04-03-2020, 05:15 AM
(04-02-2020, 05:37 PM)Bob Butler 54 Wrote:(04-02-2020, 01:33 PM)David Horn Wrote: Let's ask about the worst case. The pandemic is still raging, or seesawing through an ongoing pattern of flares-up that are suppressed by stay-at-home orders. In either case, having a convention is somewhere between ridiculous and insane. Now what? For that matter, what happens if the remaining primaries are delayed into nonexistence? And what about the general election?
No good options I can see. Yes, we can have a general election by mail, but I doubt the GOP will go along unless rural areas are being hit hard. If 2000 and 2016 were minority elections, 2020 might be even worse. Will the majority electorate stand for that, once the pandemic is under control?
It isn’t clear that the pandemic will be clearly under control by the general election. People seem not to be taking it seriously.
I won’t miss the conventions. The balloon manufacturers might. Would the parties hire air time to play reruns of the balloons falling from past conventions? Things look like Trump vs Biden. How many people are hoping that Sanders could rally, or a draft Cuomo movement could catch? Could committees write platforms as well as the convention members could?
Democracy would take a hit if the Republicans blocked voting by mail. Trump won’t care, and would find an excuse if it looks to his advantage to go either way. People could get mad if he does try to block it, and tend to vote against Trump? Ballots could be sent by census data or if you are already a registered voter? If you can’t respond to the census, there would be another way?
It is no too late to stop either Trump or Biden from winning their nominations. Nothing says that the conventions cannot be virtual, as political parties are largely unregulated. Democrats have an edge in technology because Democrats are generally more adept at using it. Figure that much money will be going into personal infrastructure to make possible "virtual" communication because people will want the simulation of face-to-face contact.
Voting by mail or even by internet is technologically possible with existing technology that includes face recognition. Voting by mail seems to have few problems built in. It is easier, more energy-efficient (nobody must drive to the polling place), and unfriendly to voter fraud. What will be more difficult will be canvassing. Dead people voting? In my township the township administrator reads the obituaries in the local newspaper and deletes the local deceased from the voting rolls. (I asked about that after my father died in October 2016; he had been removed, so had an absentee ballot come from him it would have been destroyed. I suspect that much the same is done elsewhere).
A plague is no more of an excuse for canceling an election than is a Crisis War. Congressional elections proceeded as usual in 1862 and 1942 and Presidential elections were held on schedule in 1944. The military did what it could to ensure that soldiers and sailors were able to vote in their states' elections if eligible to vote (the voting age was then 21). If Trump tries some stunt to cancel or delay the Presidential election or to declare himself the winner unilaterally, then he will be slapped down.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.