Quote:
Originally Posted by Manhattanboy
is it just me or is the concept of "mail in balloting" new to this US election cycle?
In past elections limited numbers of absentee ballots were allowed for overseas armed forces personnel and ex-pats. The numbers were small.
In this election huge numbers of voters did not vote in person and I am starting to think there may be something to the risk of serious fraud.
Maybe future elections should be limited to in-person voting with limited exceptions. Like..... in Canada?
EDIT: I get that this was done because of Covid. Should these votes not have been counted in advance?
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Of course they should have been counted in advance, but the Republicans in those States changed the laws (or didn't allow the laws to be changed, as the case may be) so that any mail-in or votes that were cast early could not be counted before Election Day.
They did that because they wanted exactly what has happened over the last week to happen. Trump would take a lead in the swing states in votes cast on Election Day, then as the early votes were counted, Biden would take over the lead.
If the early votes had been counted as they arrived, their counts would have been announced first and Biden would have had a huge early lead and everyone would have known it was a runaway win for him a week ago.
There are security measures in place to ensure mailed ballots are secure and untampered and were received from the legal, registered voter. Oregon has voted exclusively by mail for over 20 years and I believe they haven't seen any significant increase in election fraud, while also seeing a significant increase in voter turnout.