Buck Randall said:I think it's always important to start with what we can agree on. For that, I'll say that free and open elections are the cornerstone of democracy. Every legal citizen should have the right to vote, and fortunately, we have that in this country, by law.
Here comes the part that you might object to: We don't have equal opportunity voting in this country. I'll use the city of Milwaukee as an example because I'm quite familiar, but there are many similar cities in this country. This spring, around 18,000 ballots were cast in person in Milwaukee. The average wait at the polls was 90 minutes to 2 hours. I'm not a mathematician, but it's pretty clear that there weren't enough polling places open in Milwaukee to accommodate reasonable voter turnout for a city of 500,000 people. Due to Covid-19, it wasn't even clear which polling places would be staffed prior to the election.
This was a known issue prior to election day. The GOP-controlled Senate refused to offer up any solutions or entertain those proposed by the Democrat governor. Moving the election would be too expensive, they said, and mail-in ballots allow too much fraud.
Here's where we can agree again: Voter fraud is bad.
However, there's no evidence that vote-by-mail increases voter fraud. Some states are already very accommodating of voting by mail, and numerous studies have shown no increase in voter fraud. Even if you wrongly presume that fraud will increase, there is no partisan slant to it. Conservatives and liberals are both equally willing and capable of cheating.
When I see our president (who votes by mail, by the way) claim that mail in voting is crooked, it makes my blood boil. He knows the facts and has access to advanced internal polling data. He doesn't fear the few hundred fraudulent ballots that will potentially be cast. He fears that more convenient voting will increase voter turnout in urban centers, where he is unpopular.
Now, in my opinion, deterring a voter from casting a ballot because it is unreasonably inconvenient is just as bad as a ballot being cast fraudulently. In either case, it is an attempt to subvert the will of the people of this country. It takes me less than 5 minutes to vote in the small town where I live. There's no reason it shouldn't be that way everywhere. If we can't afford to open enough polling places to make that happen, then we need to offer a reasonable alternative.
BLM and the media have rightfully been pointing out this hypocrisy and demanding change. Though some media sources focus only on the mobs in the street, there's much more to BLM.
You will not get two people on this Board to agree on anything. With the exception that cattle prices are too low and that the Packers are evil. :tiphat:
