I’ve never felt so loved

[SpecialClassical]

🤦‍♀️ I just got a text from Ohio again, calling me by the same wrong name again. I’ve had this number for over 15yrs. Maybe I should start a campaign back in my texts to these Ohio people.  What needs to change in Ohio? Do you all need more cupcakes? 

[Tina]

The phones and mail box are jammed here in MN, too.

I was thinking the census was where they got some information, and about the timing of the census years.

[Frances]

56 minutes ago, Tina said:

The phones and mail box are jammed here in MN, too.

I was thinking the census was where they got some information, and about the timing of the census years.

Individual census data is strictly protected from disclosure by law. Aggregate census data from the most recent census is not yet available. There are numerous sources of public free information available (e.g. voter registration, property tax records, etc.) and also tech related data than can be purchased.

Edited November 1, 2020 by Frances

[mom2scouts]

I'm also in a battleground state. My phone is constantly alerting me to texts about the election.

[LAS in LA]

 https://www.wsj.com/articles/electoral-college-is-a-bulwark-against-fraud-11600210700

Here's the opinion piece I read.

[LAS in LA]

10 hours ago, Pam in CT said:

re ease of ballot-stuffing

Super curious about who is furthering the idea that "ballot-stuffing" is done anywhere in the US, or even possible. I subscribe to WSJ and listen to NPR regularly and have definitely not seen anything of the sort.

Link to WSJ article above.

[Pam in CT]

re argument that "ease of ballot stuffing" is greater for popular vote than EC system

23 minutes ago, LAS in LA said:

Link to WSJ article above.

 

28 minutes ago, LAS in LA said:

 https://www.wsj.com/articles/electoral-college-is-a-bulwark-against-fraud-11600210700

Here's the opinion piece I read.

Thanks.

That is clearly marked (multiple times on the header, twice at the bottom) as an opinion piece, not an article. And the opinion expressed rests on a term that is not defined, a premise for which there is neither empirical nor logical support, and whose conclusion ignores a reality orders of magnitude greater than the hypothetical he offers up.

Undefined term: While the author never actually defines "ballot stuffing"...

Unsubstantiated premise: ...the suggestion from the term itself is that Someone stuffs fraudulent ballots into the tabulator at specific polling places... presumably either by a) one person jamming thousands of counterfeit ballots all at once into the tabulator (which is absurd on face value: the tabulator is visible to voters and poll workers alike; it would take a huge amount of time to run thousands of ballots through; counterfeit ballots wouldn't scan; the poll workers have to reconcile the number of ballots they hand out to registered voters against the number of ballots in the tabulating machines before they can run the count); or b) thousands of people showing up one by one by one and each one falsely claims a false identity as a unique legally registered voter on the rolls (also absurd on its face since that would only work if the legal registrant did NOT appear, which would not work at scale)...

For which there is no empirical evidence: ... and as you said upthread, the author at no point provides any evidence whatsoever that such "ballot stuffing" has actually been found to have occurred in any election - as you said, he is just speculating about a hypothetical.  Voter fraud of any type is vanishingly rare; but since the invention of tabulation machines that automatically count the number of ballots (which are doublechecked blind against the ballot clerks' count of how many ballots were handed to voters) this particular type of fraud is particularly so. 

 

Aside from the purely hypothetical premise, I also find the rest of the argument quite unpersuasive:

Quote

The Electoral College forces presidential candidates to campaign in all parts of the country and appeal to a broader coalition of voters.

The whole gist of this thread is that the candidates only target voters in swingy states because all the red votes in CA and blue votes in TX will get disappered by the winner-take-all mechanism *..

and then the core of the argument:

Quote

If the presidential election were decided simply by tabulating votes nationwide, unscrupulous partisans would have every reason to engage in old-fashioned ballot-box-stuffing. They would target places with lax security or corrupt authorities and run up their tallies. Under the Electoral College, by contrast, fraudsters need to know not only how to cheat, but where. In the event of a close race, they need to know which state or states will swing the election. But of course they have no way of knowing such a thing, whatever their lavishly paid consultants might tell them.

But of course we DO know. A bunch of education-focused moms have named the swingy states on this very thread...  not because we're prophetic geniuses or something; because for the last thirty years it's the same states. always PA, OH, FL; always with a sideways eye on NC, WI, AZ; some years an emergent flyer or two like MI last time around and possibly GA this time around. But that base handful is massively consistent even among lay folks like us who don't have access to county and precinct level data.

And the parties and PACs and statisticians who DO have access to county and precinct level data can play the same "who's swingy" game at one and two layers down in specificity. The NYT produced exactly that this morning.

 

But the biggest logical flaw is the sheer SCALE of how many ballots would (hypothetically) be required to "stuff" enough to change the outcome under a popular vote system. The 2016 election swung on 80,000 votes, or or 0.06% of 137 million votes cast. But that margin is only calcuable after the fact --  if you're a nefarious election-snatching trickster looking to "stuff ballots" in a popular vote, you have to look at that whole ~137M without knowing exactly what turnout will be or what the range of the total "swing" will be. (At this moment the poll-projected range on the popular vote is https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/polls/president-general/national/ of the entire voting population, which is expected to be at least ~150M.  That is: for a nefarious trickster to be sure to come out ahead of the polling variation, he'd have to "stuff" ~10M fraudulent ballots or get ~10M discrete people to show up and present false ID and falsely claim to be a registered voter on the rolls (and then that real voter would have also to not-show-up).

That, obviously, would be impossible -- even if the fraudster could spread it out over all 50 states, so that big states like CA and TX "only" had to have a few million fake ballots stuffed in and little states like Montana could absorb "only" a few hundred thousand.

If "ballot stuffing" were a thing... it patently is not... effecting such fraud would be immensely easier if you only needed a few hundred thousand to get the job done in just a handful of swingy states. Like, in an EC system.

[SquirrellyMama]

12 hours ago, theelfqueen said:

No it wouldn't. No candidate would ever leave or campaign outside the populous cities. 

I'm trying to see the down side to this. How great would it be to not have all of the campaign mailings, emails, calls, texts, candidates in the state. 

Half kidding 🙂

[Not_a_Number]

21 minutes ago, Pam in CT said:

If "ballot stuffing" were a thing... it patently is not... effecting such fraud would be immensely easier if you only needed a few hundred thousand to get the job done in just a handful of swingy states. Like, in an EC system.

The argument I always find most convincing is that voter fraud is simply... not that effective. It's hard to do. It's easy to get caught. You have to do a LOT of it. And you're probably better off just getting some influential person backing you and getting people who follow them to vote your way... or opening/closing polling stations... or doing outreach efforts... or really lots of other things. Those will swing things your way by 1000s of votes, without doing something very difficult. 

[Pippen]

I'm in Illinois and only the pollsters want me for my data and opinions. 

[KungFuPanda]

Is there evidence that spamming people actually does any good? I can’t imagine changing my vote because of a text or being happy to receive unsolicited calls. Clearly this is an activity that responsible, civic-minded people really get into, but I just don’t get it. Has anyone here ever voted or changed their stance because they got a postcard?

[Pawz4me]

5 hours ago, KungFuPanda said:

Is there evidence that spamming people actually does any good? I can’t imagine changing my vote because of a text or being happy to receive unsolicited calls. Clearly this is an activity that responsible, civic-minded people really get into, but I just don’t get it. Has anyone here ever voted or changed their stance because they got a postcard?

I think obviously the spamming must work, at least for some small but significant segment of the population. Maybe a lot of it is simple name recognition for low information voters? I doubt any of us are completely immune. But consciously (like most people) I find it much more annoying than anything. I've wondered if I were undecided between two candidates if I wouldn't be more likely to vote against the one who spammed me the most? I think it's very possible. I value my peace and my privacy, and can't recall ever being happy about having those intruded upon in any way, or having positive thoughts about anyone who did it.

Edited November 2, 2020 by Pawz4me

[medawyn]

6 hours ago, KungFuPanda said:

Is there evidence that spamming people actually does any good? I can’t imagine changing my vote because of a text or being happy to receive unsolicited calls. Clearly this is an activity that responsible, civic-minded people really get into, but I just don’t get it. Has anyone here ever voted or changed their stance because they got a postcard?

I've been doing some phone banking to encourage people to make a plan to vote.  You would not BELIEVE the number of easily answerable questions that people have that keep them from the polls.  Can I bring my children? Do I need to find my voter registration card? Where do I even go?  Can I wear ______ shirt/color? Do I need ID? What if I moved this month? Can I still vote this year if I didn't request an absentee ballot? Do I have to vote for all one party?

In the space of three hours over the last week, I've talked to a dozen people who have at least indicated that "wow, now that I know _____, it's so easy."  I think getting some information can help people get over the inertia.

[LAS in LA]

Pam in CT: Thanks for your response!

There was no intent to deceive by calling the WSJ piece an "article". I use the term generically (opinion article, news article).

Re: defining his term: I don't think defining "ballot stuffing" was necessary. He's not arguing that this even happens, only that the EC makes it theoretically more difficult and PV (pop. vote) makes it easier. Actually changing the numbers in voting machines isn't the only way to influence an election. Accessing voter registration information (as Russia has) and, say, changing a voter's address to another precinct, would make it harder for them to vote and could affect outcomes if done on a large scale. Unlikely, but not impossible. 

Given the difficulty of ballot stuffing (as you point out) or other types of fraud, the EC makes it more difficult by reducing the number of vulnerable points and (he argues) makes it harder to choose which of those vulnerable points are important. He mentions the Florida 2000 and Michigan 2016 votes as ones which weren't predicted as decisive, but which were decisive in the elections. And if we know which states are likely to make a difference to an election outcome, we have a smaller number of states needing extra security. It will be interesting to see whether the NYT battleground county predictions are accurate; our ability to predict improves with each election, but some of our information is hindsight ("it's always down to X, Y, and Z"). 

I do have great confidence in election officers (like my dad!) who work hard to verify information and make sure that everyone who wants to vote can do so, even if only with a provisional ballot.

Edited November 2, 2020 by LAS in LA

[Not_a_Number]

20 minutes ago, LAS in LA said:

Re: defining his term: I don't think defining "ballot stuffing" was necessary. He's not arguing that this even happens, only that the EC makes it theoretically more difficult and PV (pop. vote) makes it easier.

But Pam made some legitimate points you aren’t addressing here, which is that she doesn’t agree that it DOES make it more difficult...

[Acorn]

@Lady Florida

Thank you for your volunteer work. I have a question about your post: when you write opt out, how is that done? My son has a new phone that must be tied to someone’s prior voting record. He is too young to vote, and the number of calls and texts are unwanted. We haven’t wanted to reply to the texts but do you mean we can reply with words “opt out” to reduce some of the noise? 
signed,

overly courted in Ohio

[KungFuPanda]

9 hours ago, medawyn said:

I've been doing some phone banking to encourage people to make a plan to vote.  You would not BELIEVE the number of easily answerable questions that people have that keep them from the polls.  Can I bring my children? Do I need to find my voter registration card? Where do I even go?  Can I wear ______ shirt/color? Do I need ID? What if I moved this month? Can I still vote this year if I didn't request an absentee ballot? Do I have to vote for all one party?

In the space of three hours over the last week, I've talked to a dozen people who have at least indicated that "wow, now that I know _____, it's so easy."  I think getting some information can help people get over the inertia.

Oh man.  I give people waaaaay too much credit.  

[SpecialClassical]

On 11/1/2020 at 12:38 PM, SpecialClassical said:

🤦‍♀️ I just got a text from Ohio again, calling me by the same wrong name again. I’ve had this number for over 15yrs. Maybe I should start a campaign back in my texts to these Ohio people.  What needs to change in Ohio? Do you all need more cupcakes? 

Third text from Ohio Democrats calling me Rachel *after* they said they were removing me from the list. Grrr

[Pam in CT]

4 hours ago, LAS in LA said:

Pam in CT: Thanks for your response!

There was no intent to deceive by calling the WSJ piece an "article". I use the term generically (opinion article, news article)...

Of course. And there's definitely a place for opinion pieces! I'm all in for persuasive opinion pieces. Just important to differentiate between that type of writing from articles disseminating news or facts. Sometimes the line can get blurry, but the clearly marked opinion page of a reputable outlet like the WSJ isn't such a place. They do a good job delineating which is which.

 

4 hours ago, LAS in LA said:

Re: defining his term: I don't think defining "ballot stuffing" was necessary. He's not arguing that this even happens, only that the EC makes it theoretically more difficult and PV (pop. vote) makes it easier. Actually changing the numbers in voting machines isn't the only way to influence an election. Accessing voter registration information (as Russia has) and, say, changing a voter's address to another precinct, would make it harder for them to vote and could affect outcomes if done on a large scale...
 

Agreed. The bolded -- messing with voter registration rolls, so when people show up to vote their names are not there -- is actually a vastly more plausible risk than "ballot stuffing." There have been quite a few empirical examples (and court cases) of both inadvertent mistakes and intentional purges that have actually disenfranchised thousands of voters. While there is no evidence that Russia or domestic mayhem-makers have changed voter rolls, both the DHS and Senate Intel have confirmed that the electoral data systems of all 50 states were "pinged" in 2016 and key districts have been again in 2018 and 2020. So that actually *is* an evidence-substantiated risk.

That has nothing to do with the opinion piece though, which is all about "ballot stuffing." Which a good writer would define: many counterfeit ballots stuffed into one tabulator?  Or thousands of invalid voters presenting fake IDs and claiming the ballots of real voters who for some reason don't show up?  Both are implausible, but there's a difference. Leaving it wholly undefined lets the reader sort of gloss over the term, which makes it *seem* like maybe it *is* a real risk. It is the specifics of what "ballot stuffing" would have to look like that starts to reveal the weakness of his argument. (This is a common sleight of hand.)

 

The article ends up being a good object lesson on how to read an opinion piece -- I've done that exercise with my own kids and others I've tutored with good effect. The idea is to get students to perceive the difference between well-reasoned persuasive argument vs writing that veers closer to propaganda. It goes something like this (the parts in italics are just for the first time through - once kids know the drill they don't need all the explanatory verbiage)

Q1:  Are key constructs in the piece well defined?  (Good persuasive writing defines key terms; sloppy or propangandist writing often fails to do so)

A1:  No. The key construct in the piece is "ballot stuffing," which is never defined. (Other key terms include "fraudster," "electoral college system" and "popular vote system" but ballot stuffing is by far the most important.)

Q2:  Is the premise on which the argument rests explicit? (Good persuasive writing clearly lays out the premise, so careful readers can evaluate its substantiation on either evidence or logic. Propaganda, OTOH, very commonly ellides over the premise since that is very often the shakiest part of an argument.)

A2: No. The premise -- that "ballot stuffing" is actually a serious threat that jeopardizes a fair count of validly cast ballots -- is never substantiated by either evidence or logic. 

Q3: Does the piece have a clear core argument? If so what is it? (In good persuasive writing, there is an identifiable central thesis. Sloppy writing tends to throw a handful of arguments out, spaghetti-like, in hopes that something sticks.)

A3:  Yes. The core argument of the piece is that under a popular vote, a "fraudster" would be able to commit "ballot stuffing" anywhere in the country, and would be able to select locations with lax security; whereas under an EC system the "fraudster" would need to know where the swingy districts were, which the author states is not knowable.

Q4: Is the core argument substantiated? If so how?  (Good persuasive argument is supported either by evidence, logic, or both.)

A4: No.

Q5: Does the piece address possible counterarguments? If so how?  (Good persuasive argument -- just like good debaters - acknowledges possible lines of pushback and addresses them.)

Q5: The piece gives a sort of literary nod to the convention in its lede:

Quote

Many Democrats, perhaps most, favor abolishing the Electoral College. Their argument is straightforward and powerful: The presidential candidate who gets the most votes should win.

This is actually a sleight of hand, however, as it has nothing to do with the core argument of the piece. The putative counter staked out in the lede is a premise rooted in the value of equity; whereas the core argument is  rooted in a wholly different premise, the (purported) risk of fraud. So while the author literally uses the word "counterargument" (thus: the literary nod) the one has nothing to do with the other.

An actual counterargument to the core argument would have to address (with either evidence or logic) the core argument. Taking in arguendo -- for the sake of argument -- that the premise (= "ballot stuffing" is a serious threat that jeopardizes accurate count of valid votes) is true: how would such "stuffing" be different under the two systems? The author names only one difference: the geographic location of where the "stuffing" would occur -- and alleges (without substantiation, but that is Q4) that though it is easy to ascertain where security is lax, it is impossible to know which districts will be close.  A competent counter would ask what other differences the "fraudster" would encounter.  The issue of scale -- how MANY "stuffed ballots" would be required to swing the whole national popular vote vs the EC -- is only the most obvious, lowest hanging fruit counterargument. There are several others.

 

It's a good exercise. And once a student learns the tools, they are easily and usefully applied in all kinds of contexts.

 

5 hours ago, LAS in LA said:

...I do have great confidence in election officers (like my dad!) who work hard to verify information and make sure that everyone who wants to vote can do so, even if only with a provisional ballot.

I do as well. And also regularly serve as a poll worker, which I really encourage folks to consider. It's wonderful to see democracy up close, and learning the mechanics of how it all works definitely steps up confidence and trust in the system.

[mom2scouts]

I was still getting texts yesterday AND someone from the local political party showed up at my door. She moved back off the porch after ringing the doorbell and just spoke loudly, so at least she was trying to social distance.

[Lady Florida.]

On 11/2/2020 at 6:52 AM, medawyn said:

I've been doing some phone banking to encourage people to make a plan to vote.  You would not BELIEVE the number of easily answerable questions that people have that keep them from the polls.  Can I bring my children? Do I need to find my voter registration card? Where do I even go?  Can I wear ______ shirt/color? Do I need ID? What if I moved this month? Can I still vote this year if I didn't request an absentee ballot? Do I have to vote for all one party?

In the space of three hours over the last week, I've talked to a dozen people who have at least indicated that "wow, now that I know _____, it's so easy."  I think getting some information can help people get over the inertia.

Yes. I see this too with texting. 

[Sneezyone]

4 minutes ago, Lady Florida. said:

Yes. I see this too with texting. 

I see the same thing with the polling station. I draw people into the parking lot with my frantic waving and then they roll down the window, squinch up their nose and say...”Is there a line?” Nope! Not today!  I’ve also had people drive around the block three times before they stop. Lol. 

Edited November 3, 2020 by Sneezyone

[Lady Florida.]

16 minutes ago, mom2scouts said:

I was still getting texts yesterday AND someone from the local political party showed up at my door. She moved back off the porch after ringing the doorbell and just spoke loudly, so at least she was trying to social distance.

We were texting this morning (just finished 19k texts) to try and get people to the polls. I had some ask me where their polling station is. We have canvassers going door to door and helping people who need a ride. Re the bolded: Our canvassers wear masks and stay back away from the door when someone answers. I'm not sure how they handle giving people rides to the polls safely. I'm not involved in that.