2016 Postmortem
In reply to the discussion: For 2020, the Democratic Party Should Take Back Its Nomination Methods [View all]trudyco
(1,258 posts)There is evidence they've been hacked. There's been demonstrations on how easy it is to hack. There has been a case in Arizona where a guy had a 1099, paid to do hacking of vote counting. These vote counting machines are crap. Many don't even have a paper trail. Every system should have a paper trail and some random subset should have hand count audits, with public viewing of the counting (video uploaded to the internet as well as in-person viewing).
Current audits are poorly done and often don't match the machine vote counting (probably because it is hacked). There seems to be no quick remediation and no consequences for "shenanigans" - certainly not anything that deters it. So this needs to be addressed.
We need paper ballots, exit polls, UN monitors, whatever it takes to prove the vote counting isn't being hacked. Until we can prove the vote counting is aboveboard I prefer Caucusing. It's less likely to be hacked. There's no point in voting or having a democracy if it's fake because our voices are taken away from us on hacked vote counting machines.
As for closed primaries: Fix how somebody becomes a member. What do you think is the appropriate time to be in a party? 2 weeks? 6 months? a year? Make it universal. Then you have to have a way to make sure that strip and flip isn't happening. How do you do that? My daughter had her affiliation changed recently. She registered this year. Got a mailing and it was Democrat. She couldn't get to her caucus so missed that and then last week she got a mail and now she's listed as independent! The databases and/or employees maintaining them are substandard. I don' t think it was election fraud because the primary for our state was already over. It was just crappy handling of her affiliation status. What if it had happened before the primary? Provisional/affidavit votes are a joke. Before we have closed primaries we need to ensure that Democrats get to vote. No fraudulent changing of affiliations or purging. Until then I think closed primaries are just a way for the ethically challenged (and some idiots) to disenfranchise people.
Make primary day and GE day a holiday. Have voting at every elementary school, unless its very rural and then the high school. No gaming the system by reducing the polling stations. Early voting can be on weekends preceding the primary/GE. The schools should be available or can be made available.
Superdelegates: why are lobbyists supers? If you want to make sure a candidate has been in the party a certain time frame then great. However, this election has shown how Supers can be bribed essentially. They are being used to prop up the entrenched candidate instead of choosing the candidate most likely to win in the GE which was supposed to be their purpose. I think they should be tossed. We may nominate a damaged candidate for our side because she is so entrenched with the Supers, not because she is our best hope.
The biggest thing that gets me is that we know a lot of "irregularities" happened this year, but virtually nobody gets caught and it just happens again the next cycle. Election fraud should be investigated like it was a bank robbery. People caught caging, purging, stripping, flipping, electioneering, giving out false voter information, etc should get the same penalty as robbing a bank. Hackers should have a stiffer penalty, since they effect the whole precinct (or more). Those who collude even bigger sentences. Every victim should have a quick and easy way to fix the situation so they can vote and have their vote counted before the official tally.