjected, with their families, to harassment from the IRS, every fascist federal law enforcement agency, and will be disallowed from entering National Parks in perpetuity.

Death threats will ensue from the fascist MAGA army who are alerted by the White House at every turn to silence their enemies.

I had a lengthy comment disappear from earlier today. Was it too many links or too much of me?