The same people complaining about delays thought delaying things would help them win.
Why is it taking so maddeningly long to count votes in Pennsylvania? There’s one big, serious reason, and one little reason that’s kind of funny.
The big, not-funny reason: The Republican-held state legislature blocked Democrats from changing rules to allow early votes and mail-in ballots to be pre-processed—i.e., taken out of their envelopes and checked to make sure the right voter filled out the right ballot—for easier counting. The Philadelphia Inquirer just published a blow-by-blow of how that happened, going back to June; here’s the long and short of it:
• In June, with concerns growing that the pandemic would scare many people off from voting in person, the state House considered a bill that would allow pre-processing to begin three weeks before Election Day rather than on Election Day.
A surge of federal spending to combat the coronavirus and cushion the U.S. economy, coupled with a drop-off in federal revenues amid widespr
U.S. annual Budget deficit TRIPLES to $3.1 trillion. My god! It took America over 200 years to incur a $4 trillion National DEBT, yet it took Trump only 4 years to incur a $3.1 trillion ANNUAL budget DEFICIT. Despite this and a NET LOSS of over 6 million jobs - worst jobs record in our history - why would anyone vote for this? Especially since he’s a white Supremacist or refuses to condemn them?
An army of Tax lawyers, accountants. & policy consultants work for the top 1% in most cities in America. State & Federal tax loopholes are a full time job. #SaveTheMiddleClass #FollowTheMoney
This is really an issue of class. Public schools are reopening because the government wants the parents of low income kids to continue working and risking their lives doing “essential jobs.”
Meanwhile schools that primarily serve upper middle class and wealthy kids will not physically reopen. Plus, parents with the time, money and ability to homeschool their children or switch them to private will not be sending their kids to school in the fall.
Schools reopening is pretty much exclusively an attack on low income kids and their families. And the teachers and staff who serve them.
Posts Distort Impact of Biden’s Tax Plan on Middle-Income Earners
Facebook posts falsely claim that under Joe Biden, the “tax rate on a family making 75000 dollars would go from 12% to 25%.” Biden’s proposal does not call for a tax increase on those making less than $400,000, though analysts say an increased corporate tax rate could effectively result in a small tax increase for middle-income earners.
“Oh, honey, she’s going to eviscerate you. But the answer is NO! She cannot break yournballs, honey. Have you blocked out when I removed your balls as part of our marriage ceremony. And I have not yet decided whether I will consent to your having a one on one conversation and you know the rules.” #BidenHarris2020
Researchers at the University of Michigan and MIT found that an online voting platform already being used in some states has serious vulnerabilities, which could be exploited to alter votes without voters or elections officials noticing.
The platform is OmniBallot, created by Seattle-based Democracy Live. It was used for statewide primaries in Delaware and West Virginia, and has also been used by various localities in New Jersey, Colorado, Florida, Oregon, and Ohio, according to The New York Times.
OmniBallot provides a portal for online voting, a relatively rare practice that has typically been reserved for overseas voters. However, some states are looking into expanding online voting to supplement in-person polls amid the COVID-19 pandemic. Other states are focusing more heavily on expanding mail-in ballots, a practice that experts say is less vulnerable to fraud.
Bad actors could compromise OmniBallot’s vote tallies by gaining access to Democracy Live’s servers or one of its third-party web service providers, including Amazon or Google, the researchers found. Such an attack could also be carried out by an insider working for Democracy Live.
“At worst, attackers could change election outcomes without detection, and even if there was no attack, officials would have no way to prove that the results were accurate,” wrote the two researchers, Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor Michael Specter and University of Michigan professor J. Alex Halderman.
“No available technology can adequately mitigate these risks, so we urge jurisdictions not to deploy OmniBallot’s online voting features,” they added.
One of OmniBallot’s biggest weaknesses, the researchers said, is that it provides an option for voters to submit ballots electronically without creating any secondary record of ballots that could be tallied to double-check elections results. By contrast, other high-tech voting systems like Microsoft’s ElectionGuard are tied to printers that create physical copies of ballots in real time, which provide a paper record for elections officials.
At least seven states and 98 counties have already used OmniBallot. Of those, six governments — including the state governments of Delaware and West Virginia — enabled electronic ballot return without requiring physical copies of ballots.
Democracy Live did not immediately respond to Business Insider’s request for comment. CEO Bryan Finney told The Times that “no technology is bulletproof” and that OmniBallot is meant to be used by those who can’t vote by any other means.
