Me too. More than once I find myself looking for an upvote button even though I know there isn’t one. Maybe something for ATMB.
I am not sure if this is good or bad. I guess good since the sheriffs office is not trusted…but bad because less security? Not sure…any opinions?
A local Ohio elections board says the county sheriff’s department will not be used for election security following a social media post by the sheriff saying people with Kamala Harris yard signs should have their addresses recorded so that immigrants can be sent to live with them if the Democratic vice president wins the November election.
Sure - but who counts the machines?
Which would still be pretty tame, as gerrymanders go. A lot of gerrymanders involve widely-separated regions connected by tendrils so thin that literally nobody lives in the tendril.
People do.
IIRC there are spot checks on the machines where humans check to see the machine is counting properly.
We have some poll workers on here who can probably say more about that.
In Illinois some connections are highways/roads (so yeah…no one lives there). I’ve seen it other places as well. Not particularly unusual unfortunately.
hijack
It’s not always for nefarious reasons (a.k.a. gerrymandering). In North Carolina, it was to comply with an effort (perhaps legally mandated?) to create a “majority minority” district – to ensure that one congressional district would be likely to represent a “community of interest” (in this case, defined by race). So, basically, several cities linked by “threads” along interstate highways.
/hijack
From Wonkette, a different sort of political news site:
In a winning blow for democracy and a losing blow for Donald Trump, it looks as if the great state of Nebraska will not be making its electoral vote allocation winner-take-all in 2024. The good news comes thanks to a Republican (what? ) whose support was crucial to the endeavor. It seems that voters were calling the office of this Republican, and in a novel twist, he chose listening to his constituents over doing Trump’s bidding. (Whaaaaaaat??? )
…
Great news! This republican is one I would probably be happy voting for (I do not live in Nebraska though).
If Harris wins I hope she considers him for some cabinet position. Not as a reward but rather as a republican with some ethics.
Worked polls as a polling place judge for 20 or so years. The 6 member polling place board is always balanced with R, D and Independent workers. Counting is done by two people of two different affiliations, R & D, or D & Independent, etc. Throughout the long day, positions are switched so no any one person is maintaining the sign in log or checking IDs, etc, so cooking the books some how would take a whole lot of conniving and sabotage. We always know how many voters, how many ballots we’ve handed out and at the end of the night that ballot count (again by two people of different parties) has to match what comes out of the locked ballot box voters return their marked ballots to. Then, after we judges seal the box that the ballots travel to the election commission office in (under constant supervision by the polling place Chief Judge until she hands them over within an hour of the polling close). The commission office then does another count so no extras are slipped in or taken out between that polling place and the counting office. The seals have the signature of two workers who are not the person transporting ballots so the transporter can’t just replace the signature seals with a forged signature after interfering with the ballots.
Is this a lame attempt at a steal? It seems too much to be a “mistake” or an “oopsie.”
How does an entire state not list one of the two major candidates for president on their ballot?
I kinda want to think it was just a mistake but how bad do you have to fuck-up to get this wrong?
I dunno…
Montana’s election season has gotten off to a rocky start after absentee voters realized Kamala Harris was not a listed candidate on their ballot.
The state was forced to shut down its electronic absentee voter system after it went live on September 20 when a voter reported that there was no option to vote for the vice president.
I hope so too, but the fact that Montana is one of the the Reddest states in the nation causes me to have some doubts.
If Republicans think they have to cheat to win Montana then they’re in far deeper shit than any of us suspect.
One of the saddest things to me about the Trump era is how a system that has functioned beyond reproach for our entire history, that of our elections, is now repeatedly called into question because a man who can’t stop committing crimes and lying about everything, characterizes them, without evidence, as “rigged,” and we now question every discrepancy.
I lived in Montana. They’re not stupid people. If they intended to do something to fuck with the election, I’m confident they would have opted for something less… obvious.
If by “one of the reddest states in the nation”, you mean “less than 50% Republican by self-identification” and “frequently has Democratic governors and senators, including one current senator”. I mean, yeah, it’s going to go for Trump, but it’s not the paragon of redness.
You’d think so, but then, you’d also think that a mistake this blatant would have been caught by someone before it went live. Something implausible definitely happened, and now we need to figure out which implausible thing it was. And Montanan Republicans aren’t subtle: Remember, the current governor launched his career into overdrive by assaulting a reporter.
I think the rule is to push all the buttons. When elections are as close as they have been you take anything and everything you can get.
Republicans can see they consistently lose the popular vote so they know they simply must game the system if they want to win.
Of the last 13 presidential election, they voted republican 12 times, and trump won 2020 & 2016 with over 56% of the vote. But Okay Wyoming and a few others beat them out, so maybe not one of the most republican states- I will give you that. But this year they are solidly predicted to go trump.
Yeah…if there were any shenanigans (and I am not saying there were) I suspect it was some drone who could meddle with the website and took it upon themself to delete Harris. But even that is super stupid. I’d think someone smart enough to be in that job would realize it would not work.
The alternative is the people who worked to setup the voting site are borderline criminally incompetent. I get mistakes happen but how could this be missed?
Or maybe it was done for the purpose of causing people to doubt the competence of the people running an election to run an election.
Oooh…good point! (really)
Scary if republicans can be that subtle.