The Midterm Elections

[fraurosena]

4 hours ago, Bethella said:

Before the public votes for candidates in a state or national election, there's often a primary election that determines which candidates will make it to the final round. Typically each party has to narrow down to one candidate, so you only have one Republican and one Democrat running for each office (top-two primaries are the exception). Some times primaries are a formality (if only one person is running), other times you can have lots of people State rules differ regarding who can vote in these primaries, which are classed as open, closed or hybrid.

In a closed primary, you must be registered with the party in order to vote. For example in New York, you must be registered well before the election is held. In 2016 Ivanka and Eric Trump were unable to vote for their father in the NY primary because they didn't switch to Republican in time. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/donald-trumps-kids-cant-vote-for-their-dad-thats-no-laughing-matter/2016/04/14/5cc603dc-0272-11e6-9203-7b8670959b88_story.html?utm_term=.667b9429f157

In an open primary, anyone registered in that district can vote either primary. You still have to decide which party you're voting for. If you vote in the Democratic primary, you can't also vote in the Republican primary.

There are also semi-closed primaries, where voters who are registered with a party must vote in that party's primary but unaffiliated voters get to decide which one they vote in. 

In top-two primaries, all candidates for a particular office are on one ballot, so all party-affiliated and non-affiliated voters choose from among the same primary candidates. The two candidates with the most votes move on to the general election, even if they are from the same party (so you could have two Democrats running and no Republicans in the general election or vice versa). 

Another option that doesn't involve a primary election is a caucus which is local meeting where registered members of a political party in a city, town or county gather to vote for their preferred party candidate and conduct other party business.

Thanks! That clarifies a lot.

I'm still baffled by the fact that you have to register with a party before you can vote. It seems so superfluous. And it doesn't really seem to serve a purpose. 

We do things differently here. We get a list (in table form) of candidates from every single party and you choose from them. The list is ginormous, (I've put a generic pic of one under the spoiler) and the font is tiny for all the names to be listed upon it, but it's relatively easy once you know which party you're going to vote for. Most people vote for the prime candidate (the topmost one) anyway. After showing your voter card and ID (drivers licence, ID card or passport) you take your ballot to the booth and simply color the empty circle next to the name with the provided red pencil, fold the ballot up and deposit it into the ballot box. Done and dusted.

We do not have to register with a party, nor do we have to be a member of a party before we can vote. We just get the voter cards (and usually a copy of the ballot paper) posted in the mail about two weeks before the elections. We don't have so-called 'early voting', although there are provisions for citizens residing abroad, but I'm not to familiar with how that process works, only that it exists. 

I'm not saying our electoral system is better, mind you. Only that it's way more simple, and that it's easier for everyone who is eligible, to vote.

Spoiler

 

[Bethella]

4 hours ago, fraurosena said:

I'm still baffled by the fact that you have to register with a party before you can vote. It seems so superfluous. And it doesn't really seem to serve a purpose. 

The purpose is to limit the slate of candidates. I know some countries will do run off ballots, where you start with a large list of candidates which is then narrowed to the top two candidates for the second round of voting (which is basically the same as our top-two primary system). I think the primaries (especially the closed ones) are a holdover to the days when the party leadership picked their candidates behind closed doors.

We've moved past that now but it's still (mostly) a system where the voters affiliated with that party (not the general public) are selecting their candidates for the general election. And it depends on the state as to whether you have to register with a party ahead of the election. I'm in Michigan where we have an open primary, so you go in to vote and pick which ballot you want right there. One of the reasons they still have closed primaries is that in 2016 we had people crossing party lines to vote for a less electable or less objectionable candidate in the other party (i.e. We had democrats who voted as republicans in the primary so they could vote for someone other than Trump). Voters can vote for anyone in the general election regardless of party affiliation.

[fraurosena]

Interesting and important:

Vote. That’s Just What They Don’t Want You to Do.

Quote

This is a fragile moment for the nation. The integrity of democratic institutions is under assault from without and within, and basic standards of honesty and decency in public life are corroding. If you are horrified at what is happening in Washington and in many states, you can march in the streets, you can go to town halls and demand more from your representatives, you can share the latest outrageous news on your social media feed — all worthwhile activities. But none of it matters if you don’t go out and vote.

It’s a perennial conundrum for the world’s oldest democracy: Why do so many Americans fail to go to the polls? Some abstainers think that they’re registering a protest against the awful choices. They’re fooling themselves. Nonvoters aren’t protesting anything; they’re just putting their lives and futures in the hands of the people who probably don’t want them to vote. We’ve seen recently what can happen when people choose instead to take their protest to the ballot box. We saw it in Virginia in November. We saw it, to our astonishment, in Alabama in December. We may see it this week in western Pennsylvania. Voting matters.

Casting a ballot is the best opportunity most of us will ever get to have a say in who will represent us, what issues they will address and how they will spend our money. The right to vote is so basic, President Lyndon Johnson said in 1965, that without it “all others are meaningless.”

And yet every election, tens of millions of Americans stay home. Studies of turnout among developed nations consistently rank the United States near the bottom. In the most recent midterms, in 2014, less than 37 percent of eligible voters went to the polls — the lowest turnout in more than 70 years. In 2016, 102 million people didn’t vote, far more than voted for any single candidate.

The problem isn’t just apathy, of course. Keeping people from voting has been an American tradition from the nation’s earliest days, when the franchise was restricted to white male landowners. It took a civil war, constitutional amendments, violently suppressed activism against discrimination and a federal act enforcing the guarantees of those amendments to extend this basic right to every adult. With each expansion of voting rights, the nation inched closer to being a truly representative democracy. Today, only one group of Americans may be legally barred from voting — those with felony records, a cruel and pointless restriction that disproportionately silences people of color.

In the months leading up to the midterm elections on Nov. 6, when the House, Senate and statehouses around the country are up for grabs, the editorial board will explore the complicated question of why Americans don’t vote, and what can be done to overcome the problem. The explanations fall into three broad categories.

SUPPRESSION A 96-year-old woman in Tennessee was denied a voter-ID card despite presenting four forms of identification, including her birth certificate. A World War II veteran was turned away in Ohio because his Department of Veterans Affairs photo ID didn’t include his address. Andrea Anthony, a 37-year-old black woman from Wisconsin who had voted in every major election since she was 18, couldn’t vote in 2016 because she had lost her driver’s license a few days before.

Stories like these are distressingly familiar, as more and more states pass laws that make voting harder for certain groups of voters, usually minorities, but also poor people, students and the elderly. They require forms of photo identification that minorities are much less likely to have or be able to get — purportedly to reduce fraud, of which there is virtually no evidence. They eliminate same-day registration, close polling stations in minority areas and cut back early-voting hours and Sunday voting.

These new laws may not be as explicitly discriminatory as the poll taxes or literacy tests of the 20th century, but they are part of the same long-term project to keep minorities from the ballot box. And because African-Americans vote overwhelmingly for Democrats, the laws are nearly always passed by Republican-dominated legislatures.

In a lawsuit challenging Wisconsin’s strict new voter-ID law, a former staff member for a Republican lawmaker testified that Republicans were “politically frothing at the mouth” at the prospect that the law would drive down Democratic turnout. It worked: After the 2016 election, one survey found that the law prevented possibly more than 17,000 registered voters, disproportionately poor and minority, from voting. Donald Trump carried the state by fewer than 23,000 votes.

FAILING TECHNOLOGY The legitimacy of an election is only as good as the reliability of the machines that count the votes. And yet 43 states use voting machines that are no longer being made, and are at or near the end of their useful life. Many states still manage their voter-registration rolls using software programs from the 1990s. It’s no surprise that this sort of infrastructure failure hits poorer and minority areas harder, often creating hourslong lines at the polls and discouraging many voters from coming out at all. Upgrading these machines nationwide would cost at least $1 billion, maybe much more, and Congress has consistently failed to provide anything close to sufficient funding to speed along the process.

Elections are hard to run with aging voting technology, but at least those problems aren’t intentional. Hacking and other types of interference are. In 2016, Russian hackers were able to breach voter registration systems in Illinois and several other states, and targeted dozens more. They are interfering again in advance of the 2018 midterms, according to intelligence officials, who are demanding better cybersecurity measures. These includeconducting regular threat assessments, using voting machines that create paper trails and conducting postelection audits. Yet President Trump, who sees any invocation of Russian interference as a challenge to the legitimacy of his election, consistently downplays or dismisses these threats. Meanwhile, Mr. Trump’s State Department has not spent a dime of the $120 million Congress allocated to it to fight disinformation campaigns by Russia and other countries.

DISILLUSIONMENT Some people wouldn’t vote if you put a ballot box in their living room. Whether they believe there is no meaningful difference between the major parties or that the government doesn’t care what they think regardless of who is in power, they have detached themselves from the political process.

That attitude is encouraged by many in government, up to and including the current president, who cynically foster feelings of disillusionment by hawking fake tales of rigged systems and illegal voters, even as they raise millions of dollars from wealthy donors and draw legislative maps to entrench their power.

The disillusionment is understandable, and to some degree it’s justified. But it creates a self-fulfilling prophecy. When large numbers of people don’t vote, elections are indeed decided by narrow, unrepresentative groups and in the interests of wealth and power. The public can then say, See? We were right. They don’t care about us. But when more people vote, the winning candidates are more broadly representative and that improves government responsiveness to the public and enhances democratic legitimacy.

•

These obstacles to voting and political participation are very real, and we don’t discount their impact on turnout. The good news is there are fixes for all of them.

The most important and straightforward fix is to make it easier for people to register and vote. Automatic voter registration, which first passed in Oregon just three years ago, is now the law or practice in nine states, both red and blue, and the District of Columbia. Washington State is on the cuspof becoming the tenth, and New Jersey and Nevada may be close behind. More people also turn out when states increase voting opportunities, such as by providing mail-in ballots or by expanding voting hours and days.

The courts should be a bulwark protecting voting rights, and many lower federal courts have been just that in recent years, blocking the most egregious attacks on voting in states from North Carolina to Wisconsin. But the Supreme Court under Chief Justice John Roberts Jr. has made this task much harder, mainly by gutting a key provision of the Voting Rights Act in a 2013 case. Decisions like that one, which split 5 to 4, depend heavily on who is sitting in those nine seats — yet another reason people should care who gets elected.

In the end, the biggest obstacle to more Americans voting is their own sense of powerlessness. It’s true: Voting is a profound act of faith, a belief that even if your voice can’t change policy on its own, it makes a difference. Consider the attitude of Andrea Anthony, the Wisconsin woman who was deterred by the state’s harsh new voter-ID law after voting her whole adult life. “Voting is important to me because I know I have a little, teeny, tiny voice, but that is a way for it to be heard,” Ms. Anthony said. “Even though it’s one vote, I feel it needs to count.”

She’s right. The future of America is in your hands. More people voting would not only mean “different political parties with different platforms and different candidates,” the writer Rebecca Solnit said. “It would change the story. It would change who gets to tell the story.”

There are a lot of stories desperately needing to be told right now, but they won’t be as long as millions of Americans continue to sit out elections. Lament the state of the nation as much as you want. Then get out and vote.

 

[fraurosena]

This is incredibly alarming. 

Trump wants new authority over polling places. Top election officials say no.

Quote

President Trump would be able to dispatch Secret Service agents to polling places nationwide during a federal election, a vast expansion of executive authority, if a provision in a Homeland Security reauthorization bill remains intact.

The rider has prompted outrage from more than a dozen top elections officials around the country, including Secretary of State William F. Galvin of Massachusetts, a Democrat, who says he is worried that it could be used to intimidate voters and said there is “no basis” for providing Trump with this new authority.

“This is worthy of a Third World country,” said Galvin in an interview. “I’m not going to tolerate people showing up to our polling places. I would not want to have federal agents showing up in largely Hispanic areas.”

“The potential for mischief here is enormous,” Galvin added.

The provision alarming him and others is a rider attached to legislation that would re-authorize the Department of Homeland Security. The legislation already cleared the House of Representatives with bipartisan support.

The Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs didn’t include the measure in the version of the bill it approved this week, according to Ben Voelkel, a spokesman for Senator Ron Johnson, who chairs the Senate committee.

The full Senate must still approve the bill, and then the two versions of the legislation would need to be reconciled before going to the president for approval.

The White House didn’t respond to a question about the measure.

“There is no discernible need for federal secret service agents to intrude, at the direction of the president, who may also be a candidate in that election, into thousands of citadels where democracy is enshrined,” according to a letter opposing the provision that was signed by 19 bipartisan secretaries of state and elections commissioners.

The letter — sent to the Senate’s majority leader, Mitch McConnell, and its minority leader, Charles Schumer, on Friday afternoon —requests that the Senate keep the Secret Service provision from the final legislation. The elections officials described the proposal as “unprecedented and shocking.”

“This is an alarming proposal which raises the possibility that armed federal agents will be patrolling neighborhood precincts and vote centers,” according to the letter, which was obtained by the Globe.

Trump has accused Massachusetts residents of illegally casting ballots in New Hampshire as a part of a vast voter fraud scheme he believes cost him the Granite State’s electorial college votes during the 2016 general election. Hillary Clinton narrowly won New Hampshire’s four electoral college points.

No evidence has been found that such voter fraud occurred, with elections officials in both New Hampshire and Massachusetts saying there were no widespread irregularities.

Trump has also said that illegal ballots cast in other parts of the country cost him the popular vote, which he lost by nearly 3 million ballots. There has also been no evidence that nearly so many votes were cast improperly.

But Trump used that accusation as a reason to launch a commission on voter fraud through which he sought personal voter information from every state. The commission dissolved in January after many states refused to comply with the federal request and amid multiple lawsuits.

Under current law, the Secret Service can be stationed at a polling place to protect the president or other federal officials when voting. But they do not provide law enforcement.

Catherine Milhoan, a spokeswoman for the Secret Service, said Saturday that her agency is seeking “clarifying language” to ensure agents can access polling places while protecting candidates.

The request, she said, was in response to an incident during the 2016 election when officers encountered “some reluctance” from staff at a polling location. The poll workers worried that letting in armed agents would violate a federal law barring troops from polling places, she said. She didn’t have details on which candidate or which state the incident occured.

“The only time armed Secret Service personnel would be at a polling place would be to facilitate the visiting of one of our protectees while they voted,” Milhoan said.

 

[AmazonGrace]

 

[onekidanddone]

Where I'd rather be tonight: Chilling in the 505 eating a blue corn enchilada Christmas style or savoring a chili relleno while gazing at the Sandia 

Where I know I'll be tonight: Obsessively refreshing several tabs on my browser watching the PA returns.

[AmazonGrace]

 

[onekidanddone]

46 minutes ago, AmazonGrace said:

 

I want to give this brave young woman a long hug.....right before I go punch the vat of festering puss from Maine a punch in the face.

[onekidanddone]

Going to take  a break this evening, but will be back later when the PA polls close.

[Rachel333]

It's definitely not over, but it seems to be going well for Lamb so far.

[onekidanddone]

I'm holding my breath  so long I think I'm turning as blue as I want the race to go

[nvmbr02]

Ugh. It is so close right now. 95% in and just over 900 votes separating them.

 

[onekidanddone]

Husband never watches election returns. He says the up and down hope vs. disrepair  is too much for him. He just needs to find out the good or bad news all at once the next morning. Me? I have election night fever in my blood. Since 1968 up until now, I've never  missed one. 

[onekidanddone]

28 minutes ago, nvmbr02 said:

Ugh. It is so close right now. 95% in and just over 900 votes separating them.

 

Does this mean recount?

[LeftCoastLurker]

2 minutes ago, onekidanddone said:

Does this mean recount?

Doesn't appear so. Special elections apparently have different rules than "regular" elections.

Spoiler

There are apparently no automatic recounts in Pennsylvania at the congressional district level. Election law expert Michael McDonald explains the process: (sorry, tweet wouldn't copy!)

 

[onekidanddone]

3 minutes ago, LeftCoastLurker said:

Doesn't appear so. Special elections apparently have different rules than "regular" elections.

  Hide contents

There are apparently no automatic recounts in Pennsylvania at the congressional district level. Election law expert Michael McDonald explains the process: (sorry, tweet wouldn't copy!)

 

The Alex Jones freaks are going to be out in force

[LeftCoastLurker]

Looks like we won't know anything tonight. Vote difference is less than .5% and they still have to count the absentee ballots.

[onekidanddone]

6 minutes ago, LeftCoastLurker said:

Looks like we won't know anything tonight. Vote difference is less than .5% and they still have to count the absentee ballots.

Looks like I'm not going to get any sleep tonight.

[BecauseScience]

95 vote difference right now.  95.

 

[JenniferJuniper]

Looks like Lamb should win by a razor thin margin when all absentee votes are counted unless Saccone over performs in the Republican precincts remaining.

So, recount almost certain. 

[nvmbr02]

37 minutes ago, JenniferJuniper said:

Looks like Lamb should win by a razor thin margin when all absentee votes are counted unless Saccone over performs in the Republican precincts remaining.

So, recount almost certain. 

I agree. I think Lamb may squeak out a victory but I do think there will be a recount or at least the courts will have to decide the question of a recount.

[nvmbr02]

So according to MSNBC it is still too close to call but Connor Lamb is up giving a victory speech. Looks like there ars till some absentee votes that need to be counted and there are 600ish votes separating Lamb and Saccone. 

Keeping my fingers crossed that Lamb did indeed win. 

[LeftCoastLurker]

No automatic recounts for congressional elections in Pennsylvania. Something like three voters from each district need to request a recount within 5 or 7 days or something like that. 

[JMarie]

19 hours ago, AmazonGrace said:

 

Does the candidate understand what skinheads stand for?  That they're generally against certain groups, like gay people and people with Latina surnames?  So the phrase "skinhead lesbian" (mentioned in the article) is an oxymoron, much like "President Trump".

[fraurosena]

This tweet made me lol...

... because MSNBC is saying Connor Lamb is the apparent winner in Pennsylvania.