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What state has categories for mail voting? I'd like to do research to stay informed. Definitely do not lie on your mail ballot stuff.

Generally speaking, mail votes are considered very safe and respected. I posted a PSA elsewhere in this thread. The ACLU recommends mail voting. But if you prefer voting in person, that's also a great option for you. I recommend doing it early so you don't have to deal with long wait times.

If you have a reason to need to vote by mail, please do more research on your options because as I understand it mail voting is available to all Americans. If you need help with the research, feel free to ask, many of us here would be happy to help.

I would characterize my participation in this thread as PRO early voting, AGAINST voter suppression, and asking questions from your low-effort comments.

RE: Voter suppression This is a very important topic so I'm glad for the discussion.

Voter suppression is most damaging on election day because that's when most of the actions by red states come together. By doing deliberate suppression like reducing the amount of polling locations, sending in older and broken voting machines, and inventing BS laws like prohibiting citizens from giving each other water, the goal is to make Nov 5 particularly gruseome for anyone trying to cast their vote from an urban center like Atlanta. As a result, we routinely see wait times of 12 hours in Atlanta just to cast a vote on election day.

Other efforts towards suppression affect other types of voting. Like the ID requirement and the shifting of mail voting regulations. However, the most damaging of these efforts affect those trying to cast their vote on Nov 5. This is why I recommend that people review their options for their state to vote early, and make a plan to vote as early as possible (in person or by mail).

RE: support for OP This is silly, but I think it's funny that you claim to have reviewed my post history. I've been critical of this poster's memes in this sub a few times and recently too. But why let the facts get in the way of your rant, same as you did in that farm post in which I didn't even comment (what a mess of a thread that was). I only brought it up here because you are doing it again on something important, just ranting on feelings when we are talking about voting. I don't care if you want to rant at anyone on this sub including me, but let's stay on facts when talking about important stuff, please. This is an important election and we are talking about helping people figure out how to cast their vote.

PSA About mail ballots, because I know a lot of people are worried about this stuff.

Voting by mail is safe in the US. Here are some data points:

The ACLU recommends voting by mail https://www.aclu.org/news/voting-rights/voting-by-mail-is-easier-and-safer-than-you-think-heres-how

They would not make that recommendation if they thought your vote could be easily suppressed that way.

The rejection rate of mail ballots is only around 1% https://ballotpedia.org/Election_results,_2020:_Analysis_of_rejected_ballots

Rejections happen typically because the signature on the ballot doesn't match the signature they have on record from your ID (state or driver's license). Another reason is that states can change the requirements, and sometimes voters are not informed on those changes. So make sure you know the latest requirements for your state to avoid problems, and double check that you've followed all steps and your signature matches.

Things to know: You can track your mail ballot. Most states offer online tracking so you can confirm they have it.

You could vote by mail and in person. Check the rules for your state, but in many places they can track your voting and will simply override your mail ballot if you also show up to vote in person. This is done so you can request your mail ballot, and retain the option to go vote in person if you feel like it. Check with your state website if this is an option for you.

Do this stuff early. No reason to delay. Check when your state opens early voting. If you plan to vote in person, going early gives you the best odds at short wait times. If you plan to vote by mail, voting early makes sure there's plenty of time for your ballot to reach the counting place within all deadlines, and to deal with any clerical issues if any happen to come up, particularly if this is your first time voting.

Plus, when you vote early you get to enjoy civic pride for this cycle longer than everyone else.

Are you talking about the post about comparing the quality of life of a farmer in the 1800s vs now, and a bunch of you madlads took the position that the miserly farmer in the 1800s had it better? Wasn't it you that that tried to argue that OP's data was wrong by posting links that proved OP's data was correct?

I swear, sometimes Lemmy makes me feel like I've fallen into a fever dream. The quality of discourse around these parts.

It's not even how voter suppression works...

Please do continue. I've done a lot of research on GOP voter suppression in places like Georgia, so I'm excited to hear what you have to say on the topic.

For those that actually want to look into it: https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/georgias-voter-suppression-law

My recommendation to anyone in a GOP state: Vote early, and I'd personally use a mail ballot to avoid their voting location shenanigans. They can't make you wait in line for 12 hours if you get your ballot via the mail.

2/2

War is easy. If we want to back off we can simply let Israel get their weapons anywhere else in the world because they don't need top-tier US war gear since Gaza is entirely defenseless and Hamas is fighting with low-tier weapons. So if we do what the pro-Hamas tiktokers want, we could simply have the US disengage, make a show of stopping weapons supplies to Israel, and then both Israel and Hamas would get exactly what they want which is to keep fighting it out to the last drop of blood, with scores of Gaza civilians dead in the middle.

Peace is hard. Staying involved so we can lean on Israel with Western influence and threats of pulling broad support, and working to bring half a dozen state actors to the negotiation table, drawing up several rounds of cease-fire proposals, trying to enforce food deliveries to civilians in a war zone. All that stuff is very hard. Even harder is to negotiate Palestinian statehood and sell it to the international community for full support. Even more will be having me, the US tax payer, pay for the Gaza reconstruction. And for the US troubles, they get labeled "fascists" by the tiktok crowd that would simply let Hamas have exactly what they want to prolong Gaza's suffering and destruction.

If any of this sounds foreign, take a moment to think about this. Gaza's population at the start of the conflict was 4 million people. They are fish in a barrel, locked in on every side by all countries, with no way to defend themselves against modern war weapons. People keep calling this a "genocide" under the accusation that Israel wants all Gazans dead. There are 40k dead by the count of the Hamas Health Ministry. That's 1% of the Gaza population. They've been fish in a barrel for nearly a year and only 1% official casualties. This is because the US puts guardrails on what Israel is allowed to shoot at as part of their anti-Hamas operation, as the US seeks to find a way to end the conflict with some form of agreement. If we pull out completely and let Israel and Hamas have at each other no-holds-barred like they want to, you think the death toll after 1 year of modern war rockets on a defenseless population would be 1%? Israel has the military might to wipe Gaza completely within weeks. The West is standing in their way using international pressure and the rules embedded in the weapons agreements.

The reason we DONT want to pull out of Israel is so that we can continue to stand in their way to protect Gaza's civilians. So that we have a say in pushing in food convoys. So that we can head the negotiation table and demand a cease fire.

1/2 In short: No more bullets or rockets on either side moving forward. It would be a culmination of centuries of deeply rooted animosity in the region.

There are only 2 ways to get there. Either the bigger side kills every one on the smaller side, as is customary in human history. Or (#2) the Western world order steps in to force a Palestine state that will be fully recognized and protected by international agreements (the same way that Israel is allowed to draw breath today, through the protection of the bigger Western guns demanding peace).

Since it's clear we are simply not going to allow Israel to do #1, the only option left is to do #2. As long as Biden ->Harris goes, this is the direction of things. So on the current path we are on, we are most likely to end the Hamas terrorist rule, secure Palestine as a state and let them form a government, use my tax money to pay to help rebuild Gaza, and apply social equity investment to help Palestinians form trade and communication ties with the world to guarantee their place.

Once Palestine is a fully recognized country with a seat in the international community, they'll have to answer at a state level for any Hamas-like BS they might start later, and they'll also be protected from any future Israel incursions.

We all wish this could be done in a few days with zero civilian casualties, but that's not how things work, particularly when the terrorists that run Gaza want their own people dead (as martyrs and meat shields) with twice as much gusto as the invading force. The reason negotiating a cease fire is so complicated is that Hamas doesn't want one, because they are getting exactly what they want, a nasty war with lots of dead civilians for their propaganda channels.

Biden's strategy so far has been to use Western influence to put guardrails on what Israel is "allowed" to do in terms of operations and certain weapons use, and lean hard on all sides to accept a peace agreement. Mind you, settling ALL sides is quite a complicated mess because Hamas terrorism has a lot of support from Israel-hating states that love the depth of the conflict. Region countries that don't see human life as valuable like we do in the West, and are happy to use a destitute population in Gaza as martyrs for their political objectives against Israel.

"What an evil comment" says the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Useful_idiot

that's being manipulated with propaganda warfare by terrorists groups, to support an agenda of hate and death on both sides of the conflict, including Palestinians civilians.

Those of us that want a decades-old conflict to reach a sustainable end are now "the fascists" in the eyes of the deeply disinformed and dangerously vocal tiktok simpletons.

You haven't made any effort to ponder on why the leaders of my country that take this stuff seriously and are trying to solve it won't waste a minute of their day to listen to your nonsense Hamas talking points. You just decided that anyone that is not like you knee-deep in terrorist propaganda has to be evil. Fantastic. What a champion of morals, willing to teach the rest of us how to not want children to die - we would be so lost without your moral guidance and tiktok-tier understanding of these complex issues.

Thank you for helping with today's demonstration.

? It's a cartoon, I don't see it trying to pass as a real picture of 3 people with a transcript of what was said in regular conversation.

Given the title of "civics", what I understood from this is that anything we say in current politics can be said reasonably, and people can choose to be decent, respectful and gainful in how they interact with each other. Lots of people and places have rules against "politics" talk because we can't behave ourselves. But being divisive is not a requirement of politics, that's just us being assholes.

The people in the cartoon are showing us that you can also talk about these issues respectfully and working together.

For instance, lots of assholes around these parts come in with their pro-Hamas rhetoric talking about how the US is supporting genocide, acting like the rest of us are happy with children being bombed. The difference is not that we support genocide, the difference is that we don't think the answer is anywhere near as simple as they want to make it. That region is full of religious hate and ignorance with roots of bloodthirst that go back thousands of years, and it will not be fixed overnight with any one policy.

And where is the outrage about Sudan? https://www.cnn.com/2024/08/22/africa/sudan-darfur-humanitarian-aid-intl/index.html

10 million people have fled their homes due to civil war, the WHO says 8.5 million peoples are at emergency levels of food insecurity, and the UN is warning that the death toll could be 4 million people if we don't intervene aggressively https://www.npr.org/sections/goats-and-soda/2024/08/21/g-s1-18004/famine-hunger-sudan-united-nations-food-insecurity

Let me be clear. My president in the US and his Secretary of State are already working hard on finding a cease-fire deal in Gaza, and the entire West alliance is putting pressure on Israel to end their operations. But who is working to do something for Sudan? While all these pro-Hamas drones are plastering the internet with Hamas propaganda and doing shenanigans at the DNC to get attention, yet nobody gives a shit about 4 million impending deaths by famine because they didn't see it on tiktok. Where are the calls to hear from a Sudanese-American at the Dem convention?

And here we are with this cartoon asking me to find a way to listen to the pro-Hamas tiktok simpletons, and try to communicate with them to find some common ground. It's hard, but it's true that we don't HAVE to be assholes, we just are for now. The one side starts at asshole and goes from there, and it brings out only the asshole out of the other side. Same for any topic. But it doesn't have to be that way, it's just the way we are doing it.

Now, for a practical demonstration, watch the response from the pro-Hamas simpletons.

Trump will sue you constantly over petty BS like the state of your home's paint job and some made up story about how you hit his trash cans with your hummer truck (when you don't even own a hummer), and Vance would wait for you to be stuck in the hospital caring for a loved one to file a HOA motion on your home because you forgot to mow the lawn that week.

Kamala is the neighbor that shows you how to fight Vance's HOA motion, and Tim Walz shows up the next day and mows your lawn with his own riding mower without even asking you about it.

I know it's hard to find real images of these families since most pics online are going to be PR-approved. But that image of the Vance family is quite disingenuous.

The Vances are cosplaying as a regular rural family, but he is an Ivy graduate who sold himself to a twisted libertarian billionaire, and she is a highly paid Ivy lawyer that has worked with the corrupt conservative SCOTUS judges. A real picture of those 2 would be in fancy dressing at an exclusive cocktail party for the dirty right-wing powers trying to control the country. Far from salt-of-the-earth Americans just trying to live their lives.

Nobody that understands how this works could have said that. Once you are already at war, it's either sending more thousands of American soldiers with guns firing at anything that moves, and then civilians die anyway, or use the drones to shoot at targets with precision, and then civilians die anyway. The only people that think civilian deaths during war are 100% avoidable are people that have no idea what they are talking about and like to wax lyrical from behind a keyboard.

There was one other place where it could have been stopped, and that's earlier by preventing war mongers from gaining power and starting the wars in the first place. I'm sure you did your part then using your vote effectively to prevent Republicans from gaining power for 8 years, just as you are ready to vote effectively now to prevent a Republican from returning this Nov.

Those are military choices. People need to stop imagining these law-degree prime ministers as kings that control every aspect of government. The military had been developing drones for a while, and having superior tech wanted to use them more. The wars were started by the Republican jackasses before Obama and we were already stuck in them. There's a very limited playbook Obama could draw from to have any influence in that situation. He simply did what any US president would have done by continuing with the mess left by the previous admin and following the recommendations of the generals when it comes to the approach to war. Military stuff was one of Obama's weakest knowledge areas, so he did what any educated person would do and simply let the seasoned experts handle it.

If you ask me WHEN I had a problem with it, it was when we let Bush start a series of unwinnable wars promising it would be done in 3 months and over some BS excuse that everyone knew was nonsense going into it. I don't blame Obama too much for the tech advancements in drones, and I don't blame Biden too harshly for the exit out of Afghanistan. I blame the morons that create that unsolvable problem, promising it would be cheap and easy and would go great.