Marv's number is close, and the correction strengthens his point. Eight states plus D.C. mail a ballot to every registered voter with no request. Roughly twenty-eight or twenty-nine more let any eligible voter request one. So the figure is nearer thirty-six or thirty-seven than thirty-three, with thirteen or fourteen still requiring an excuse, and about a third of all ballots cast nationally arriving by mail.
The distinction between the two groups is where the Portal does its work. States upload batches of mail voters and their envelope barcodes for verification. Per the whistleblower disclosure, the system is built to a zero-percent failure standard: if one ballot in a batch of ten thousand fails to match, because a voter married or moved, the entire batch goes back to the state to be cured, with no clear appeal. In the eight automatic states, the batch is the electorate. The number of exposed voters is not a projection. It is arithmetic. Marv is right that the administration is arranging for the Postal Service to hold the bag, and the last few days confirm it. USPS now describes the Portal as something election officials may voluntarily familiarize themselves with so they can decide whether and how to use it. Nobody orders a disenfranchisement. A tool is offered, an agency stands behind it, jurisdictions adopt it or are pressed into adopting it, and when ballots fail to arrive, the fault distributes itself across fifty administrations and one rushed IT project. Charles says this is being done openly. I would put it the other way. This is what it looks like when it does not have to be done openly. On the LL.D.: the Twentieth Amendment is one sentence, and nobody needs a degree to read it. I raised it because Charles's conclusion rested on incumbents staying in place, and they do not. The seats go empty. I pressed it because the corrected version is worse than his, not better. Now the postal worker thing, since Mark asked. Consider what has actually damaged this scheme in the past week. Not a resolution, not a demonstration, not a brief. A postal insider documented what the system does to real mail and handed it to counsel. That disclosure is now the evidentiary spine of the press coverage, the Senate demand, and the litigation. One employee with access to the process accomplished more in a week than the organized left has managed all year. That is the entire content of the proposal. Not that letter carriers will strike against the Portal. That members handle this mail, will see the returned batches before anyone outside the building does, and are the only people positioned to say what happened, where, and on whose instruction, while it is still happening. The timing is the argument. The failure does not occur on November 3. It occurs in late September and October, while ballots are being mailed and rejected batches sit in state offices. By election night the disenfranchisement is complete. A strategy that waits for the streets is a strategy that arrives after the event. The demonstration Charles expects will be a demonstration about something specific, or it will be a mood, and what it is about will have been documented by somebody in September or not at all. Charles's fourth point I take, and it concedes more than he intends. If reformists and communists are working the same terrain here, then the clause about capitalism is not what distinguishes the position. What distinguishes it is whether anyone we can name is in a position to do anything by October. -- Tony -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group. View/Reply Online (#43277): https://groups.io/g/marxmail/message/43277 Mute This Topic: https://groups.io/mt/121053097/21656 -=-=- POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. #4 Do not exceed five posts a day. -=-=- Group Owner: [email protected] Unsubscribe: https://groups.io/g/marxmail/leave/13617172/21656/1316126222/xyzzy [[email protected]] -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
