They actually said that they could have handled it better and made some procedural changes.

No one thinks they are saints. Give us a minute to celebrate having a non-geriatric candidate with a vp pick that isn’t an incel, abuser, robot, or anti-lgbt closeted homosexual.

While Roe v Wade may have been legally about privacy, abortion rights are also absolutely a body autonomy issue ideologically.

We had comments there too, maybe try an interpretive dance to spice things up?

Fair enough.

Maybe, but that’s because the rest of us did think he was to old. One doesn’t invalidate the other.

If Biden is on the ballot, I will vote for him. I also want him off.

But, frankly, we need to scare the pants off the Democratic party if there is going to be any chance they change their behavior.

Where are the five great younger candidates they have have been fostering to be ready for something like this? Nowhere, because they keep putting all their effort into one entrenched candidate and then force them through no matter what. Look how disastrous it was when they kept pushing Hillary when Bernie was doing so well, she lost. Now so many people are saying “no” to Biden, what should we expect will happen?

If history is our judge, we’re going to lose, whether we can afford to or not. Because even if we supported Biden right now with solidarity, a lot of people are going to not vote for him, whether we like it or not.

Would it be better if the Democratic party didn’t see how unhappy people were and we all pretended it would be ok and told them we would just vote for any candidate they give us no matter how bad?

I wish I had good advice for how to connect with people after the school years, that’s just difficult.

If there is one lesson I could teach my younger self, it would be to have several low commitment relationships while I was younger to learn what is “normal”. Once you start making murder pacts, it’s usually too late.

Not if you cut the power.

Yeah, they agreed with you. Their point is that they agreed with you. Sometimes people just share their thoughts and aren’t trying to start a fight.

People have tried to poll me. I ask them to remove my number from their list. I’m not sure exactly sure who they are polling, but it’s mainly people who want to be part of polling, which I assume skews the results.

Is that because the only people hand counting now are regressives?

There’s usually a four prong power connector on the top left corner of the motherboard. I always forget that one, nothing works without it plugged in too.

Every state has it’s own laws and every set of equipment is a little different, so each county can be a little different too , but the basics are that you pull a few scan batches, count them by hand, and then compare to what the computer says. If the two ever don’t match, you know you have a problem and you count again to make sure the problem wasn’t the humans recounting. Then you check to make sure they weren’t scanned wrong. If you still have a problem after that, the auditor should be calling the secretary of state as fast as they can and I would guess the goal would be to get a new tabulator in there ASAP to start fresh on a completely different system.

With regard to machines with no paper trail, counties can choose to be as OCD or laid back as the law and their elected official (the auditor) wants them to be; the auditor is theoretically there to represent the interests of the people and make sure the system is trustworthy.

I’m my county the April election was small enough that they ended up recounting every single ballot as part off the audit since it was only about 200 ballots for one taxing district.

You should also be able to observe if you want to, contact your county and ask how to get on the list and you can observe first-hand exactly how they do it.

I’ll also point out before I go, that the audits of the machine show that the system looks to be working right, but when you batch audit a hand count all you can do is verify that one batch because humans are not a consistent process.

They couldn’t even hand count an election of 127 people correctly. Imagine how big the errors would have been with thousands of votes.

The fact is that this isn’t being counted by full time well-trained accountants, but by temporary and on-call employees at best, and lots of them are retirees, who can afford not to have a full-time gig.

Hand counting requires more blind faith trust than a machine you can easily audit at any time.

It’s not just about the speed, it’s about an inhuman level of consistency and memory that the machine provides.

You aren’t imagining things. We take social cues from others. If you have friends who are weird, you will feel more free to be weird. If politicians have to hide their racism to work with someone above them, others will follow suit. If they don’t have to hide it… same.

Yeah, for us they were pretty much straight up too.

A lot of men are desperate to connect with other people and for validation.

There’s a route you take when you walk to the front door, there’s a hand you open it with, there’s a way you shift your weight as you open it. Yes, usually going to the pastry shop on the weekend can be a habit too, but there really are tons your never think about.

When someone calls your name, do you look or not? Fast or slow? When someone tells you their name do you repeat it to yourself in your head? Any of these things you do consistently without thinking are habits, and anything you do consistently through mental effort can be too, even if they aren’t automatic.