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.
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.
I’m glad you commented bc I have a question you might be able to answer. The district covers 5 parishes (we do parishes instead of counties) but the news article states the registrar of voters provided the number of 300 ballots at each location and expectation of 20 voters.
Only 3 of the 5 parishes actually had voting locations, so voters from 2 parishes had to travel to vote.
Each parish has its own registrar. It’s unclear which parish the registrar that provided that estimate is from, but why would anyone expect the estimated number of voters in smaller parishes to be exactly the same as larger parishes?
The only reason there was an election is because the incumbent candidate was suddenly challenged by a commercial fishing captain. Keep this in mind, and remember that because of our proximity to the gulf, fishing and seafood is still a pretty big industry for the state.
It was all very odd, and caught people’s attention mainly because:
A. Typically people on the board hold these seats unchallenged for as long as they wish to remain on the board.
B. The district covers 5 parishes, but this board member is from New Orleans/Orleans Parish. She runs several urban gardens and contributes to local farmers markets. This is likely why she was able to mobilize so many voters, and why the news of the vote spread like it did.
C. Some weird things that have happened regarding voting the last two times the city voted, has everyone on high alert for attempts to sneak corruption through without people realizing it.
The election was on Saturday. As it turns out, the Tuesday before the election, the Louisiana Senate President had signed a bill to change the regulation process for seafood safety and testing. It is still sitting on the governor’s desk, just waiting to be signed.
The bill also gives oversight of seafood regulation to the Louisiana Department of Agriculture and Forestry. The conservation board the candidates were running for also just happens to fall under the jurisdiction of this same department.
Louisiana lawmakers send seafood safety, oversight bill to Landry’s desk
If this is all be one big coincidence, it certainly is an odd one. Rather than risk some kind of typical Louisiana good ole boy corruption BS, why not just allow everyone that wants to vote, the chance to vote?
It turns out the incumbent candidate from New Orleans won, but they’re not releasing any numbers of how many votes she actually won compared to the other candidate.
I voted for her, but I still strongly believe they should call for a re-do bc this all sets a very bad precedent for the future. Even though it’s not a normal election, our tax dollars fund this board. You should not be able to turn voters away, and then just shrug it off as incompetence or special circumstance.
Well shoot… My whole comment just disappeared. I’ll do bullet points.
Even though my state is vote by mail, smaller districts like the conservation district follow different rules based on their founding documents and may do elections completely differently. Ours did theirs in person because that’s what their framework is.
Ballot ordering should be based on history. If they only had that little available, it suggests to me that may have been historically sufficient. What was the turnout last time? How much money would it be worth spending on ballots and polling places for that many/few voters?
I agree that they shouldn’t be turning anyone away. In my state we can print ballots on demand if we need them. I wish every state was invested in preventing disenfranchisement.
This was the first of its kind of election in the district, so I would really like to know where they got those estimated numbers, and if they went only by one parish voter registrar when determining the numbers for 5 different parishes