Very detailed Lemmy post I wrote about this fuckery and more
Local news article containing the quote about the voter registrar
On Homer Plessey Way, board member Daniel Milojevic stood outside the Bywater polling place in the Press Street Gallery suggesting people try the two Jefferson Parish locations.
He said the local registrar of voters gave the district only 300 ballots per location and told them they could expect about 20 people.
“We had to confirm the number of ballots weeks ago,” he said, before it was clear how high the turnout would be. Milojevic conceded that planning had clearly missed the mark.
As one astute gentleman asked while defending Reddit, and accusing me of spreading misinformation:
If hardly anybody knew, how did turnout exceed expectations within 2 hours?
Because the “expectation” provided by the registrar was literally 20 voters per location (60 voters in total) for the entire fucking city.
The election is unique in that it is organized and managed by the district itself, not the Louisiana Secretary of State’s office, and seats on the board are rarely contested. The race for this particular seat is reported to be the first ever.
So perhaps some degree of incompetence/not having any clue how many people would show up. Not necessarily malicious intent. Seems like it was such a shitshow it’ll force a redo. Clearly it should.
Elections official here, though in a different state.
We had the same thing happen here for a conservation district. Here are a few facts for our situation, it may be different than this news item, but it’s similar.
Conservation districts handle their own elections, they aren’t done by the state/county.
The last time they had an election, votes were in the low hundreds, this last time votes were in the thousands.
Our conservation district doesn’t get “official ballots” they just had something simple and when they needed more they printed more, but they were not prepared for the amount of work involved.
Conservation district elections here are not distributed to all households, they are an “interested parties show up” sort of deal. I believe in the old days you had to be a land owner to vote in then. These days I believe you need to be a resident. I’m the past no one really cared much about them, they decide things like where to plant trees to fight erosion and stuff like that. They aren’t making “political” decisions.
Please keep in mind that this wasn’t a normal election like you think of, it was more along the lines of an HOA election in terms of how it is conducted.
I don’t know if some party just googled “election” and mobilized for this, but this kind of turnout was new and unexpected.
I have no problem believing this district was blindsided by this.
It’s important to remember that this is a different sort of election though.
How are we still giving Republicans the benefit of the doubt? What will it take?
That’s the thing though, is it just incompetence or is it an attempt to see what people are willing to let slide?
We definitely need a re-do bc otherwise it signals that we’re ok with letting it happen again and again. Will there be enough ballots when it’s time for us to vote for elections with more at stake like mayor or in the midterms?
I could see low expectations from the registrar of voters for turnout, but 60 people in the entire city? And they just didn’t have any kind of plans if more showed up?
We’re the first state to start using the DOGE voter database maintenance system. Will we end up with some kind of “glitch” that purges voters on top of being told the registrar made a miscalculation when estimating how many people would actually show up to vote?
The one thing I’ll say in their defense is that a water district board seat, in a special election, is not typically something that generates votes. Perhaps they did that on purpose, thinking the low turnout would help one candidate. We’re talking about school board election numbers. The kind of thing where a bus full of people could swing the whole election.
You’ll know if it was on purpose or not immediately when we see who won and if they try to stick with the result. If they were out of ballots at 9 am, then they shouldn’t even try to count the votes or declare a winner. With the need for a redo being so obvious.
Nah, there’s been a few recent elections and ballot initiatives that are explicitly designed to undermine democracy and set up separate courts. This is definitely on purpose.
I’m willing to agree with malicious intent if they try keep the result. There should be no need to count the ballots, with the need to redo being so obvious.
Election officials: “Nonsense! If an excess of voters show up we will be happy to provide waxed paper and ballpoint pens for them to vote with.”
Electronic voting is not safe, print and cut more paper!
Yes, I’m sure no one has ever tampered with paper ballots. Right.
Much easier to protect and verify than any electronic system
Except they have a much higher rate of lost or miscounted ballots.
But the two methods can be used together to create an improved system: electronic ballots with a printed ‘receipt’. My state uses this method. Before submitting your ballot, it displays the paper receipt and asks you to confirm your choices. If it’s incorrect or you want to change it, you can reject the ballot and it is immediately voided in front of you. If it’s fine, you press a button and it submits both the digital and paper copies of your ballot.
Election monitors can then validate the calculated results against the paper receipts.
So you still need to count all the paper votes, and hope they didn’t use disappearing ink or any other bullshit
What they’re supposed to start doing here (or at least they were when the last governor left office, not sure if they still will do it now that democracy is crumbling) is paper and then scan every ballot so it can also be included in recounts.
As of now with most elections in LA, it’s electronic only and votes don’t get included in recounts unless they’re mail in.
It’s not paper ballots I’m pissed about, (but like I said, it also seems like that could open up the door to more BS given what happened in the recount) it’s the fact that anyone would pretend 900 ballots would be enough for the entire city, and that they had no backup plan for when they weren’t.
In NY we have these amazing devices, where they can adhere a chemical to blank ballots before voters mark them to be scanned.
It’s a fairly obscure tech, kind of like an additive manufacturing rig that, instead of adding one plane at a time to build a 3D physical thing from the bottom up, uses small rows of line segments to create a two-dimensional image. These “printers” used to be widespread, but still do have enough niche uses that the government was able to acquire some fairly easily.
It’s also going to make that lawsuit in New Paltz very interesting.
Multiple checks and balances are required for paper, too.
And electronic voting goes against the principles of a fair and free election.
One of the principles of such an election is that a layman can understand the process to verify the legitimacy of the election. The average citizens needs to be able to understand the election process.
Electronic voting either allows the state to track who voted for what and/or allows people to vote multiple times, or it is not possible for a layman to verify the legitimacy of the election.
Electronic voting are just plain anti democratic.
Edit: I am ignoring here the simple fact that closed source code is unverifiable and any voting machine running with e.g. windows would return unverifiable results. So I am ignoring the issues of the software stack of this machines, which we shouldn’t.
Paper Elections are dead easy and safe to perform
There is a reason nearly no one other real democratic country uses stupid voting machines, but undemocratic shitholes like Russia love electronic voting and machines
It’s not checks that are the issue, but the scalability of the offensive and the inevitable opaqueness of countermeasures.
Surely there is a cryptographic way to count votes where someone can check that the results are correct but not how individuals voted, right?
Now you have to trust the software used to do this, the algorithm itself, and that there was no tampering before the data got stored. Which is something truly verifiable by a very tiny subset of population and even then with full cooperation from authorities. This is the opaqueness of countermeasures.
Vote counting is not a mathematical problem, but a sociological one. Any „always correct machine” is useless if people can’t reasonably trust it.
Paper ballots don’t scale - you can’t stuff ballots without someone being present - and are designed exactly in the problem space vote counting itself occupies. As an additional evidence in their favor, autocratic regimes and corrupt politicians are way too eager to switch to electronic voting.
That’s the whole point of crypto though, you publish the mathematically verifiable results, and everyone becomes a vote counter. Instead of trusting a small group of people to do it right, you can verify the counts yourself in a trustless system.
The algorithm isn’t a black box like you’re saying, it’s fully auditable and decentralized so any fuckery is immediately visible.
Now maybe I’m wrong and a mathematically verifiable algorithm can’t exist, but to my knowledge that’s never been shown to be the case.
Edit: turns out there are MANY such systems, and they are mathematically verifiable, and used in actual use cases today. The only thing stopping it is lack of political will, and arguably, the fact that even people without computers have the right to vote.
You do not have to trust the software. You could do that math for yourself if you really cared.
You’re thinking about the voting problem wrong, specifically not including all of the requirements
The algorithm isn’t a black box like you’re saying, it’s fully auditable and decentralized so any fuckery is immediately visible.
Their point is that even in this system, there is both a small and finite number of people who are skilled enough/qualified enough to perform that audit. I’m not sure I’ve got the math to be able to validate a blockchain transaction by hand without referring to a (potentially tainted) source repo. There’s a world where blockchain voting can solve this problem, but the competing requirements make it the less-optimal solution compared with paper voting.
Specifically, there are 3 potentially competing requirements for a secure voting system in a functioning democracy:
- Votes must be accurately recorded and tallied
- Votes must not be attributable to any specific individual
- Votes must be auditable for an arbitrary amount of time
Blockchains, potentially, optimize the voting problem for #1 while introducing explicit exposure in #s 2 and 3, while paper ballots optimize for 2 first, then 3.
Woah woah woah, I said nothing about blockchain. That would almost certainly be the wrong, overly complex solution. The systems that exist for cryptographic voting do hit ALL your points while having the additional benefit of being perfectly auditable.
Cryptography is a much larger field than blockchain, and people use it for trusted communication every day.
I’m sure that exists, yes. But you can’t give the voting key to individual voters, because that can be bought. So you’re using the same black-box voting machines with all the same attack vectors (or even worse if they’re connected to the internet).
The only way to make voting machines safe is to have them print out the ballot, but at that point they’re just very expensive pencils.
That’s NOT Voter Fraud! Voter Fraud is when TRUMP LOSES!
I hope this is sarcasm… god I fuckin hope.
it is; that’s their entire account. you can tell who it is by the unique capitalization.
If you’re turned away and have the right to vote then your rights have been violated.
c/microblogpolitics
Just a slight correction in that it doesn’t sound like the City of New Orleans has much to do with this election, as it’s an election for a district the covers three parishes, the whole region. If anything, it seems like there may have been an effort to provide disproportionally more votes to the two more conservative parishes by giving the same total number of “available votes” to each polling station, whereas Orleans Parish could’ve hands-down elected their preferred candidate otherwise.
I actually found out it covers 5 parishes but they only had voting locations in 3, which makes the first come first serve thing even more bizarre.
The election was for one member on a board. The only reason there was an election was because a new candidate challenged the incumbent candidate, which usually never happens. Usually people remain on the board for as long as they would like to hold that position. Why this seat in particular?
The incumbent is the only board member from Orleans, and runs community gardens throughout the city, so I would argue that if anything, Orleans has a considerable amount to do with this particular election. How did the registrar even come up with that number if this is the first of its kind of election for this district?
I believe another member of the board will have a seat that can be challenged soon. If that seat is challenged, whichever Parish that board member is from hopefully gets a lot of support behind them of the people of the parish feel they’re doing a good job.
Also find it a little suspicious, this guy challenging her seat is a commercial fishing captain, and recently Louisiana Republicans passed a bill to deregulate seafood safety and hand oversight to the department that controls this board.
Actually found out the district covers 5 parishes but they only had voting locations in 3.
There is a separate registrar for each parish, so who is the “official” registrar they mention in the article and how did she generate that expect around 20 voters at each location number?
