I'm still not gonna waste two hours on anything edited by Project Veritas. But the link below suggests that the recording doesn't add anything to the story prior to that, but adds that the total of "late arriving but postmarked by Nov 3rd" ballots in Pennsylvania were only around 10,000 (not enough to swing the state; I don't even know if they were even counted yet). Further, Erie had only 129 such and the whistleblower's facility had only 2 of these.
https://factcheck.thedispatch.com/p/did-a-postal-worker-witness-ballot
I don't intend to single you out, but it sounded to me that the claim was a dig at Veritas rather than at Brad. I totally understand criticizing Veritas - there's a lot there to criticize - but if you're going to make substantial arguments against them, then you have to read them. Dismissing them without reading, and citing liberal sources isn't convincing to anyone who might believe Project Veritas in the first place.
Listening to their two hour edited recording is not
reading them; I read a lot of sources, including posts here. So I'm willing to read a variety of opinions on Project Veritas, and even their press releases, but the consensus about their honesty is not good. A 2 hour video is like the immense wall of text posts that I routinely skip over. The summary I link to above? That's from an apparently conservative leaning website, although the factcheck part of it may be pretty even-handed; I didn't form an opinion on that, especially since it wasn't necessary to my point.
EDITED TO ADD: jhkim, care to acknowledge my correction of you? https://www.therpgsite.com/the-rpgpundit-s-own-forum/2020-election-commentary/msg1151983/?topicseen#msg1151983
Both parties have had recent opportunity to pass through meaningful election reform with undivided control.
If the Democrats thought that Republicans were hugely cheating, they could have passed election reform legislation during Obama's first two years.
If the Republicans thought that Democrats were hugely cheating, they could have passed election reform legislation during Trump's first two years and/or launched investigations to prove the fraudulent votes in 2016.
Instead, it seems that the existing system is roughly balanced between Republicans and Democrats, and neither are pushing for any major reforms - at most minor tweaks. Rather than constantly bitching only about the other side, we should fix the system.
That would require that Democrats recognized the danger 10 to 12 years ago, before the wave of Republican gerrymandering after the 2010 election. It is a mystery why the all-Republican government of 2017-2018 did not fix the problems (like shortages in the national stockpile for pandemics) the Trump administration has blamed Obama for.
But elections are run by states, not the federal government; Democrats in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania asked for changes to the vote counting to avoid the current issues by counting mailed ballots earlier, and the unrepresentative Republican legislatures refused to do so. If the mailed ballots that are counted last are mostly for Biden, it's because Trump discouraged his voters from using mailed ballots (at least in those states; Florida it was OK, for some unexplained reason).
Gerrymandering is an old and well-understood problem, though, so Democrats should have understood the danger of it. It seems to me that it wasn't a priority. I suspect it's because gerrymandering tends to help those who are ahead. So while Democrats were ahead, they felt that gerrymandering was not a major problem for them.
The scale of gerrymandering after 2010 was much greater than before; the Supreme Court jumped in to toss parts of the Voting Rights Act; Republican-controlled states passed numerous voter suppression laws, like overly strict voter ID and reducing polling places and hours, that would be difficult for federal legislation to forestall; and Republican minority legislatures have routinely acted in lame duck sessions to strip power from incoming Democratic governors. (It's a flaw that Democrats never believe that Republicans will do anything to hold power.)
How would the 111th Congress (2009-2010) have achieved any solution to a problem that they didn't know about yet? I think the Democrats made mistakes then, not least among them trying to get any cooperation from even token Republicans, and they had far more urgent issues (like dealing with the Great Recession and the promised health care legislation).
By contrast, the problems Trump inherited were generally caused by Republican intransigence in Congress; the Obama administration requested funding for the national stockpile in preparation for a pandemic, and Republicans in Congress blocked it. The Trump administration never did anything about it except to blame Obama for something they didn't fix in 2 years of full control. Democrats proposed funding for election security; the Republicans were not interested. The Republican candidate in 2016 (the guy who has never won the popular vote) ran on a platform of certainty that the election was rigged, but he and his party never proposed any legislation to address it.
Do you honestly believe your both-sides-ism, or do you just do that to get along here? I don't think either reflects well on you.
