$100,000 is a pretty big carrot, admittedly. Probably moreso than laziness…
Still, nobody thought this was a bad idea? I’d be interested in knowing all the counties involved here.
Of course nobody thought it was a bad idea. Up until a few years ago, no one was seriously thinking there might be any significant voter fraud going on in rural Ohio counties. And when you have to be at polling station, set-up and ready to go by seven am in areas where you might have to drive a fair distance to whatever central location the polling machines are stored at, it makes practical sense for trusted election board workers to take the machines with them. And even in the last few years, when everyone seems to be expecting to find fraud everywhere they look, the people running those polling stations never thought anyone would think they would abuse the public trust that way…that’s just what they do in big cities. Not in small towns where everyone knows who you are and would notice if the local election for mayor had a wildly skewed result.
We used to be so trusting, and worthy of trust…
I get this - except where the hell are the polls in the first place? In my jurisdiction, they’re at places like schools and fire stations and the like. aren’t there any secure locations w/in those buildings that can accomodate the stuff overnight once or twice a year? and if not, what’s wrong w/renting a portable space once/twice a year and lock 'em up in that (I see ads all the time for temporary lockable storage things for things like ‘you’re moving and packing up your entire house’ or remodeling an important room and need all your stuff out of it for a week)
Remember, no one has proven that fraud occurred in any of these sleepovers, but it would be best to avoid even the appearance of impropriety. Most of the election irregularities I have witnessed in southwestern Ohio have been minor, and legal, but it takes very few votes to swing an election sometimes.
When Democratic strongholds have multiple hours of waiting time to use voting machines, and in Republican counties it’s 10 machines, no waiting, that’s certainly wrong, but is it illegal? I don’t think so.
When a concerted effort is made to challenge the registrations of only the new voters, as happened to me in 2004, that may be unethical, but again, not illegal.
When the Warren county officials lied and said that the FBI told them that security reasons required the votes to be counted behind locked doors, that wasn’t illegal either.
I am sure these poll workers, many of whom have been doing this for years, are as dismayed as all get out to find out their probity is in question. The efforts to influence the election have recently been a good deal more subtle than that.
I’ve noticed a trend lately in discussions about government actions to narrow the focus onto whether or not said actions broke the law or not. (Not picking on you, Bill, your post just got me thinking.) I feel this completely misses the point in cases like this. As a citizen in a democracy, I shouldn’t only be concerned about whether our government is skating within the existing rules, but also if what they’re doing is right or wrong. I often see these discussions end with people shrugging their shoulders and saying “right or wrong, they didn’t do anything illegal” and leaving it at that. In my opinion, when cases are found where government policy/laws are found to allow wrongdoing which is technically legal, that should be cause for greater outrage, not less. And I can’t think of anything more critical to our democracy than elections being done as fairly and securely as possible.
And when a church in a Bush stronghold county has 97% of registered voters vote while in an inner-city precinct only 7% do, it’s highly improbable, but not “illegal”.
I was an election officer in Stanislaus County, CA in the 1990’s. The evening before the election the inspector for each precinct would attend a meeting, and then pick up all the supplies needed to hold the election. They would take them home for the night and set up at the nearby election location in the morning. That inspector is hired by the county, and is charged with being trustworthy and protecting the equipment for the night. It was part of their job, and not doing your election officer/inspector job correctly can land you in jail. I do not know if they still do it like this.
This saved all the inspectors from having to drive to the county seat in the wee hours of election morning and ensured each precinct would be open at 7 AM (we had to be at the precinct at 6 AM), and no one’s car would break down or anything on the (sometimes long) way to and from the county seat and cause the precinct to not open on time. If everyone had to get there in the early morning my guess is that it would be a zoo trying to hand out all the equipment, and getting the precinct open on time and keeping it open until the polls close is a BIG deal. Also, don’t forget that the inspector also has to do some accounting (make sure the number of ballots matches the number of signatures in the register), and drive all the equipment and ballots back to the county seat at around 9 PM on election night.
Would you feel better if the equipment were locked in the unoccupied voting location (like a school) for the night? That doesn’t seem to make sense, as everyone would know where it was, and anyone could break in and get to it at their leisure. Also, the inspector would presumably have access to this location, so you’re worse off than when you started. Having the inspector take the equipment home ensures that it is in the custody of a mostly undisclosed county employee, which seems more secure than leaving it at the precinct.
When the inspector brings the ballots and equipment to the precinct in the morning, the other election officers can see if the ballots are still sealed in their protective wrapping, and we all looked into the ballot box to be sure it was empty before we sealed it.
I’m also not sure what everyone thinks might happen during the 8 hours the stuff is in the custody of the precinct inspector that can’t happen on election day during the long hours we sat chatting because no one came in to vote.
I’m not saying there isn’t a (likely much more expensive) more secure way to do things, but I don’t see precisely why everyone is so freaked out that the equipment was taken home.
Maybe it has something to do with this:
Bolding mine.
My guess is that your fellow poll workers might have a word or two with you if you were to get up and say “Gosh fellas, I’m bored! Think I’ll go on over and put in some “practice ballots” on that there machine–who’s with me?”
These are the infamous Diebold touch screen election machines, you know, the ones that randomly didn’t upload their memory cards with cast votes? Ya think maybe “practice ballots” are recorded on said memory cards and are uploaded about the same way as “real ballots” are? How is this NOT voter fraud?
Well, you don’t know she was talking about “practice ballots”. When I read it, I thought she meant that the poll workers were casting their own ballots at home.
Either way they were, by definition, casting ballots BEFORE the official opening of the polls and in an unofficial, nonsecured, unmonitored area. Again, how does this not constitute voting fraud?
Assuming the voting machines don’t have some system in place to prevent untimely votes from registering, and the votes actually do register, it’s certainly voter fraud either way. But the one is “harmless” voting fraud, in that it doesn’t change the outcome, while the other one does.
I see what they might have been trying to do, making sure the thing was working by testing it with their own ballot, rationalizing that it was OK to do so, seeing as they were using their own vote and not going to vote twice, people that vote by mail don’t have to wait until election day, etc…
I agree that it was totally against the rules and wrong of them to cast their ballot early though. Anyone that did that should be punished accordingly, just as any employee who makes a mistake is.
I would count the sealed packages of ballots on election morning and make sure there were the amount the equipment sheet said there should be, so nobody could do that in my precinct.
I think that the touch screen voting machines were an extremely bad idea, precisely because there is NO paper trail. In Oregon we do all voting by mail, and we have a sealed outer envelope, a sealed and signed inner envelope and the ballot itself. We know how many ballots were originally mailed out to registered voters. We can check to make sure we have a signed envelope for every ballot counted. Unsigned envelopes are invalid ballots and they’re discarded. With the Diebold machines there was nothing to indicate that the memory cards weren’t uploading correctly since there was no physical record of the vote to match against counted ballots. There’s also the fact that it’s been proved over and over that the software was highly insecure and anyone with access to a computer station could manually change the number of votes registered for a candidate through a ludicrously easy to find back door in the software.
There’s nothing quite like paying a bunch of money to get fucked, but not getting even an orgasm out of the deal. Ohio got proper fucked. Diebold needs to be kicked out of the election business. And any voting method needs to have a separate, physical record to match against the electronic count.