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SPECIAL WEATHER ADVISORY
MY FELLOW EAST COAST AMERICAN VOTERS
(who have not already been successfully blocked by those undemocratic fuckers* who are messing with registrations)
VOTE AS EARLY AS YOU CAN.
Normally I'm a bit of an early voting skeptic, but you guys remember the derecho, right? AFAIK (and I'm going in as an election judge starting tomorrow, so you'd think I would know) my election board's total disaster-zone-voting-plan is "if there's an ice storm on election day, the governor might extend voting hours, at which point you open this sealed package which you have never seen before and have not been trained on."
Hopefully they will come up with something better within the next few days, but considering their general level of flexibility and logistical genius? Um. And I can tell you right now they don't have enough generators for all of the normal voting locations.
If we have the same sort of clusterfuck* we had with the derecho, which is sounding like a distinct possibility, and then you put the clusterfuck this election was already going to be on top of it...
You will be very, very glad to have already voted before the worst of the storm hits, if you were able to vote before the worst of the storm hit.
*yes, I am still watching The Thick Of It! I even posted a story to![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
ttoi_kinkmeme. I bet you couldn't possibly guess which one was me.
(who have not already been successfully blocked by those undemocratic fuckers* who are messing with registrations)
VOTE AS EARLY AS YOU CAN.
Normally I'm a bit of an early voting skeptic, but you guys remember the derecho, right? AFAIK (and I'm going in as an election judge starting tomorrow, so you'd think I would know) my election board's total disaster-zone-voting-plan is "if there's an ice storm on election day, the governor might extend voting hours, at which point you open this sealed package which you have never seen before and have not been trained on."
Hopefully they will come up with something better within the next few days, but considering their general level of flexibility and logistical genius? Um. And I can tell you right now they don't have enough generators for all of the normal voting locations.
If we have the same sort of clusterfuck* we had with the derecho, which is sounding like a distinct possibility, and then you put the clusterfuck this election was already going to be on top of it...
You will be very, very glad to have already voted before the worst of the storm hits, if you were able to vote before the worst of the storm hit.
*yes, I am still watching The Thick Of It! I even posted a story to
ttoi_kinkmeme. I bet you couldn't possibly guess which one was me.
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I hope any problems caused by the storm will be resolved before Election Day. And failing that, they bloody well better provide more voting opportunity as soon as the problems are resolved.
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If the East Coast is a major disaster zone come Tuesday after next, in fact, I think the only way to avoid huge legal battles afterward would be to delay voting for the entire country, and that would still be a clusterfuck (plus I think not legally possible.)
...yeah, let's just hope everything's fixed by election day. Or at least that Obama has a big enough lead to win even without votes from those states, which will at least confine the clusterfuck to those states.
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Definitely not constitutionally.
Although I wonder if it might be possible to extend it for the entire country. You can't change election day itself, but I wonder what the laws are for extensions, which probably vary by location and even lawyer. Elections are done locally, but could Congress (legally, not in the real world) pass a law to extend for a week? This Congress would never do that, but *could* they do that?
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I've been skeptical about early voting (some of the fairness issues around extended voting apply to early voting to) but this year is kind of changing my mind....
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I just moved back to Oregon after school in PA and I forgot to change my mailing address for my ballot before they went out, so I drove over to the county courthouse and got a new one. They didn't ask to see my ID, they didn't ask me what the address the old one had been sent to or what my permanent address was, nothing to check I was who I said I was. They just slapped a label with my name on the outside of the return envelope the ballot goes with and handed it over to me. Even if they have some way of cancelling the old ballot so nobody could take it and vote twice, what if I wasn't who I said I was? Anyone could have gone in there and gotten my ballot!
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(and yeah, the intimidation/interference issue is always going to be there with voting at home.)
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Thing is, people who aren't willing to take the time and effort to go to a polling place probably aren't going to take the time and effort to pay attention to election news and read their voter's pamphlet, in which case I'm not particularly thrilled if they do vote.
We've had vote-by-mail for over 12 years now, and have never had a serious challenge to a race or issue on its account ... which amazes me, given what I know of how it's run.
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It's not just about willingness (not every voter has a nice middle-class job whose employer will let them vote on company time, or who could afford lost money or even potentially getting their already part-time hours reduced for not being "available" 24/7). Vote-by-mail isn't perfect, but there are people who are legitimately disenfranchised--not just lazy--when vote-by-mail is not a readily available option at all.
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MALCOLM TUCKER.
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