I moved from one county to another in the same state between the last two presidential elections. Three months before the 24 election I get a letter from my old county saying I need to prove my disability or vote in person. No idea what that was about, because you don’t need to be disabled to vote by mail in this state. They obviously knew I moved five hours away because I changed my address everywhere and it was directly mailed to me, not forwarded to me.
So I wrote them a nice letter back saying I had moved and had already changed my registration to my new county. One month before the election all my friends had gotten their mail in ballots, but I hadn’t. Turns out my voter registration was canceled in my new county by the old one. So I re-registered, took my new ballot home and filled it out. Then I took it to the courthouse to file, and guess what? My voter registration had been canceled again. I still have no idea if my ballot was even counted, but this county was one that was blue all the way down except for president
I voted by mail in '22 from my new address with zero issues from the old one. So I’m extremely suspicious at the length that someone went to in order to discourage my vote last year. I’m positive it happened to more people than just me
Americans should use more paper ballots, instead of using methods that people don’t understand and cannot prove is accurate
We do. The machines print a paper ballot. The ballot is recorded electronically as well, but the ballot is inserted by the voter into a locked container.
The thing is, we don’t always count the paper ballots by hand. We only do manual counts if the race in a particular voting district is very close.
There were a lot of districts that voted for Trump in numbers just large enough to avoid these manual recounts. A suspicious amount, some might say.
Some states do it this way. Other states do it all electronically (fewer now than in the past, thankfully). Other states do it all on paper and do the counting with offline counting machines, then spot check some precincts at random. Some do it by mail entirely on paper.
And that’s the big reason why this line of inquiry is nonsense. The entire country showed a huge shift to the right, not just the swing states or the states that are more vulnerable. That’s 51 entirely separate election systems that you’d have to manipulate, make sure public information about the election matches exactly, and also not go so far that any independent exit polls show anything fishy either. The scale of conspiracy to do it in even one state, make no mistakes, and have no one leak is hard to believe. Doing it across the entire country? You’re going to need a lot more than “I feel like the numbers are fishy” to be convincing. The conservatives were wrong when they said 2020 was rigged, and anyone saying 2024 was rigged is equally wrong.
It varies a lot by state. Washington primarily uses mail-in paper ballots. I love never having to visit a polling location. (In-person voting is an option here, but everyone I know votes by mail).
