Will Ron DeSantis succumb to the same temptation to rig the election for himself, like Jeb Bush did for his brother George? As Michael Keaton once said in a movie, “Is a frog’s ass watertight?”
I lived in FL when Bush did his cheat. I got to look at the voting machines, which for the first time ever were sent to Diebold for adjustment rather than have the setup crew check them. We found every machine was OK on the R side but off on the D side, leaving hanging chads or not punching the hole. We re-adjusted all the machines to work.
That fall was unique. Mary Morgan, manager of voting for Naples, quit, in private telling coworkers that she refused to cheat. Something like 16 managers of elections quit, like Mary, a month before the election. Most cited the usual excuses, but quite a few said they would not cheat.
I lived in Naples, FL during the 2000 election. The corrupt Roberts SCOTUS threw the election, not Florida or Jeb.
Jeb and the NaziRepublican Party certainly cheated on a MASSIVE scale, but they still lost. 16 local county election managers refused to cheat and resigned. Those counties ended up watched closely, and probably couldn't cheat more than 10% of the votes. Other counties cheated more, but Gore was far more popular than the Bush crime family. Most of Florida knew the Bush crime family well. Don't forget that Jeb wasn't elected by voters.
The real culprit was the corrupt Roberts SCOTUS. Florida law REQUIRES a manual recount if votes are within some %, I think one percent but don't quote me, what matters is the election was closer than the trigger for manual recount.
The corrupt Roberts SCOTUS decided the election for CheneyBush. By Florida law, a manual recount was required, and was being started.
Perhaps the most telling statements came from Gore and CheneyBush.
When the manual recount was announced, both Gore and CheneyBush immediately said they would accept the results, DO NOT DO A RECOUNT.
We know CheneyBush cheated, but clearly so did Gore, and both thought they had cheated way more than the other.
I live in Missouri. The rules are being changed constantly. Most changes are good, but they will reduce voting. Two examples, ballots are no longer "party oriented" and absentee ballots are far more difficult to obtain.
Eliminating people checking one box to vote party is great, they may actually read the ballot and realize they are voting for people who rob them. Might help, can't be worse.
Making absentee ballots more difficult was puzzling, until I found out many urban people did it for convenience. We do it here in the rural area because we found NaziRepublican thugs hanging around our voting station in 1996 intimidating voters, so we've voted absentee ever since.
Absentee voting requires a reason. Until this year, the reason was "honor system". Now you have to be a bit more reasonable about your reason. You can't say "my dog has to go to Disney World in November" any more. You have to say "My grandkids are demanding Orlando" instead. We are always gone, sort of the opposite of the intent. They want a valid reason, so we head for the French Quarter in NOLA in order to make our reason valid - and the jazz, oysters, and cooking classes convince us we were right.
I thought you'd stolen material from Greg Palast until I came to how you and he are in synch on his extraordinary instigative work. What to do? Here's what I posted yesterday on something Chris Hedges wrote, that serves here, too:
So, what are we going to do about this? How about collecting Robert Reich, Thom Hartman, Robert Scheer, Michael Moore, Greg Palast, Noam Chomsky, Jeremy Scahill, and whoever else would be of that ilk to join you to turn you gadflies into a force? We need a voice, and, if you all deliberated on what you would do if you ran the country, everybody would hear you. You could collect us into the Human Survival Party – not a political party but a people’s voice that would figure to be huge.
An immediate thing I’d submit, in the SUGGESTION BOX you’d create, would be something to deal with how separated into camps we are. Any trial or fraud conviction won’t put off Trump’s followers, where we will stay divided even if we get our pounds of flesh, but, instead, how about an intervention? Get Trump to show up on some fabrication and get the Republicans who’ve been testifying against him to sit in a circle with him and read him chapter and verse. For what the country needs, offer him total immunity from all prosecutions to admit he lost and whatever he’d say about that – omg, a Trumpian mea culpa would be something to behold. But he’d be speaking for the good of the country, to unite us. He might love being that kinky hero.
It is really pathetic that the country that has spent 200 years bragging about its system of democratic governance has not had enough voters doing their due diligence and insist on a federal, independent election monitoring system. There are lots of things we love about living in Tennessee, but we really miss Oregon's Vote-by-Mail at home. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vote-by-mail_in_Oregon
We miss the ballot material that came with proper pro-and-con information and comments about each proposal and candidate. Tennessee's voting system is sad, by comparison; it's up to voters to dig and dig on the web to make good choices, and you have to apply for an absentee ballot.
The Florida Game, Round 2, looks and walks like a system worthy of the most backwards voting system in an under developed country. Again, where are the voters in Florida who have allowed Florida to move so far to the right? And where are the common sense Democratic Party candidates? If the Democratic Party nationwide continues to insist on representing mainly the ultra left urban voters, it stands to reason that our only choice is either NOT to vote, or vote for whatever the Republican Party presents. For many of us, the two -party system has failed utterly.
Now that the Boomer generation is almost retired, let's not hope it will take the Republican Party stripping them of Social Security benefits and privatizing all health care, to get enough voters to empower the US legislature to create a completely independent voting system for all state; preferably one that simply duplicates Oregon's system or one of the other 18 states https://www.ncsl.org/research/elections-and-campaigns/vopp-table-18-states-with-all-mail-elections.aspx
Mr. Hartman's citation:
Florida and Texas are the only two states where the Secretary of State — the person who runs elections statewide — is appointed by the governor. And Ron DeSantis just appointed a doozy, State Representative Cord Byrd.
Byrd is a Trump-humping election denier eager to do whatever DeSantis wants. The law requires the state senate to confirm him, but DeSantis, apparently wanting to avoid the public hearings that Democrats are demanding, is stalling and apparently plans to let him be an “acting” Secretary of State for years, if necessary.
I lived in FL when Bush did his cheat. I got to look at the voting machines, which for the first time ever were sent to Diebold for adjustment rather than have the setup crew check them. We found every machine was OK on the R side but off on the D side, leaving hanging chads or not punching the hole. We re-adjusted all the machines to work.
That fall was unique. Mary Morgan, manager of voting for Naples, quit, in private telling coworkers that she refused to cheat. Something like 16 managers of elections quit, like Mary, a month before the election. Most cited the usual excuses, but quite a few said they would not cheat.
I lived in Naples, FL during the 2000 election. The corrupt Roberts SCOTUS threw the election, not Florida or Jeb.
Jeb and the NaziRepublican Party certainly cheated on a MASSIVE scale, but they still lost. 16 local county election managers refused to cheat and resigned. Those counties ended up watched closely, and probably couldn't cheat more than 10% of the votes. Other counties cheated more, but Gore was far more popular than the Bush crime family. Most of Florida knew the Bush crime family well. Don't forget that Jeb wasn't elected by voters.
The real culprit was the corrupt Roberts SCOTUS. Florida law REQUIRES a manual recount if votes are within some %, I think one percent but don't quote me, what matters is the election was closer than the trigger for manual recount.
The corrupt Roberts SCOTUS decided the election for CheneyBush. By Florida law, a manual recount was required, and was being started.
Perhaps the most telling statements came from Gore and CheneyBush.
When the manual recount was announced, both Gore and CheneyBush immediately said they would accept the results, DO NOT DO A RECOUNT.
We know CheneyBush cheated, but clearly so did Gore, and both thought they had cheated way more than the other.
I live in Missouri. The rules are being changed constantly. Most changes are good, but they will reduce voting. Two examples, ballots are no longer "party oriented" and absentee ballots are far more difficult to obtain.
Eliminating people checking one box to vote party is great, they may actually read the ballot and realize they are voting for people who rob them. Might help, can't be worse.
Making absentee ballots more difficult was puzzling, until I found out many urban people did it for convenience. We do it here in the rural area because we found NaziRepublican thugs hanging around our voting station in 1996 intimidating voters, so we've voted absentee ever since.
Absentee voting requires a reason. Until this year, the reason was "honor system". Now you have to be a bit more reasonable about your reason. You can't say "my dog has to go to Disney World in November" any more. You have to say "My grandkids are demanding Orlando" instead. We are always gone, sort of the opposite of the intent. They want a valid reason, so we head for the French Quarter in NOLA in order to make our reason valid - and the jazz, oysters, and cooking classes convince us we were right.
I thought you'd stolen material from Greg Palast until I came to how you and he are in synch on his extraordinary instigative work. What to do? Here's what I posted yesterday on something Chris Hedges wrote, that serves here, too:
So, what are we going to do about this? How about collecting Robert Reich, Thom Hartman, Robert Scheer, Michael Moore, Greg Palast, Noam Chomsky, Jeremy Scahill, and whoever else would be of that ilk to join you to turn you gadflies into a force? We need a voice, and, if you all deliberated on what you would do if you ran the country, everybody would hear you. You could collect us into the Human Survival Party – not a political party but a people’s voice that would figure to be huge.
An immediate thing I’d submit, in the SUGGESTION BOX you’d create, would be something to deal with how separated into camps we are. Any trial or fraud conviction won’t put off Trump’s followers, where we will stay divided even if we get our pounds of flesh, but, instead, how about an intervention? Get Trump to show up on some fabrication and get the Republicans who’ve been testifying against him to sit in a circle with him and read him chapter and verse. For what the country needs, offer him total immunity from all prosecutions to admit he lost and whatever he’d say about that – omg, a Trumpian mea culpa would be something to behold. But he’d be speaking for the good of the country, to unite us. He might love being that kinky hero.
Editorial correction: it’s spelled Crist, not Christ.
It is really pathetic that the country that has spent 200 years bragging about its system of democratic governance has not had enough voters doing their due diligence and insist on a federal, independent election monitoring system. There are lots of things we love about living in Tennessee, but we really miss Oregon's Vote-by-Mail at home. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vote-by-mail_in_Oregon
We miss the ballot material that came with proper pro-and-con information and comments about each proposal and candidate. Tennessee's voting system is sad, by comparison; it's up to voters to dig and dig on the web to make good choices, and you have to apply for an absentee ballot.
The Florida Game, Round 2, looks and walks like a system worthy of the most backwards voting system in an under developed country. Again, where are the voters in Florida who have allowed Florida to move so far to the right? And where are the common sense Democratic Party candidates? If the Democratic Party nationwide continues to insist on representing mainly the ultra left urban voters, it stands to reason that our only choice is either NOT to vote, or vote for whatever the Republican Party presents. For many of us, the two -party system has failed utterly.
Now that the Boomer generation is almost retired, let's not hope it will take the Republican Party stripping them of Social Security benefits and privatizing all health care, to get enough voters to empower the US legislature to create a completely independent voting system for all state; preferably one that simply duplicates Oregon's system or one of the other 18 states https://www.ncsl.org/research/elections-and-campaigns/vopp-table-18-states-with-all-mail-elections.aspx
Mr. Hartman's citation:
Florida and Texas are the only two states where the Secretary of State — the person who runs elections statewide — is appointed by the governor. And Ron DeSantis just appointed a doozy, State Representative Cord Byrd.
Byrd is a Trump-humping election denier eager to do whatever DeSantis wants. The law requires the state senate to confirm him, but DeSantis, apparently wanting to avoid the public hearings that Democrats are demanding, is stalling and apparently plans to let him be an “acting” Secretary of State for years, if necessary.