US Politics: Locking Up the Vote!

[aceluby]

Just checked my ballot status and it was accepted Oct 7th.  Kind of a pain since we registered at our new house and asked for a mail in ballot at the same time, so we had to jump through the non-registered hoops, but honestly those were dead simple instructions to follow.  Glad to know everything went as expected.

[Zorral]

21 minutes ago, argonak said:

Don't forget also they had to figure out how to Teach 20- 30 kids remotely via a computer screen without any extra training or budget.   Another huge failure of the Federal Government.  The Dept of Education should have spent March through June figuring out a nationwide tele-education plan that could be rolled out as an option to every school in the country.  

Yes~ how did I manage to leave out that?  We all had to learn to do this at whatever level of education, do it in hours, sometimes, a few days, and then figure out simultaneously how to adapt the syllabus and materials to the entirely unfamiliar format -- though some of us, as in the universities and colleges' programs of music and other performing arts had it a lot easier than the rest because the technology was already in use as a matter of course, as well has having even, often, as with many of the programs at institutions like NYU, an entire roster of professionals in music, television, film who adjunct teach, and the students themselves who were all about this technology.  So those in these departments tended to have it a lot easier than many or most in other departments and programs.  And absolutely easier than those in pre-K through 12, especially those in the public schools and those who teach and do therapy for the learning challenged, including the kids who are autistic, and who were learning to finally talk -- and that cannot be done Distance.

And then -- to add insult, as the fall rolled around, the real estate institutions, er, universities, etc., as, o say, just for a single but notorious instance, was determined the professors come back and do it f2f in these non-ventilated over crowded classrooms.  When other schools had already shown that by-and-large (there are some exceptions who did it right) the students at this level themselves utterly refuse to observe any and all safety protocols and had to close down again, sometimes within two days of convening the fall semester.

[Guy Kilmore]

27 minutes ago, aceluby said:

Just checked my ballot status and it was accepted Oct 7th.  Kind of a pain since we registered at our new house and asked for a mail in ballot at the same time, so we had to jump through the non-registered hoops, but honestly those were dead simple instructions to follow.  Glad to know everything went as expected.

My ballot is in and ready to be counted.  It feels nice that it is done.

[Martell Spy]

Yeah, people are definitely tired hearing from all these idiots who got it wrong, like Trump and DeSantis.

 

Trump Blames ‘Fauci And These Idiots’ For His Own Coronavirus Ineptitude
“People are tired of Covid,” the president complained on a call with campaign staff.

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/trump-fauci-and-these-idiots-coronavirus_n_5f8db57ac5b67da85d208b7a

Quote

 

President Donald Trump on Monday lashed out at medical experts and complained about people being tired of hearing about COVID-19, as the confirmed death toll in the U.S. ticked closer to 220,000 and the spread of the disease continued to accelerate. 

Trump made the comments on a call with campaign staffers, seeking to pass blame for the pandemic and seemingly lamenting his inability to shift the national conversation.

“People are tired of Covid,” Trump said. “People are tired of hearing Fauci and these idiots, all these idiots who got it wrong.”

“Every time he goes on television, there’s always a bomb, but there’s a bigger bomb if you fire him,” Trump added. “This guy’s a disaster.”

The president was referring to Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s leading infectious disease expert and a member of the White House coronavirus task force. 

 

 

[Maithanet]

I got a confirmation email that my ballot was received.  Also my former college roommate says that he and his wife are dropping off their absentee ballots for Biden today.  This is much more important than my own vote, because they live in Florida. 

But I do take some credit for this, because he was a disaffected Sanders supporter who back in March pledged not to vote for Biden.  But after many hours of political discussions, he came around to the idea that Trump has to be stopped before anything that Sanders wants to do can possibly happen.  So I'm happy with that. 

[argonak]

7 minutes ago, Martell Spy said:

Yeah, people are definitely tired hearing from all these idiots who got it wrong, like Trump and DeSantis.

 

Trump Blames ‘Fauci And These Idiots’ For His Own Coronavirus Ineptitude
“People are tired of Covid,” the president complained on a call with campaign staff.

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/trump-fauci-and-these-idiots-coronavirus_n_5f8db57ac5b67da85d208b7a

 

The guy who refused to listen to Fauci trying to blame Fauci?  Of course he is.  I don't think it will stick though, its too late.  Corona is the one thing Trump can't unstick from himself.

If Trump had just done the smart play and made Fauci Corona Virus Tzar, and then let him do the job, we'd probably have at least 150,000 less dead and he'd be cruising to re-election.  But even when he put Pence "in charge" he still couldn't resist taking the limelight and running things (into the ground).   He's just so. . . him.  He couldn't be anyone else.

[Fury Resurrected]

6 minutes ago, argonak said:

The guy who refused to listen to Fauci trying to blame Fauci?  Of course he is.  I don't think it will stick though, its too late.  Corona is the one thing Trump can't unstick from himself.

If Trump had just done the smart play and made Fauci Corona Virus Tzar, and then let him do the job, we'd probably have at least 150,000 less dead and he'd be cruising to re-election.  But even when he put Pence "in charge" he still couldn't resist taking the limelight and running things (into the ground).   He's just so. . . him.  He couldn't be anyone else.

It is also very very bad optics when you can’t control Covid in a single building while you are supposed to control it for the entire country.

[Fez]

8 minutes ago, Maithanet said:

But I do take some credit for this, because he was a disaffected Sanders supporter who back in March pledged not to vote for Biden.  But after many hours of political discussions, he came around to the idea that Trump has to be stopped before anything that Sanders wants to do can possibly happen.  So I'm happy with that. 

Hopefully all Sanders supporters are like this lady:

 

[Maithanet]

One thing I'm seeing in absentee ballot returns in that Dems are returning them at a higher rate than Reps, but on the maps, Republican counties are the ones that have the highest return rate.  I have to assume that Democrats in more Republican areas feel more comfortable voting absentee than going into a polling area. 

Not sure there's anything to glean from that, but it's interesting.

[Centrist Simon Steele]

11 hours ago, Fury Resurrected said:

I have that kind of job where I do hours of work at home nightly for which I am not paid. I do not recommend this model (or my profession itself) for most people. I would not consider it low paying in my case currently, but it is in the first few (or several) years while one establishes themself. You also have to touch and shave strangers, which is suboptimal. However, it is the greatest of all jobs except for baby walrus caretaker at the Alaska Sea Life Center. 

A non-related note first: I think this is a worthy discussion for this thread. Equal access to schooling has huge political implications. The better our education system, the more informed and active our future citizens will be in the political process. I put this here because I can't figure out how to insert text above Fury's quote box. 

Hi Fury--my work is the same, and ultimately, I agree--I think this is true of a lot of careers. We take work home, we manage what we need to do, etc. And this is why I hate making that connection of compulsory schooling as job training (but I did, so let me walk it back a bit). First, as a former Language Arts teacher, trying to tie my classroom content and skills to future careers is a losing battle. Writing essays, reading literature--I was always trying to find ways to make it more relevant and meaningful to their out-of-school experiences right now, as opposed to some career in the future. In fact, I'd argue adolescents in general struggle with the "you need all this to be good workers" or even "good members of society." That seems an infinite amount of time away for a significant percentage of middle and high school students.

11 hours ago, Guy Kilmore said:

 

Tywin,

I respect your intelligence, but, it feels like in this conversation you are arguing from an emotional place and not an educated one.  In my work I interact with, throughout the year, probably around 40 to 50 teachers, school psychologists, school behaviorists, IEP specialists, school social workers, therapists (community and school based), and psychiatrists (community and school based).  Homework modification is something that is done frequently to mitigate psychological distress, caused by said homework.  Where do you think I got the information from regarding this topic?  From the professionals I work with.

Simon, please correct me if I am wrong, was also a teacher for several years before going on for his masters and PhD in the educational sciences.  He comes from an informed background.

Right now?  You haven't presented a supported argument.  You basically set-up a straw-man about needing to address socio-economic matters to improve education.  No one has said otherwise.  (Funny enough, a conversation about homework is one of the many tendrils of that issue, but I digress.) And then have presented no information to even support your position.  Just, lol, I talked to some friends.  Right now, you aren't really arguing in good faith.  I mean, I had more of a rigorous discussion with myself presenting at least some information, with research, that shows homework is either meh, to detrimental, and then information on some of the positive aspects of homework, again with supporting research.  (ETA:  And this is an area that isn't even my expertise, I have an idea of how much I don't know.  I don't think you do.  If you were legit curious, Simon would be a great person to get information from, because he has a mixture of direct, practical experience with higher education.)

At this point, I am kind of out of calories to talk shop with someone during my relaxation time, especially when it feels like they aren't even having a discussion in good faith.

Thanks for being much more thorough (and kind) than I was. I should not let past squabbles with @Tywin et al. determine how I respond to him. Tywin--you deserve better than that, and I apologize.

Guy--that's correct. I taught in public school for 8 years, then traditioned into postsecondary teaching while working on my master's in teaching secondary English, and now working on my PhD in ed psych. (I just passed my comprehensive exams proposal defense this morning--what a load off. I have no doubt the stress and anxiety didn't help me with how I responded to this argument). 

One thing I've been able to reflect on since leaving secondary ed is that a lot of things we do as teachers that we truly believe are in the students best interest are things we don't always critically evaluate. Homework is the prime example, in my opinion. We believe it's good because that's how it's always been done. We use the same logic that our parents and teachers used on us. Also, there's a stigma surrounding teachers who try to break that mold. In my last few years of public school teaching, I'd begun being exposed to research on homework being ineffective and, worse, harmful to students who need the most support. This occurred at the time our school went to a 1 to 1 technology model--every student has a Chromebook assigned to them in the school. The writing in my class went from a mix of students who had computer access at home, and students who hand wrote everything to all students using Google docs and cloud storage in Google Classroom. This transition, coupled with the research, was a lightbulb for me. For years, students would come to me saying they lost their homework. And of course teachers are snarky to these habitual defenders. "Oh, did you lose it in between your locker and this classroom? Oh, did you forget it at home?" All sarcastically indicating the student was lying.

When everything went to the cloud, that's the lightbulb moment I mentioned. Those habitual offenders suddenly had work they completed in class (and sometimes at home), and it wasn't getting lost. I had been teaching and accepting the widely held belief among teachers (this belief existing for generations) that students who didn't have their homework at school, didn't do it. What was really happening was that these students didn't have the same supports at home as more affluent peers. Their parents loved them, wanted them to do well, but their parents worked non-traditional work shifts, couldn't afford technology in their homes, couldn't always be there to reinforce the value of schoolwork. This is an issue of inequity, and it's something we can fix.

Those last two years of no homework meant I radically redesigned our curriculum. We read a ton in class, but I never sent it home with them. We read short stories and fewer novels. If we read a novel, we'd work through it in class. What started happening is that a lot of kids would go home and keep reading anyway! I remember one student who came to me once and said his friends were accusing him of cheating for going home with his Chromebook and listening to the audio of a classroom text on Youtube. He said he liked the story and kept wanting to hear it. I told him to absolutely keep doing this. That was it. And his reading scores skyrocketed that year. He never felt "in trouble" or "ashamed" of coming to class, because we completed everything in class.

Sorry for the long reply, but I just have to emphasize this point as I see it as a truly political one: Low-socioeconomic status and often race are barriers that subvert equity. These kids will grow up and learn how to work (and bring work home if needed). These lessons are not why they're in school in the first place. I teach future English teachers now, and so many of them love this point of view, and they take it with them to their new teaching careers after graduation. I never tell them they must do this, but I think once you research it, talk it through, the answer is obvious: homework is extremely harmful (and has life-long impacts) to the students we need to help the most.

I think the models of education like in Finland are such excellent frameworks we could adapt for our kiddos.

ETA: On my self-bolded point above. Homework as we know it is a cultural construct as well. It comes from white middle class and upper middle class values, which is fine, but that culture is not representative of our rapidly changing demographics. We have to start rethinking a lot of education. If some let me make changes, the first thing I'd do is cut the school day in half. Kids are in class in the morning or afternoon (their choice), and the rest of the day they are working with mentors relevant to their culture. The issue is, of course, the hyper-capitalist nature of this society makes mentorship like this hard to achieve. So maybe you'd keep them in school, but not chained to a desk. Teachers would teach less classes and we'd retool their contract to be something like 60 percent teaching, 20 percent research and scholarship, and 20 percent service (this is the higher ed model), but the service could be those mentorship roles.

10 hours ago, Ser Reptitious said:

I get the sense that he doesn't want to do the homework on this! 

And rightly so! Homework sucks.

[Ormond]

12 minutes ago, Maithanet said:

One thing I'm seeing in absentee ballot returns in that Dems are returning them at a higher rate than Reps, but on the maps, Republican counties are the ones that have the highest return rate.  I have to assume that Democrats in more Republican areas feel more comfortable voting absentee than going into a polling area. 

Not sure there's anything to glean from that, but it's interesting.

I don't know if you saw a post I made a week or so ago, but I heard some leaders of the Democratic party in Wisconsin say something similar happened in their primary and Supreme Court election earlier this year -- the biggest increase in turnout was among Democrats who lived in predominantly Republican areas. I think there is something about Trump that prompts Democratic leaning people who normally wouldn't vote because of feeling like "what's the use in my neighborhood" to overcome that. 

[Centrist Simon Steele]

2 hours ago, Zorral said:

TEACHERS. Low pay to start with, then enormous numbers of hours of work for NO PAY, plus very many of them are actually buying school supplies for the kids out of their own pockets, and even cleaning supplies for the school, out of their own low pay pockets -- and that even includes towels and soap for the lavatories -- and are cleaning those lavatories themselves.  This is going on all over the USA, and that was BEFORE the virus.  For years it's been like that.

Additionally, now they are expected to know how to handle a gun and shooter lockdown defense and offense -- and take this training at their own expense, and even, it has most certainly been expected and demanded BUY the damned guns and ammo, while putting their lives out as first line of defense of others' kids.  And NOW, further being the first line of putting their lives at very great risk, additionally learning and performing all sorts of medical procedures to keep out kids safe in the schools.

 

Ugh, I remember when it was floated in our school--"what do you all think about carrying guns?" I think it was after Sandy Hook. It was the most silence I'd ever heard in a staff meeting (and attended by the superintendent). I volunteered first and said, "I was in the military for 8 years, I am comfortable with guns, but if that became a requirement here, I'd find another profession. That is the worst solution." Superintendent didn't care for it, but a lot of teachers later thanked me. 

All this to say, I don't think these are virtues of a profession (taking work home, buying supplies). We train pre-service teachers to understand this is the reality of their chosen profession though. Much like I think homework for school should go away, I also wish we could make professional unpaid homework go away as well.

[Varysblackfyre321]

1 hour ago, DMC said:

Yes, as far as I can tell that is the link I used.  Sorry for the confusion - I meant the 2016 numbers.

So I'm not seeing the need to increase the worry off of just that.

Are the requested mail-in ballots proportional to what we’d expect/hope to see in this election cycle? 

Genuinely asking I've tried to see if anytthing shows that but haven't found luck.

[DMC]

3 minutes ago, Varysblackfyre321 said:

So I'm not seeing the need to increase the worry off of just that.

The point there is that Pennsylvania is comparatively very unprepared to deal with "advanced" ballots.  Not only compared to FL, AZ, NC that have done this at high rates before, but even Michigan had about a quarter of their vote in 2016 as advanced ballots and Wisconsin was somewhere in the low 20s off the top of my head.  PA's rate was in the single digits in 2016.  So the worry is it follows they will encounter more difficulties and errors in administering and counting such ballots, relatively speaking - not due to voter suppression but simply the fact that any time a large organization(s) has to take on such an added burden there is heightened possibilities for unintentional incompetence and mistakes.

[Varysblackfyre321]

Just now, DMC said:

The point there is that Pennsylvania is comparatively very unprepared to deal with "advanced" ballots. 

Oh okay, now I'm getting you.

Yeah I totally agree man. 

[Fragile Bird]

Dr. Fauci has really gotten under Trump’s skin, more than ever before. He has attacked Fauci repeatedly today, even saying that if he had listened to Fauci 500,000 Americans would be dead. I gather Dr. Fauci appeared on 60 Minutes yesterday and pissed the man off.

It’s National Good Character week or some such thing, where being positive and honest and kind is being recommended. “Trump” tweeted about the week yesterday. It was so obviously not a Trump tweet, lol.

[Maithanet]

10 minutes ago, Varysblackfyre321 said:

So I'm not seeing the need to increase the worry off of just that.

Are the requested mail-in ballots proportional to what we’d expect/hope to see in this election cycle? 

Genuinely asking I've tried to see if anytthing shows that but haven't found luck.

The problem is that it's very hard to know what we should expect/hope, since 2020 is so unique.  Polls clearly indicate that Dems are more likely to vote absentee and early, while Trump voters prefer to vote on election day.  We are seeing the first half of that equation come true, with Democrats both requesting and returning absentees at a higher rate than republicans, and beating Republicans in early-in person votes (although in states with very high absentee numbers this second part isn't always true). 

It's very clear Democrats are overperforming Republicans thus far, but that is what everyone expected them to do.  But it's almost impossible to say whether Democrats are overperforming "enough". 

Winning elections is about two things:  turnout and persuasion.  Early voting data can give you an (incomplete) picture of turnout, because you don't know how many people who vote early would have just voted on election day anyway.  But early voting data tells you nothing at all about persuasion.  If (as polls currently show) about 3% more Trump voters are voting Biden than Clinton voters switching to Trump, then there's no way to see that.  Likewise the huge number of independents/3rd party voters showing up to vote early could be backing one party or the other in overwhelming numbers.  Polls can give us some idea what they're going to do, but until the votes are counted we won't know for sure. 

[Martell Spy]

Heavy turnout in King County WA most definitely. Just dropped my ballot off at the public library as I have done since the state went mail voting. I usually park and walk it up to the box. I couldn't this time as cars were lining up and I was forced to do the same.

[Ran]

A spate of polls after the NY Post smear, and for the most part it (so far) seems to be having no real impact (except big movement on TIPP, which is kind of a giveaway of their partisan weighting, IMO):

 

[DMC]

17 minutes ago, Ran said:

A spate of polls after the NY Post smear, and for the most part it (so far) seems to be having no real impact

Yeah file this under completely unsurprising.  This is another facet of the difference in Trump's incumbency when compared to 2016 that underscores why the two cycles are so different.  It's hard to even conceive of anything like the Comey letter having that much of an eleventh hour effect on the race.  The only thing that I think could possibly substantially move the needle like that at this point is if Biden got covid or some other serious health emergency.