Paul Stapleton @paulstapleton - Twitter Profile

Respectfully, if we did a 48-hour rule we would be disenfranchising tens or hundreds of thousands of voters. For what? To convince people who still insist that the 2020 election was stolen and the FBI was guiding people into the Capitol on Jan 6? To stop Twitter trolls, some of whom we have found are getting paid to push disinformation? We could absolutely speed things up with significantly more staffing. But it would be costly - and what’s the cost-benefit ratio? Let’s say you staffed up LA with tens of millions of dollars so they could count 90% of ballots in 48 hours. That could be possible. But you would also be spending tens of millions in the cumulative of 57 other counties, most of which don’t have these close races that are drawing the ire of everyone. And are we gonna be hearing all these complaints out of LA County in the general - when there may be no close races except Raman v. Bass (where neither of their camps are likely to scream about fraud and lie about the election). So, massive $$ shift away from other state priorities to achieve what? Faster results to quell out of state disinformation? And, note, in this case it wouldn’t have even changed the reason for their claims of fraud, we would still have @spencerpratt starting with a lead and then losing. It would just happen faster. There is the state law that ballots to be accepted when they are postmarked on time, mailed on Election Day or, commonly, mailed the week before but USPS delays cause them to be late. This would cause hundreds of thousands of ballots to be disqualified if/when SCOTUS decides a current case. I would invite you to join me at any county registrar to see all the trays of ballots that are set aside to be disqualified in November if that decision restricts counties abilities to count these ballots. It was insane before the new law allowing postmark to count, and it will be worse this year if SCOTUS rules against it. There are other things, like the ability for Santa Cruz’s registrar to get ballots that arrive in Santa Clara (common because mail from one county often travels to USPS sorting facilities in other counties) or ability for people to fix a bad signature, or the same day registration (which necessitates a provisional ballot so registrars can be sure the person is an eligible voter and isn’t voting twice). The catch with all of these last edge cases is that we could say “ok, counties, you have a week to do all that, not a month” but that would do zero to stop all the freak out we have seen this last week. We would still not be done. So, we can work with counties and maybe help fund more election workers within reason, but I think we can’t let conspiracy theorists or the loudest disingenuous actors online guide our policy choices. If we do we are just disenfranchising voters because we don’t know how to confront mean tweets and lies coming out of the White House - and genuinely, nothing we do that is a rational policy would appease them anyways.

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