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.
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
According to the news article “300 ballots would be available at each of the eight polling places” so that’s a lot less unreasonable than I was thinking. The fact that this race got a news article is also noteworthy, in the past these races weren’t considered important enough. I’m sure that helped bring more people in.
I also wonder what the regulations governing that district say. Maybe the law says something about having a certain number of ballots and closing the election after they are cast. If that were the case this would be a legislature problem, not an elections office problem.
Remember kids, sometimes the law requires or allows stupid things.