I’d assume it’s in “Assure the re-election…” Though that definitely seems pretty biased for someone who’s overseeing an election, I’m not sure that it’s really saying “I’ll openly cheat to help Trump win.”
But that’s how US elections are always run, isn’t it?
The Secretary of State is the person charged in most states with final certification. And they are elected. On a partisan basis. What is wrong with someone running for a political office to declare that one of their goals is to get Trump elected (if they are a Republican candidate), or to get Biden elected (if they are a Democrat)?
And the canvassing boards appear to be explicitly staffed with partisan individuals in Michigan: two Republicans, two Democrats. Those individuals are presumably either elected in their party organisations, or reliable party stalwarts appointed to the boards. Why shouldn’t they explicitly state that they favour the election of the Republican or the Democrat? That’s how they got on the canvassing board.
Remember, Katherine Harris was the Florida Secretary of State in 2000. She was responsible for deciding whether to certify for Bush or Gore. She was also a Republican. She was also the Co-chair of the Bush Campaign in Florida. Obviously, she wanted Bush to win. That doesn’t mean she was prepared to cheat, does it?
Where did they “find” them? Was it at a precinct? If yes, why didn’t the election official in charge of the precinct report that batch of ballots as missing? Or have the people in that precinct already voted? It will be recorded in their logs of who checked in that day to vote, and all those people would have been required to sign the in-person voter’s log before they are allowed to go into a booth and vote. You sign one way or another, whether absentee or in person.
And again, you’d never find that many uncounted ballots at any individual precinct for only one individual.
These discrepancies stick out like a sore thumb to the local election officials who are running their individual precincts. They would have reported such an anomaly.
In America, we don’t expect officials to be robots with no political views. But if they assume a position and perhaps even swear an oath to be impartial, we expect them to set aside their personal feelings and do the job without bias.
I went to a small private high school, and one of my classmates was the daughter of the principal. Don’t you think that, as a father, the principal hoped she would win the most prestigious awards and get the highest grades? No one would fault him for parental pride that made him feel his daughter was the most deserving of “best actor” for the thespian program, or “greatest team spirit” in sports, or whatever. But how would it be if he stated that one of his goals as a principal was “assure the success of my daughter.” Nope. That’s not how it’s supposed to work.
So was Kathleen Harris doing something wrong in 2000 when she was co-chair of the Bush campaign in Florida? She was clearly working to get Bush elected, and also deciding who she should certify as the winner.
Was there something wrong there? Was that not how it was supposed to work?
Yes, I think it was wrong for Kathleen Harris to serve as both Secretary of State for the State of Florida and co-chair of George W. Bush’s election efforts in Florida in 2000. It was a clear conflict of interest.
I think it was also a conflict of interest for Brian Kemp to serve as Secretary of State for the State of Georgia and simultaneously run for Governor in 2018.
I think these obvious conflicts of interest with respect to elections are serious defects and are some of the weakest parts of American democracy. This should be reformed. We should establish independent, non-partisan elections officials to administer and certify elections like they do in more civilized countries (like Canada).
It may vary state-to-state but in Illinois I voted in person and the very first thing I had to do was fill out my name and address and write my signature.
When I went to the table to get my ballot they had computer screens which showed the relevant info on me including the signature they had on file. The poll worker had to match that all up (never asked for an ID).
This is such an important point. It’s why Georgia SoS Brad Raffensperger is so angry. You do the job, and you do it with utmost integrity in accordance with your oath. Voting is a sacred trust. One’s individual political preferences are never supposed to enter into it.
When I was a lowly election official (and there are many of them to run any election) here was the process for accounting for votes:
A voter comes in to individual precinct. The registrar locates the individual on a list of registered voters for that precinct and ticks the voter’s name off their list. The voter signs his name and is given a ballot to vote. When finished, the voter takes his completed ballot to another official and drops it off.
The completed ballot is packed into an official box in front of witnesses. Once the box is full of ballots, it is sealed, again in front of other election officials, and placed in a bag to be transported to the local board of elections to be counted.
The ballots are picked up by another election official (this is the job I most often performed) accompanied by a local Sheriff’s deputy. The receiving election official must sign for each bag of sealed ballot boxes, and the Sheriff’s deputy must sign that they witnessed the bags of ballot boxes being received. Together at all times, the election official and the deputy physically transport the ballots back to the board of elections.
Ballots are turned over to the BoE and are again signed for by the receiving officials. From there, the boxes are unsealed, again in front of witnesses, and processed for counting.
The BoE knows what batches of ballots to expect from each precinct. If a batch is missing, they know it pretty fast. As a “runner” of ballots, I was never allowed to clock out of an election until every box of expected ballots had been received from the precincts I was covering.
Again, every step is witnessed and every step records the chain of custody.
It’s pretty tough to mess with ballots. My time working elections is 18 years out of date, and I know processes have improved in that time. I just don’t see how someone would work around the safeguards we took even back then.
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People need to stop trying to compare what happened in 2000 to what’s happening now.
In that election, the entire outcome hinged on some 577-ish votes and how those ballots were voted. The hanging chad thing was open to interpretation, and the butterfly ballots were genuinely confusing. There was no clear way to resolve the discrepancies regarding the voter’s individual intent.
When the SCOTUS finally ruled, it was a nutty ruling with such tortured reasoning that they depublished it from ever being used again.
That’s not what we have in this election. Physical ballots have improved so it’s much easier to discern a voter’s true intent. There are no real questions about how individuals voted. Biden is the clear winner in every case, and not by a tiny margin. Trump has only “won” one court case, and it made no difference to the outcome of Pennsylvania’s vote count.
People who are trying to compare 2000 to this year’s election either don’t know history or they are being deliberately disingenuous. My money is on the latter.
If I had infinite resources and could do anything to mess with an election I would try to hack the electronic machines and ever so slightly mess with their counts. I am not sure if all states have paper backups but those only really come into play in a recount or some reason to think the electronic count was bad. Unless they are hand counted someone could, in theory, mess with the electornic counting machines. It can be subtle too. Don’t just switch all votes to one candidate but randomly switch 2% or something.
Trying to intercept ballots or stuff ballot boxes is not really possible anymore since every side knows that used to be a thing and they have made sure (as you spelled out) to watch super carefully for that.
I’m simply saying that you can’t assume someone is cheating because they support one or the other of the presidential candiates. The Vice-Chair of the Wayne County Canvassing Board is Jonathon Kinloch, who is the Chair of the 13th Congressional Democratic Party Organisation, and 3rd Vice-Chair of the Michigan Democratic Party.
Given that background, I would assume it wouldn’t be difficult to find statements from him over the past half year that he was working to elect Democratic candidates. But that doesn’t mean we should assume he’s going to cheat on the canvassing board, any more than we can assume that the Republican is going to cheat because he wants Trump elected.
They’re both on that board precisely because they are partisans. That doesn’t mean they’re going to cheat, as the earlier post in this thread suggested with regard to the Republican.
Exactly. And elections officials are onto the messing with electronic ballot counters, too. There are almost none left in the country, AIUI. Most states have moved to having paper ballot backups to keep those inclined to cheat honest.
It’s good to see that all Republicans aren’t just rolling over, and that includes Republican judges. Besides the wrath of his party, he’s gotten death threats.
I feel for the guy. He’s trying to run a clean election in accordance with his oath. Apparently, that’s no longer the goal of many Republicans. To be a ‘good’ Republican, you have to be willing to cheat like an SOB.
As well they shouldn’t have.
This is poorly worded and I want to clarify.
Electronic ballot counters are still widely in use. Heck, we used them even back in my day. But now there are many crosschecks in place to ensure that voting tallies have not been corrupted. My understanding is that most of the computers that tally votes are air-gapped. Paper ballots serve as the double-check, and in some states there are random audits.
The biggest concerns I hear about election officials having over election integrity is voter rolls being messed with ahead of an election, such a foreign actors causing chaos by deleting voters from the rolls, etc.
FWIW air-gapped is not necessarily the protection you think it is.
IIRC, a few years ago, some white-hat hackers showed they were able to hack voting machines while standing in front of them. In one case those machines had a USB port so the hacker just used their own USB stick to jack the machine.
I am making no accusation that happened in this election and, hopefully, they have sorted a lot of that out but one thing is certain…nothing is hack-proof. We need checks and double-checks to make such things not worth the effort. A paper backup is great IF you count the paper backups. If not then they aren’t much use.
That’s why spot audits are a thing.
and that is where this whole “you have to show an ID to get prescripton of Sudafed” nonsense falls apart. You go to our local CVS, the pharmacist doesn’t have a database of every other place in the city where you can get a prescription that she can check against to make sure you haven’t already filled it. She can make sure it wasn’t filled at that location before, or if it looks fradulent. And if you are gettting unauthorized prescriptions, there is a benefit. Feeding your habit, or selling them to someone else. There is no benefit to commit a felony for voter fraud, unless Nicky Haley, who is the last one I heard use the sudafed comparison, thinks that 10s of thousands of voters have been paid $20 bucks to do so.
I can’t stress enough how well individual precincts know who votes and where. The BoE knows instantly when something is amiss. They’ve done this many, many times and they have it down to a science. If we had a tardy batch of votes that hadn’t been turned in from a precinct, the elections administrator was on it, calling the precinct supervisor to find out what was the problem.
These things are done at the local level. For that reason, it’s extremely tough to mess with them.
What is air-gapped, please, and why is it a protection against fraud?