> It's honestly worth going through election monitoring training in your state to find the answers to these questions.

If that was the path one had to take to learn such things at your work, would you be as cool as a cucumber with it as you are with the running of your countries sacred democracy?

>> And, is this process identical (in design, and confirmed practice) for all states

> No, of course not. The elections are run, independently, by each State. By design, the rules are different. Because we are a Federal government, made of multiple States. This is on purpose.

Is it also on purpose that one (presumably) has to go through the election monitoring training in each state in order to "educate themselves" on each state's procedures, if they happen to be the type of personality that doesn't take a faith based approach to system integrity? And that just tells you what is supposed to happen, not what does happen.

> Yes, and it is only rational to have beliefs based on evidence. And we live in a system of laws expressing how that evidence is to be gathered, evaluated, and decided upon.

This is a funny comment, but I suspect your mind will refuse to see it - look how many people believe(s) (beginning the morning after the election) that there is/was no(!) evidence of election fraud. Of course this is silly - how does one know that evidence does not exist in physical reality if you haven't even looked for it? Yes I realize this is simply propaganda, but I am referring to how even intelligent people believe such things irrationally without evidence. But of course, they have no idea they are irrational, so therefore continue to believe that "rationalism" is the only tool you need in your kit.

> This week, a ton of people rejected that process, because they FEEL like they can't trust it, proposing nothing to replace it instead.

Technically, neither you nor any of the other know what percentage of the mob "rejected that process" - although, you did only say "a ton", and indeed, surely at least one ton/tonne of human mass of the crowd believes what you say.

> Voting irregularities are investigated, yes.

Gosh this sort of comment drives me up the wall. All it takes to satisfy this assertion is precisely two historic instances of voting irregularities being investigated.

And then there's this:

>>>> If someone smuggled in fake ballots, AND somehow managed to falsify the poll book, it would be possible to use the poll book to ASK people if they voted.

>>> It may be "possible", but is it practical? How difficult would it be? Is the current approach perfectly optimal, or could it be improved?

> Perfect is the enemy of good. And we're discussing THIS election. I welcome a different discussion about improving the process for future elections.

You declare something to be impossible to be fraudulent, and then when I point out the blatantly obvious hole in the plan, you discard it with a catch phrase, and then rhetorically dodge the uncomfortable fact that the system is not actually imperfect as you represent.

It's funny, when a thread is about a technical topic here on HN, however trivial the magnitude of the topic is, people here tend to be very pedantic about what is technically correct. But change the topic to democracy (our "sacred institution" as we were told repeatedly in the last few days), which is "rather important", concerns for the details go right out the window, and attention to detail is not only not important, but shamed. Even funnier, just four years ago, the culture was the polar opposite of this. Funny that eh!

I'll leave it at that, except for this one important thing:

>> I have a bit of an issue with the manner in which we approach this whole situation from an educational perspective. As a society, we've surely spent many tens or hundreds of person-hours participating in meme wars about this topic. If this sort of non-productive (and socially destructive) behavior was going on anywhere we worked, I would expect that someone was assemble a FAQ or Wiki of some sort that laid out the details - fully comprehensive, and fully accurate (across all states), in a format that is approachable by all employees. Does such a resource exist for the election process?

> There are literally hundreds of books, hundreds of web pages, hundreds of explanations, millions of hours of explanation. Here's a 31 minute long video from Georgia alone

Imagine if you started a new job and needed to learn the precise functioning of 50 distinct but extremely similar processes, and someone referred you to something like the above. Once again, it reminds me of one of my favourite parables:

There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says “Morning, boys. How’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes “What the hell is water?”

I don't know why I even bother writing these things, maybe I find it therapeutic, or maybe it is so some day in the future I have evidence to point to when the next Capitol-style blowup happens. People's behavior can easily be characterized as being purely based on their imaginations, and mainstream normies will accept that without question (without evidence(!)) - but if it isn't actually true inphysical reality, well sometimes this has a way of biting you in the ass.