#election shenanigans

[christinaroseandrews]

Set in Sussex and centered around the parliamentary election season. Sweet Disorder features a heroine, Phoebe, who is poor, plump, widowed, and in possession of her father’s votes. Except being a woman she can’t cast them but any many she marries can. And her votes are so very necessary in a very tight election. Welcome to the oddness of English elections in the Regency Period Enter Nick Dymond, Brother to the Whig candidate. He’s there to convince Phoebe to marry a man who will vote for his brother. Except the longer he gets to know her, the more he wants her for himself. That’s a problem because his family will never approve. After all, he’s the son of a noble, and she is the widow of a newspaper printer. Not to mention he’s got his own baggage, PTSD and a very severe wound from the peninsula wars, which left him with a limp.

As for Phoebe, she doesn’t particularly want to get married. She’s been married before and it didn’t turn out well. She’s doing just fine selling stories to the newspapers and living in the tiny and untidy rooms in a boarding house. But when her family needs her, she puts her own happiness on the line and agrees to a marriage of convenience. The only problem is who will she choose?

The Tory Candidate? The Whig Candidate? Or herself?

I like the story. I really liked Phoebe and Nick. Their reasonings and rationales made sense. Like there is a giant/huge class issue and then there’s the fact that they’re not supposed to be falling in love with each other. I especially liked that neither one was seen as less or by the other. But that things like her poverty, her weight, his wealth, and his disability weren’t overlooked and forgotten in the midst of the love must conquer all. Then there’s the families and their drama. So much drama.

Even with the drama, this isn’t your typical Regency Romance.  First off, there aren’t any balls. Or dastardly Duke’s. Or gaming establishments. And I loved that. It’s so rare to have a romance between lower class people. Every day people. Even small town people. While Nick came from the gentry, he’s a younger son and his experience as a soldier had colored his sensibilities more. He wasn’t afraid to get his hands dirty. And I like that.

This story takes “slow burn” seriously. Very seriously. Which might be off-putting for some people, but when I read it I was in the mood for slow. The plots and twists are well telegraphed, and the book takes time to set the stage and introduce all the players. And all of the players are important. I also liked that Phoebe’s other suitors were all viable, they weren’t horrid for the sake of being horrid. I even liked them as characters and potential romantic heroes. They just weren’t the romantic hero that Phoebe wanted. All of the characters were well rounded, And I really liked that.

Trigger warnings Because those matter, period appropriate sexism, discussion of miscarriage, discussion of depression & PTSD, mild BDSM, period appropriate ableism, and parental neglect/emotional abuse. That being said all of the triggering Content is handled well as I would expect from Rose Lerner (which if you’re looking to support minority authors Rose Lerner is Jewish). Basically this was an adorable slow burn featuring every day people in Regency England. If you’re a fan of Austen, this would likely be up your alley. As it is, I’m happy to give it. Five stars.

If this is your jam, you can get it here.

If you like these kind of honest reviews, please consider supporting us here!

[reynard61]

The Dobbs of Voting Rights

“Kamala Harris is the only patriotic choice for president,” writes the NYT editorial board as it enumerates the dangers of another Donald Tr

[reynard61]

RFK Jr's chaos campaign to support Trump

He says he doesn't want to be a spoiler, but he's spoiling pretty hard.

[jacarandasdays]

I guess Facebook isn’t complete trash after all 🤷🏽‍♀️

[crystalinn]

I fucking hate this.

(blacklist “election shenanigans” to keep this shit off your dash)

[troutoforder]

so are we going to talk about how the green party is trying to fuck us over yet again or what

Wisconsin Supreme Court temporarily blocks absentee ballots from being mailed a week before deadline

https://www.cnn.com/2020/09/10/politics/wisconsin-supreme-court-absentee-ballots-green-party-lawsuit/index.html

The Wisconsin Supreme Court told election officials across the state on Thursday -- a week before the deadline to mail ballots -- that they can't mail out absentee ballots until the court decides whether to add the Green Party's presidential ticket to the ballot.

The September 17 deadline for when the 1,850 municipal clerks need to mail out absentee ballots to Wisconsin voters who asked for one is set in state law.

[drumpfwatch]

The Process of Election Rigging

Originally, I was going to start this post off by assuring everyone I don’t actually think the election was rigged. That while I think it’s stupid unlikely, if it turned out the Russians or somebody else had bent the votes I would not be surprised. However, things have since changed. To be sure, I’m not a conspiracy theorist, and I almost don’t want this to be true because of what it would mean for our system and international politics. But there is no denying that at least some weird things may have happened when you have computer scientists looking at data and saying “Y’know, this is fishy.” Those are details I will get into at some other point, of course, but I won’t deny that we have something worth looking in to - even if it does turn out to be nothing.

Another disclaimer: I feel like if this election was rigged, it wasn’t Trump who lost the election by 2 millions votes that did it. The Presidick-Elect isn’t savvy or stupid enough to do that, and I honestly don‘t think he actually wanted to be the President. So if this election was altered, it almost certainly wasn’t by him.

But, let’s play pretend. Let’s pretend the election was rigged. And I’m not just talking about the Voter laws that made it harder for black people who usually vote Democratic to vote. We know that’s true. Or the Electoral College - we know that’s true too. No, I’m talking something bigger.

What if the election was hacked? What if Russia was responsible? What if Hillary Clinton should have won the election, but didn’t? How would they do it? Why? And, most importantly, what happens next?

First, the how. There are a few possibilities - in our Pretend Scenario we’re going for the classic “Commies did it!” but there are other possibilities. The evidence seems to point to someone tampering with the electronic voting machines, and it would indeed be much easier for American technicians with Trump leanings thinking “The election is rigged so I’ll rig it right back!” to alter it, especially with the machines not being connected to the internet while the election was going on. However, we’re getting international on this, so it’s the Russians. They couldn’t hack the machines while the election was ongoing from Russia, so they would have needed to either get an agent over here who works on the machines to alter the data on the programmable thumb drives used to provide the coding for the vote machines. They could also access a computer whose duty was to program those thump-drives and tweak it the voting program from there. Both of these options are difficult, but not impossible. After the machine was hacked, all they’d have to do is set every 5th or so Clinton vote to a Trump Vote - this would let Trump get more votes without letting him look like he won by an impossible margin.

So, what then, in our world of pretend? The answer, constitutionally speaking is “we have no fucking idea.” There’s nothing in the constitution, at least that I’ve read, that talks about a frauded vote. I mean, sure there IS something that talks about what happens to people who fraud the vote, but those people are supposed to be citizens. There’s no precedent for what happens when another country interferes with our election. There’s also no precedent for what would happen should the election results change. To be fair, I’m not a legal scholar and I would immediately differ to someone who knew better then me on this matter, but in my own research, there’s nothing there about what happens if the election somehow went to who it didn’t belong. The closest we have is the the Gore/Bush Election, where the Supreme Court ostensibly decided there wasn’t any chicanery going on - regardless of whether or not their actually was. And believe you me, that is a whole other kettle of fish.

And this is important! In our imaginary land, Clinton lost because of the involvement of the Russians. An investigation can take a long time - longer then a recount - and our country can’t go without a leader. So what we do now will set the precedent for what will happen when this happens in the future. And what could we possibly do? Maybe hold off on swearing anyone in until the matter is cleared up and let Obama keep running the country? Sounds good, but what if the investigation doesn’t find anything until after Trump is sworn in? Or worse, what if it doesn’t really start until after words? Then there’s no reason to prevent his swearing in and, say, 6 months into his presidency his power will be called into question.

Let’s avoid talking about the trouble that could happen by calling a man as short tempered and stupid as Donald Trump (who still lost the vote by 2 million people) a rigger. All the people who will get angry that their candidate lost. Let’s just focus on what would happen politically.

Frankly, what Hillary does is up in the air here too. Just think about it. If Hillary accepts the election is rigged, then she’s causing our very election system to get called into question. And she can’t just pretend it wasn’t the Russians if it was - people will want to know why and when it’s discovered people will look into it. Will she call it out as the Russians, or will she cover it up? Will she accept that this is the reality? If she decides not to, she’ll be setting a precedent that will harm elections for years to come. If she decides to, she’ll be starting a huge problem both locally and internationally. The same applies to the Supreme Court, who will undoubtedly have a say in this as well.

It’ll make for intense political waters. Even if she doesn’t accept the presidency - setting a precedent that the loser abdicates even if they weren’t really the loser - the question in the back of everyone’s heads will be there. How could we let this happen? Tensions between Russia and America will rise. The pale specter of nuclear war always hangs over those moments - and if Hillary doesn’t take the wheel, we’ll be left with Donald Trump piloting the ship of state in those waters. A man who has already made 12 tweets about how he’s so mad we’re checking the election will be forced to interact with the ones who did it.

Point is, this is some dangerous stuff if it really is happening. And what happens in response will set some complex precedents.

[drumpfwatch]

Time To Fix The Electoral College

So, it’s about a week after the election, and I have finally had time to screw my head on straight. We now know Hillary Clinton leads Donald Trump in the vote by a million, but she is still losing the Presidency because Donald Trump the Electoral College.

Yes, I probably sound like a whiny liberal baby. I’ll freely admit, I am legitimately upset about this and think it’s unfair. This recent election is the 5th time US History where the Electoral College hasn’t elected the person chosen by popular vote, and each and every time it’s been a Democrat losing to a Republican - with the exception of John Quincy Adams, whose situation was different enough that I don’t consider it to really count, what with the entire electoral process being different. The Democrats also didn’t exist as they do today and the Republicans didn’t exist at all. But you know what? I have every right to be pissed off about this because logically, the Electoral College just doesn’t make any sense anyway. I’ve always felt this system was bad, but this most recent election has made the votes of, at the time of writing, 1.4 million people unheard. This is the largest margin a president has ever won an election by, and still lost. And this time, the consequences are not just a horrible Bush Presidency. They’re the election of a man whose political lack of knowledge and experience has had him speak like a fascist and be praised by fascists. And if he starts acting like one in the White House...

    So, what’s the deal? A lot of non-Americans don’t really understand the system and it’s difficult to explain. It has to do with States Rights, a concept that exists largely because America used to be a series of separate colonies, if you remember. When they incorporated into a single nation, each one wanted to keep parts of what made it unique. And, partly to do that, partly as a way to make counting votes simple in an era when mass communication and digital calculations were unheard of concepts, and as part way to make sure the ignorant masses didn’t elect a fucking moron to the presidency, the Electoral College was created. Regardless of whether or not this was a good idea at the time, after today I think it is safe to say it isn't a good idea anymore.

    The idea behind the electoral college is that a state has a different number of people, but they all think similarly. So that the major population centers of America - New York, Texas, California, etc. - don’t overwhelm the voices of the smaller areas. That every state should be counted equally and focused on equally in an election.

    Now, at first, the system may not seem so ridiculous. It works - or indeed doesn’t - by weighing votes based on the population density of a state. So, in New York, where there’s the great blue bastion of New York City, where people are largely liberal and there are a lot of them, their votes are counted as worth less than those in, say, Wyoming. In fact, while Wyoming only has 3 Electoral Votes to New York’s 29, New York has a great deal more people, meaning each of those votes speak for 519,075 New Yorkers but each of Wyoming’s votes counts for 142,741 people (1). Wyoming, then, has the most voting power of any state in the union because each one of its votes carries the weight of more people. In and of itself, that doesn’t sound too too bad, but there’s an assumption being made here that we’ll get to later, and the major problem is one really stupid bullshit thing.

See, once the popular vote comes in, whoever got the most then receives every single one of all the state's votes. So New York’s 29 votes don’t speak for 1/29th of the New York voter base, they speak for all 15,053,175 New Yorkers, rounded over. As a New Yorker myself, I can flat out tell you that a surprising amount of New York is actually red - with New York City, Buffalo and Albany basically being big blue patches in the midst of an otherwise red sea. A lot of people outside those areas have conservative and even Alt-Right ideologies. They just get routinely ignored by America as a whole because every single one of their votes in the Presidential Election is flat out ignored - which is why a good deal of them either don’t bother voting or do so really for local elections or out of spite.

So we basically have this jerry-rigged system that ignores everybody who didn’t vote with the majority of the state. Because apparently if you live in a Blue State you can’t even possibly think Red - and vice versa, of course. In fact, I can actually show you there are plenty of counties that voted for Trump over all in New York City (2). But not a single one of their votes counted at the end because they are apparently a part of the New York hivemind. That’s how, even though America voted for Hillary Clinton, we’re getting Donald Trump. The Loser won.

But it’s even worse than that! The Electoral College isn’t even capable of doing what it was designed to do. It is supposed to bring everyone into play, by making every single state count, but it’s done the exact opposite of that - all it’s done is changed which states matter! Now, argue this all you want, but Presidential candidates only have a certain amount of resources on which to campaign, and if it’s not expedient or useful to campaign there, there’s no point in doing it. Not only does this mean that Democratic Presidents don’t campaign in New York and and Republican President don’t campaign in Texas, but it means that, guess what, only certain states matter! Instead of the most populous states, it’s the Swing States - states where the electorate is divided enough that they could go to either candidates. Florida in particular is a sweet spot because it has a lot of Electoral Votes and is a fairly conflicted state. So it hasn’t made the election a 50 State race, it’s just shuffled which states matter!

By the way, if you’re really concerned with each state having an equal voice in the country, we sort of have Congress and the House for that. In the Senate, every state has two people to speak for it and the House of Representatives is divvied up based on population.

And all of this, I remind you, is ignoring the most fundamental and basic fact that this process removes the simple and sacred democratic standard of “one person, one vote.” The vote of a Wyomingite is worth nearly 5 times my own, and my vote carries the least weight of any state in the union.

So, we’ve established that there’s a problem, but how do we fix it? The short answer is I don’t exactly have the best idea how. Getting rid of it would be too hard and honestly I’m not even sure it’s a better idea then reforming it. But reforming it is even more complicated, because every idea I have has its own problems. For instance, one idea was to make the votes of the Electoral College directly proportional to the votes of the people, so that it truly is a representation of, say, 1/29th of New York State or Florida. But that comes with its own problems - the least of which is that the rounding. Does the vote that doesn’t pan out perfectly go to the winner of that fraction of the state, or does it go to the person who won the state over all? And that basically makes the Electoral College useless. With one tiny little exception.

See, remember I said there was one other thing the Electoral College was made for: So that the intelligent people could keep the idiots from voting in another idiot. Now, I’m not going to go into the complexities of intellectual privilege tonight. Suffice it to say, in principle I can entirely agree with the fact that those with intimate knowledge of say, law, politics, and history should have more say in how politics works then some schmuck who dropped out of grammar school. However, I also understand that other things, such as race and class, play intimately into that and that uneducated people themselves could potentially have unique experiences that deserve a representation - especially in regards to how to fix the fact that, say, not everyone in this country is literate. But regardless of all of that, the Electoral College was in part created to stop stupid people from doing stupid things. And make no mistake here, I’m using the Men in Black definition of stupid: A person is smart, but people are dumb, dangerous, panicky animals and you know it. History proves time and again that it’s all too easy for a well spoken strong man to manipulate hatred and fear to guide an already simmering populace into terrible situations. But something can be done.

In most states, there’s no law saying that the Electoral College voters have to vote for the majority candidate of their state. Just that it’s who they’re supposed to vote for. The Electoral College could, in an unprecedented move, all decide to vote for Hillary - or at least a lot of them could. 39 of them. If 39 of the delegates not legally bound to vote for Trump voted for Hillary, she could win the election. It isn’t decided until they vote on the 19th of December. It’s an unprecedented and dramatic move, but this entire election has been made of it.

So, to any members of the Electoral College who may be reading this: vote for Hillary Clinton. Put the woman America actually voted for in office. You’ve seen the kind of people Trump wants to put on as cabinet members, you’ve heard the things his people have talked about. He’s a dangerous idiot who’s either too racist to be allowed to run this country or to obsessed with money to run it properly. I know I just spent the past 2 pages shitting all over you, but right now you are the only tool we have to stop Donald Trump Who Lost The Election by Over a Million Votes. Otherwise, the next 4 years are going to be a nightmare. Help us, Electoral College. You are our only hope.

For those of you who are not in the College, you can sign this petition to help spread the word. You can also contact any of Electors directly and ask them to do the same.

WORK CITED:

Electoral College Vote Weight: http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/map_of_the_week/2012/11/presidential_election_a_map_showing_the_vote_power_of_all_50_states.html

Votes by Neighborhood in New York City: https://www.dnainfo.com/new-york/numbers/clinton-trump-president-vice-president-every-neighborhood-map-election-results-voting-general-primary-nyc?utm_source=Breaking+News&utm_campaign=20b985b816-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2016_11_09&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_2d7fd7fa28-20b985b816-137105521

Losses in the Electoral College: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_presidential_elections_where_winner_lost_popular_vote