Woo hoo! Just came back from one in a blue county. Around 30 vehicles, a struggle to keep our thick flag pole up in our car at 45-60mph - phew. Good vibes. Don't mind the few middle fingers or F-Trumps anymore - we love standing FOR something good.
Yeah, sadly those who benefited from immigrating here don't see the damage that can be done by electing the wrong person. BUT, did you see this article? www.aksam.com.tr/dunya/muslim-voters-have-shifted-support-to-trump/haber-1119228 If true, 61% of U.S. Muslims are voting Trump. My guess, they also like peace and many of them are small business owners. Woot!
Yes! I'm a member of a small online group full of naturalistic and anti-big-pharma/anti-mask women who are all MAGA but they can't be outwardly so to protect their careers. It's beautiful but sad they can't be OUT about it.
A few things that turned me around with the 2A: 1) each time a people hands over its guns, shit happens not too long afterwards. Venezuelans, Jews, Australians. Those Aussie lockdowns of late? Being unable to drive more than a tiny number of miles? WTF. Bought our first gun in 2016. Now we have too many arms for home defense but enough to defend or give to some of our neighbors/patriots as well. 2) As for "reasonable gun restrictions" - every time a liberal governor/legislature passes those, they just go farther the next time - until there are ridiculous restrictions - like in Cali where a certain % of guns have to actually stamp individual casings with a serial number - also wtf - meaning I have to somehow collect all casings at the gun range or those can be planted to frame me - you know how hard it is to pick up casings? And many gun ranges don't allow you to. 3) Also, when I read about what stops mass shootings, sometimes it's an AR-15 since the mass murderer is all armored up. e.g. the TX church shooting - a shame some of the congregation weren't armed. 4) I also read about how school shootings went up after the gun-free zones legislation was passed. Hmm, fancy that.
I'd like to post a positive note: working the polls during covid has been an unexpected joy. Voters bringing in their adorable children, people actually acting like PEOPLE vs the grocery store which is full of morose, scared people who don't look you in the eye. People thanking you for working, idle chit-chat, some coming in with fuzzy slippers or a gorgeous hairstyle, getting to see smiles at least in photo I.D.s, helping someone through a bit of a complicated situation, going the extra mile for them and being thanked for it. We get the occasional frustrated person - who may be that way justifiably - and one annoyed guy accused me of smirking (during the few times I wore a shield instead of a mask) though I wasn't even looking at him - but by and large my voters have been lovely and my colleagues great as well.
Random thing: for the people who complain about voter suppression because of lack of polling place availability - that's a county budgeting/mgmt issue. Our facility contained two counties and the red as hell county side had 50% more machines but about 80% of the staff of our county (purple I think). Their machines were never in full use despite occasional long lines because they had 1/2 the check-in clerks. I almost wonder if they do that on purpose or whether those counties are so poorly managed that they just don't have the money. btw judging by my polling location's vote-processing daily numbers and the trickling-in of voters, the extension of early voting due to covid was unnecessary.
Ours are machine-generated but you look them over before you scan them in. The paper ballot then drops into a box at the bottom of the locked machine which is collected by election officials periodically - these paper ballots are the backup. What kind of worries me are that some states are saying pencil or pen are fine to mark the ballots, esp. mail-in - that freaks me out a bit.
WHAT? That's not good. Where I am, the ballot scanner rejects provisional ballots as they are marked in the upper right corner with a blackened square under "R" (review). And those ballots each go into a separate sealed envelope and put in a special pouch with a poll worker at the ready. And if the ballot were printed wonky the scanner would reject it - I have yet to see that happen though it can if someone folds the ballot in the printed area. Sign off? I hope you don't mean mark the ballot in some way before it's scanned. Though if the scanner gives the acknowledgement it should be fine. (I saw later that it appears to be a hand-filled-out ballot. So that makes more sense. Though you should be given privacy - weird.)
Oh, God, that's horrible. We have the voter scan their own ballot and wait for the acknowledgement. The number of check-ins should match the number of ballots counted on the scanner. I have checked ours three times during early voting just to satisfy my curiosity. If there's a big discrepancy, that's bad. I'm not sure how they'd know how you voted unless they actually take your ballot and look at it but I imagine that's what some workers may do.
The only thing is that if the moderator is biased, EVERYTHING one candidate says could be "fact-checked" based on misleading articles (you know, those for which retractions are posted days, weeks, months later in an obscure place and aren't retweeted) and that would mire the debate into a one-sided clusterfuck. I thought it was very useful to have the fracking vids posted later on - I had of course been seeing them for weeks but a lot of people aren't looking for info. Luckily, a lot of people ARE, so I'm thankful for that!