Get ready for a lot more of this.
A reader comment:
There are plenty more comments along those lines. :rolleyes:
I am amazed that there is no legal recourse to such lopsided conduct of an election.
Honest question…is there no end to how bad a state can make it for one group versus another? Is there any line to be drawn here?
Does anyone know if it’s true that when Ivanka went and got patents in China, it was in the papers, that one was for voting machines?
I saw something about this, can’t remember where now, and my first thought was, ‘That can’t be true, surely!’
Right? Right? Please tell it’s not true.
I remember when mostly-Hispanic Dodge City, Kansas had a major election with ONE polling place - in a building that was a mile out of town and not on any bus line.
To TPTB’s surprise, people showed up anyway.
I’ve also heard stories about voting machines, specifically the Diebold brand, that cast straight Republican votes if a person voted any kind of straight ticket.
Voting (n).
Piece of paper, a pencil, somewhere private to fill in the ballot, somewhere secure to post the ballot, somebody to count the vote. Been working in Australia since about 1856.
Is it really that hard? (assuming you actually want to, which obviously isn’t a given)
In a colonial backwater on the cheap side of the puddle, we count 14mil votes and determine an election in less time than Ms Mitchell stood in a queue.
Ahh, well, there you’ve hit on it, you see.
One side has cluelessly acted as if we’re still playing in a functioning democratic republic, and the other side is street fighting for their very existence at a time when they can practically taste the culmination of their immoral efforts over the past 60-ish years. Their motto has been unwavering: The end always justifies the means.
Voter suppression/disenfranchisement? Yawn. Piece of piss, as you might say. Republicans are not even trying to hide the lengths to which they are going to go in 2020 to stay in power.
Georgia is only the beginning. Question is, what are the rest of us going to do about it?
It certainly didn’t help that the Supreme Court overturned much enforcement of the Voting Rights Act in 2013.
The court’s 2013 decision in Shelby County v. Holder ended the Justice Department’s longstanding power to block and to litigate changes in voting rules in nine states, most of them in the South, and in parts of six others. The court reasoned that the blatant racism that once justified such pervasive oversight no longer was widespread.
Snopes says mixture of true and false. Seems she may have gotten a trademark there, but she apparently has not been involved in any production of voting machines or further shenanigans. From what we can tell.
Do you have mail-in ballots? A number of states (like mine) also do their voting my mail and so far it’s significantly reduced the problems caused by too few polling sites, limited voting hours, and dodgy voting machines. (Of course, voting by mail is an abomination in the eyes of Our Great Orange Lord and Savior so I wouldn’t be surprised if He and his Flunky Attorney General do something before November to eliminate the practice.)
It’s really not fair to compare parliamentary voting to voting in the US, where you have so many different things on the ballot: municipal, state, federal positions and referendums. When I go to vote, I get a ballot for one position. I make my mark on it and pop it in the box. Done. (Australian ballots are more complicated because of their voting systems, plus two houses, but nothing near as complicated as US ballots.). I can understand why you need voting machines.
But, not having equal distribution of said voting machines for all voters - that’s bad stuff
Ballots in the US tend to be very cumbersome beasties. In addition to Federal offices (President/VP, Representative and — maybe — Senator), we generally elect the entire State government (Governor, Lieutenant Governor, Secretary of State, Attorney General, Treasurer &c&c&c) as well as members of the Legislature. Ditto for county offices. Ditto for municipal offices. Also judges, which an acquaintance from NZ assures me is an abomination to most of rest of the world. Then there are financial measures such as levies and bonds for schools, libraries, parks, fire districts and so on. And constitutional/charter amendments. In some places there are initiatives, referenda and recalls. And as a bonus, the way Congressional and Legislative districts are crazy-quilted together means that addresses across the street from one another may get significantly different ballots.
None of this absolutely rules out the paper, pencil, place and post. The kicker is “somebody to count the vote.” And there’s no national standard (in the SoW there’s no state standard: every county manages its own elections). When I first voted in 1968 we used bulky machines with levers one flipped to make a choice, and which produced a paper tape that gave the count. As time went on the trend has been more and more toward automated systems, with the latest incarnations being touchscreen machines that may or may not include any kind of paper trail and in some cases have been found to be eminently hackable.
The case before us stems from the disastrous 2018 election that started with purging half a million voters from the rolls for highly suspicious reasons and ended with polling places that only had one or two machines which sometimes didn’t work. Curiously, these incidents happened most frequently in Democratic-leaning areas. The contract for the replacement system was given to a company which had never done anywhere near this volume, and — again, curiously — hired the new Governor’s campaign manager as a lobbyist. “Clusterfleech” doesn’t begin to describe it.
ETA: Ninja’d (somewhat) by Northern Piper.
I think we certainly need machines to tabulate our crazy quilt of elections in a reasonable amount of time, but we can have that without requiring that votes be cast on a machine, and if a jurisdiction does ordinarily use machines for most voters, it should still have an ample supply of emergency paper ballots and a way to count them expeditiously. There are solutions that combine this as well. There are voting machines that record votes onto paper ballots, so if the machines break, you can simply hand those ballots to voters directly. Even in places that rely on hand-marked paper ballots for most voters, there might be a ballot-printing machine available for voters who can’t read (the machines have audio narration) or can’t handle a pen.
Georgia chose to do something…very different, even as experts warned that disaster was looming.
Resident of the Peach State here.
The voting situation in Georgia has been complicated going back to the Jim Crow days.
While there are no longer poll taxes and literacy tests to vote here, it’s not far from it.
The registration process to vote is not difficult IF you have legal ID AND if you have access to the internet site of the Secretary of State’s office or you can get your hands on an application or someone can help you fill one out. There’s a bunch of stuff right there that may be difficult for disadvantaged people, disabled people, and people with no easy access to legal ID.
All that is why you often see church buses loaded with people going to go register and going to go vote. This is considered by many Republicans as proof of voter fraud.
Georgia had touch-screen voting machines for a long time, but these machines have long been considered suspicious because there’s no audit trail, among other things. They’re so old you can’t get parts for them anymore. So last year the legislature voted to get new machines that did print paper receipts for audit so the results could be checked.
The company that won the contract, supposedly their lobbyist used to work for the Governor, but I’m sure that’s a coincidence. 
These new machines were used for the first time in this primary.
Lemme see …
Machines were late being delivered to polling places.
Machines were programmed for different precincts/different elections than the ones they were residing in.
Machines malfunctioned.
There were not enough voting machines at many precincts and people had to wait a long time to vote, like hours and hours.
Poll workers did not have the passwords to activate the machines.
Poll workers were ignorant of how to set the machines up.
There were not sufficient ballots available at polling places.
There was not sufficient printer paper for receipts.
And turnout was quite large, larger than expected.
So all in all, lots of fun.
Usually you’re not allowed to absentee vote in Georgia under you are over 65 or are disabled and can prove it. This time because of the pandemic the Secretary of State mailed every registered voter in the state an absentee ballot application. Not everyone received their application. Many who did and returned the application didn’t get their ballots. The ballots had special return envelopes you were supposed to use; there’s reports by some people that their reply envelopes were sealed and could not be used.
There appeared to be more problems in Democratic strongholds (like Atlanta) than in other parts of the state. The Secretary of State blamed problems on the counties, singling out Fulton County (Atlanta) as the biggest screwup.
NOW … all that could be mismangement, or stupidity, or ignorance rather than malfeasance. But geez, it’s awfully convenient.
Jenny
your humble TubaDiva
(Georgia on my mind.)
I think John Roberts, Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas, Brett Kavanaugh, and Neil Gorsuch should be forced off the bench. They should be pressured to resign in disgrace, and if Democrats win the Senate, they should be threatened with impeachment. Or just pack the damn court. I know that it’s probably a pipe dream and that they’ll all resist, refuse, and squirm, but put the spotlight on their asses. Turn up the political heat. They wanted to be activists on the bench, so let’s make them feel the brunt of bad politics.
The judiciary has become a farce, and it’s time to stop pretending like it’s apolitical. The best way to depoliticize is to call attention to the hacks and quacks, and rebalance the judiciary any way possible. I would have argued until fairly recently against packing and for the filibuster, but the Republicans have broken constitutional and political norms and it’s time to reset.
Just a reminder that Georgia was one of the first states to enact strict Voter ID laws in 2005 and that one of the reasons proponents use to justify such laws is to have confidence in the integrity of elections.
Counting paper ballots accurately is hard. Do not mistake the precision of the vote totals for accuracy. Different hand counting techniques have different error bars but the results reported can be off by up to 2%. (Cite)
For most elections that is not a big deal. Live through enough close elections and it is likely you have been represented by someone that lost the actual vote but “won” the count. There is a value in trying to use technology to create a more accurate system and put the actual winners in office. Those newer systems come with their own problems that need to be addressed, though.
I now return you to the socially useful fiction that in democracies candidates who get the most votes win elections.
Our municipal election, which can have more than one candidate or item, uses a combination of hand-marker ballot, where you colour in the bubble for your choice, with an electronic tabulator. That produces a paper trail, but leaves the counting to a mechanical process, which strikes me as a good approach, similar to what Lord Feldon mentioned.
Gee, you’d think that it might have been intentional, nowhatimean?
Same for ours. The electronic tabulator has the additional benefit of instantly rejecting any ballots with errors, so they can be immediately corrected by the voter, rather than adjudicated days later and potentially tossed out.
The supreme court has held that such questions are political and none of their business, so no, there is no remedy. Democracy in action!