NEVERENDING ♾️ The NEVERENDING Political Discussion Thread

[mendelman]

The way they structure it here is they have a handful of 'early voting sites' spread throughout the County (County runs the elections here) and if you live in that county, you can show up at any of them to vote. They check you off on a paper and a computer form to indicate that you have voted, and they hand you the proper ballot. It works out great for me because it allows me not only time, but location flexibility and the computer check in synchronized with the other polling places to prevent me from going to multiple locations and voting more than once.

If you vote on election day, you have to go to your assigned polling place.

Pretty much the same in my state.

But for early in-person voting, we only have the option of the Board of Elections office, which is located in southern part the township just north of the county seat. Good thing I live and work in the county seat, so the Board office is a 5 min drive from either my house or office.

But we are a much lower population county than yours, so having multiple physical locations is a good idea for you.

 

[Planit]

Over the past week Republicans have been blocking their own policy goals in order to make legislating more difficult for the Democratic majority.

What's more, the bill is being stopped by Idaho Republican James Risch, who is himself a cosponsor of the bill. He has worried that Republicans won't get enough credit for the bill, that it will be more Democratic at the end of the day. This, even though three of Republican Sen. Marco Rubio's smaller bills are within the larger piece.

Republicans are blowing up their own agenda to 'own the libs'

 

[kjel]

Hadn't checked in here for a few weeks. Ironic that the first unread post was after the Boulder mass shooting and late last night there was one in Indiana at a Fedex facility. I don't know what the answers are, I don't thing there is any one singular answer though.

I've always been fascinated by the ATF firearms trace data alter sitting through a presentation about a decade ago. Until recently, the ATF had to search through paper records to determine the origin of the firearm, who sold/purchased it, and perhaps what happened afterward. That is ridiculous in the modern age given the technology that exists. It was my understanding that the gun lobby fought hard to keep everything paper because it was cumbersome and slowed things down.

Now the ATF has something called eTrace which is allowing them to complete tracing much more quickly for weapons recovered in conjunction with crime. Every year they release a report for each state and you can tell a lot about a state from how the data stacks up. https://www.atf.gov/resource-center/firearms-trace-data-2019

Let's take NJ as an example. Firearms are difficult to purchase here, it takes a lot of effort. In 2019, there were 4,309 trace requests submitted to ATF and they located the state of origin in 2,700 traces. NJ was the source of 19.5% of the firearms, PA was 15.7%, GA 10.1%, VA 9.5%, NC 8.8%, SC 7%, FL 5.8%. In the Northeast PA/GA/VA/NC/SC/FL are often referred to as the "Iron Pipeline" because as you can see 56.9% of the firearms recovered in NJ were from those states. Time to crime in NJ firearms is 12.38 years as compared to the national average of 8.29 years.

Using NC as a comparison there were 16,830 trace requests submitted to the ATF and 13,149 traces were completed. NC was the source of 74.7% of the firearms and the next highest states of origin were SC 6.3%, VA 3.7%, GA 2.3%, and FL 2%. Time to crime in NC was 8.11 years.

The population of NJ is about 9 million and NC about 10 million so it's somewhat of a fair comparison population wise. I find it interesting that there were 4x the amount of trace requests in NC as compared to NJ. Also NJ did not even come up as a top 15 origin source for NC the way NC does for NJ.

We aren't paying enough attention to what happens to firearms after the initial purchase from a licensed dealer.