Everyone is required to wear a mask while working, but not in the small break room where as many as 15 people might be eating lunch at once, voiding any protective benefit whatsoever. The warehouse is not air-conditioned and has been 90 or 95 degrees most days this month. Wearing a mask in these conditions is so stifling, most people duck frequently into the break area for a few minutes to cool down, further defeating the stated purpose of the mask. Mask off in break room: no problem! Mask pulled down over your nose even momentarily in the 60,000-square-foot warehouse, supervisor reprimands you! And this is in NYS, a state of 20 million which has had just 600 new cases a day this month. No wonder people are so pissed off, it's almost as if it's designed to humiliate you.

And the kicker? Our job is packaging facemasks.

Someone I know irl lost her job of 8 years (and health + dental) and was forced to start looking for work, ASAP. After applying to several places she landed a job canvassing for the Biden campaign. She was paid about 700 bucks for her first two weeks of work, which consisted entirely of a few training sessions on an ipad they gave her.

A few points:

At first they told her she was going to canvass, then they cancelled canvassing because of covid. Then they told her the canvassing was back on, and they sent her a bunch of hats/ masks. Then they told her it was cancelled again.

The second time canvassing got cancelled, they decided to make her phone bank. Except the iPad they gave her isn't compatible with their phone banking app.

The entire outreach program is "vote or die" all over again. Their hats say "voting matters" and their script never mentions Biden. Their entire modus operandi is to harrass people into promising that they'll come out for the general. No encouraging people to vote for Biden. Just encouraging people to vote.

The canvassing campaign doesn't even take an anti-Trump stance. They are literally just encouraging people to vote.

However if someone says they're voting for Donald Trump, they are to be put on a blacklist immediately so canvassers know not to reach out to them anymore.

The canvassers and phone bankers are only trying to reach out to registered Democrats who won't vote Trump. Curious strategy for a nominee whose entire appeal was supposed to be Republican outreach.

The people in charge of training her were pissed off about Biden being the nominee, and even said as such candidly to all the trainees, several times, over zoom calls. They all seemed to want literally anyone else. Some of them were even Bernie bros.

Nobody seems to be an enthusiastic true believer. Everyone is being as lazy as possible and soaking up that lavishly wasted donor money. Everyone knows they're going to be fired in November so they couldn't give less of a fuck.

People are supposed to be in meetings with their cameras on, but several people turn their cameras off halfway through meetings and still get paid. Nobody cares.

Thought you all would find this interesting.

Text of the article from October, 2012:

Error and Fraud at Issue as Absentee Voting Rises

Nationwide, the use of absentee ballots and other forms of voting by mail has more than tripled since 1980 and now accounts for almost 20 percent of all votes.

Yet votes cast by mail are less likely to be counted, more likely to be compromised and more likely to be contested than those cast in a voting booth, statistics show. Election officials reject almost 2 percent of ballots cast by mail, double the rate for in-person voting.

“The more people you force to vote by mail,” [Florida elections supervisor Ion] Sancho said, “the more invalid ballots you will generate.”

Election experts say the challenges created by mailed ballots could well affect outcomes this fall and beyond. If the contests next month are close enough to be within what election lawyers call the margin of litigation, the grounds on which they will be fought will not be hanging chads but ballots cast away from the voting booth.

In 2008, 18 percent of the votes in the nine states likely to decide this year’s presidential election were cast by mail. That number will almost certainly rise this year, and voters in two-thirds of the states have already begun casting absentee ballots. In four Western states, voting by mail is the exclusive or dominant way to cast a ballot.

The trend will probably result in more uncounted votes, and it increases the potential for fraud. While fraud in voting by mail is far less common than innocent errors, it is vastly more prevalent than the in-person voting fraud that has attracted far more attention, election administrators say.

In Florida, absentee-ballot scandals seem to arrive like clockwork around election time. Before this year’s primary, for example, a woman in Hialeah was charged with forging an elderly voter’s signature, a felony, and possessing 31 completed absentee ballots, 29 more than allowed under a local law.

The flaws of absentee voting raise questions about the most elementary promises of democracy. “The right to have one’s vote counted is as important as the act of voting itself,” Justice Paul H. Anderson of the Minnesota Supreme Court wrote while considering disputed absentee ballots in the close 2008 Senate election between Al Franken and Norm Coleman.

Voting by mail is now common enough and problematic enough that election experts say there have been multiple elections in which no one can say with confidence which candidate was the deserved winner. The list includes the 2000 presidential election, in which problems with absentee ballots in Florida were a little-noticed footnote to other issues.

In the last presidential election, 35.5 million voters requested absentee ballots, but only 27.9 million absentee votes were counted, according to a study by Charles Stewart III, a political scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He calculated that 3.9 million ballots requested by voters never reached them; that another 2.9 million ballots received by voters did not make it back to election officials; and that election officials rejected 800,000 ballots. That suggests an overall failure rate of as much as 21 percent.

Some voters presumably decided not to vote after receiving ballots, but Mr. Stewart said many others most likely tried to vote and were thwarted. “If 20 percent, or even 10 percent, of voters who stood in line on Election Day were turned away,” he wrote in the study, published in The Journal of Legislation and Public Policy, “there would be national outrage.”

The list of very close elections includes the 2008 Senate race in Minnesota, in which Mr. Franken’s victory over Mr. Coleman, the Republican incumbent, helped give Democrats the 60 votes in the Senate needed to pass President Obama’s health care bill. Mr. Franken won by 312 votes, while state officials rejected 12,000 absentee ballots. Recent primary elections in New York involving Republican state senators who had voted to allow same-sex marriage also hinged on absentee ballots.

[...]

There is a bipartisan consensus that voting by mail, whatever its impact, is more easily abused than other forms. In a 2005 report signed by President Jimmy Carter and James A. Baker III, who served as secretary of state under the first President George Bush, the Commission on Federal Election Reform concluded, “Absentee ballots remain the largest source of potential voter fraud.”

On the most basic level, absentee voting replaces the oversight that exists at polling places with something akin to an honor system.

“Absentee voting is to voting in person,” Judge Richard A. Posner of the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit has written, “as a take-home exam is to a proctored one.”

Fraud Easier Via Mail :lol: Yep that’s right libs, that’s the actual sub-heading :lol:

Election administrators have a shorthand name for a central weakness of voting by mail. They call it granny farming.

“The problem,” said Murray A. Greenberg, a former county attorney in Miami, “is really with the collection of absentee ballots at the senior citizen centers.” In Florida, people affiliated with political campaigns “help people vote absentee,” he said. “And help is in quotation marks.”

Voters in nursing homes can be subjected to subtle pressure, outright intimidation or fraud. The secrecy of their voting is easily compromised. And their ballots can be intercepted both coming and going.

The problem is not limited to the elderly, of course. Absentee ballots also make it much easier to buy and sell votes. In recent years, courts have invalidated mayoral elections in Illinois and Indiana because of fraudulent absentee ballots.

Voting by mail also played a crucial role in the 2000 presidential election in Florida, when the margin between George W. Bush and Al Gore was razor thin and hundreds of absentee ballots were counted in apparent violation of state law. The flawed ballots, from Americans living abroad, included some without postmarks, some postmarked after the election, some without witness signatures, some mailed from within the United States and some sent by people who voted twice. All would have been disqualified had the state’s election laws been strictly enforced.

[...]

Clarity Brings Better Results

In 2008, Minnesota officials rejected 12,000 absentee ballots, about 4 percent of all such votes, for the myriad reasons that make voting by mail far less reliable than voting in person.

The absentee ballot itself could be blamed for some of the problems. It had to be enclosed in envelopes containing various information and signatures, including one from a witness who had to attest to handling the logistics of seeing that “the voter marked the ballots in that individual’s presence without showing how they were marked.” Such witnesses must themselves be registered voters, with a few exceptions.

Absentee ballots have been rejected in Minnesota and elsewhere for countless reasons. Signatures from older people, sloppy writers or stroke victims may not match those on file. The envelopes and forms may not have been configured in the right sequence. People may have moved, and addresses may not match. Witnesses may not be registered to vote. The mail may be late.

But it is certainly possible to improve the process and reduce the error rate.

Here in Leon County, the rejection rate for absentee ballots is less than 1 percent. The instructions it provides to voters are clear, and the outer envelope is a model of graphic design, with a large signature box at its center.

The envelope requires only standard postage, and Mr. Sancho has made arrangements with the post office to pay for ballots that arrive without stamps.

Still, he would prefer that voters visit a polling place on Election Day or beforehand so that errors and misunderstandings can be corrected and the potential for fraud minimized.

“If you vote by mail, where is that coming from?” he asked. “Is there intimidation going on?”

Last November, Gov. Rick Scott, a Republican, suspended a school board member in Madison County, not far from here, after she was arrested on charges including absentee ballot fraud.

The board member, Abra Hill Johnson, won the school board race “by what appeared to be a disproportionate amount of absentee votes,” the arrest affidavit said. The vote was 675 to 647, but Ms. Johnson had 217 absentee votes to her opponent’s 86. Officials said that 80 absentee ballots had been requested at just nine addresses. Law enforcement agents interviewed 64 of the voters whose ballots were sent; only two recognized the address.

Ms. Johnson has pleaded not guilty.

Election law experts say that pulling off in-person voter fraud on a scale large enough to swing an election, with scores if not hundreds of people committing a felony in public by pretending to be someone else, is hard to imagine, to say nothing of exceptionally risky.

There are much simpler and more effective alternatives to commit fraud on such a scale, said Heather Gerken, a law professor at Yale.

“You could steal some absentee ballots or stuff a ballot box or bribe an election administrator or fiddle with an electronic voting machine,” she said. That explains, she said, “why all the evidence of stolen elections involves absentee ballots and the like.”

Source link: https://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/07/us/politics/as-more-vote-by-mail-faulty-ballots-could-impact-elections.html