(iii) Proposed provisions specifying that the USPS shall not transmit mail-in or absentee ballots from any individual unless those individuals have been enrolled on a State-specific list described in subsection (b)(iv) of this section with the USPS pursuant to this subsection.
I don’t think the anti-GOP sentiment is confined to elderly liberal voters.
Also, Eight states – California, Colorado, Hawaii, Nevada, Oregon, Utah, Vermont, and Washington – conduct what is commonly referred to as an all-mail election, or universal mail-in voting. In these states, voting is conducted primarily by mail, and all eligible voters receive a ballot by default
I’m not sure how post offices in these states could even respond.
By laughing and ignoring it, having the Governors of those states countermand it with their own executive orders, just straight up saying that this is plainly obviously unconstitutional.
This is how all of these ridiculous eos should be handled. It’s nuts that everybody is just doing what mango Mussolini decrees.
Its nuts, but this is basically just how fascism works.
More than enough people, politicians and the populace, basically just get stun locked by the pure audacity of ‘you can just do stuff’, as all the ‘norms’ that were never formalized just evaporate.
The response is at first bureacratic, procedural, untill it becomes extremely obvious that the entire strategy of the fascists is to weaponize everything.
Even then, it tends to take a while for most people and politicians to actually begin to react in kind, strategically, seriously, largely because they are afraid of… further destroying the norms that the fascists already destroyed.
Normalcy bias. “It can’t happen here” exceptionalism. Cowardice. Incompetence. Propoganda. Historical illiteracy.
Take your pick.
If state governors were more clever, they’d be coming up with reasons to keep their National Guard busy doing something ‘important’ in their states, literally just to deny them from being mobilized Federally, or make it more procedurally difficult and more of a PR mess for the Feds to do so.
The federal government has no control over voting, it is 100% controlled by the states. The post offices are not legally allowed to do anything to the ballots.
They don’t care what they’re allowed to do. They care about what’s technically feasible. They’re exploiting the fact that they can break the law precisely in ways that empower themselves to be above the law before the law can come back around to them. It’s analogous to crowning Trump king and issuing a decree that the transition from president to king was legitimate. What’s the constitution going to do?
The effect is sowing further distrust in voting by mail and suppressing the vote of people who are being targeted by the government in other areas. In those states anyone who knows citizens who were targeted by ICE could easily assume the same harassment of citizens will happen with mail in votes as well.
Just because it isn’t feasible to implement doesn’t mean the chilling effect won’t happen.
Colorado and Oregon consistently have some of the highest voter turnout in the country.
Idk if this works in practice.
From the GOP perspective, this explains why Colorado is a Democratic island in the otherwise “real American” range states. They probably tell each other that without all the fake, mail-in ballots, Colorado would be as red as Wyoming and Utah.
Colorado isn’t a Democratic island. New Mexico and Arizona are also blue states. Nevada’s solid purple, regularly sending up a mix of Ds and Rs. There’s no shortage of conservatives in Colorado, either. Lauren Boebert is from Colorado, ffs. She’s got an enormous constituency of evangelical lunatic supporters and die-hard Republicans. Trump lost Colorado in 2016 by a Gary Johnson’s margin. It was straight up winnable back under Compassionate Conservative Bush Jr.
Sure. And Democrats keep insisting Texas is winnable if all the non-voters turn out, nevermind how a rising volume of overall voters only ever breaks for Republicans.
Nevertheless, shutting down mail-in voting in Colorado won’t benefit Republicans in any meaningful way.
They can respond by just trashing ALL of the ballots - remember the ruling a month or so ago saying they weren’t liable for shit if they did?
They can. But will they? These post offices are run by the same people doing the voting, after all.
It’s one thing to tell a post office in Utah to trash all the ballots and just hand the keys of state off to the local Mormon Bishopry. Very much another to give the order in Washington State.
All it takes is a few traitors at key points.
That cuts both ways.
Except Dems always play by the rules, to their detriment. I liked Michelle Obama but that “they go low, we go high” shit has been causing problems for far too long.
No they don’t!
They say they do, but they routinely break conventions and norms and laws and constitutional amendments when it’s convenient for them and their donor base.
More often than not, they wait for a Republican to do it first and then just keep on keeping on.
But they don’t follow the rules. They use the rules to excuse why they refuse to enact popular policies. They deflect and defer and soccer-flop.
Obama did drone strikes on children.
Wrong Obama, but let’s put things in perspective here…Trump bombed a girls school in a remote village. Then came back and bombed the rescue effort.
I really wonder what a generation of boys who grow up in a remote village with a shortage of female peers will end up like.
Yep. They’ll sure as fuck break the rules when it comes to preventing a progressive candidate from winning a Democratic primary race.
Good point - “Dems don’t break the rules FIRST” is probably a better way for me to phrase it. But that gets us to the same place. They wouldn’t trash the ballots here until they’d seen proof Repubs did it, and by then it would likely too late to respond tit for tat. Election over; world fucked. But the NEXT time election (in what, 50, 60!years of we’re lucky) we might get something.