Why not have more severe consequences for voter suppression?
Because that would lead to fair elections. And if elections were fair republicans would never win any. So they block any attempt to fix elections.
Because that would lead to fair elections. And if elections were fair republicans would never win any.
Why would Democrats not simply extend and expand the Voting Rights Act when they have a Congressional majority? Dems had this in 2021 when Biden took office - both branches, plus the White House. They had it back in 2009 as well, when the House had two dozen votes to spare and the Senate enjoyed a 60 vote supermajority.
Why not send down more financial and legal aid, as Howard Dean championed back in 2008 when he was head of the DNC and delivered one of the largest landslide majorities in the party's history? Why not use federal money and manpower to amp up Mississippi state election offices?
Don't Democrats want to win in Mississippi?
Because Voter Suppression usually comes in the form of laws and judgements, and legislators can't be arrested for passing unjust laws, and judges can't be arrested for passing unjust rulings, partly because...well who the fuck could even prosecute such a case without risking biased prosecution?
The supreme court is ordinarily supposed to be the check for when the law itself is unjust, but that ship has sailed and it ain't coming back until, IMO, we institute a sortitionate bench, IE the judges for any given case before the supreme court are selected at random from the pool of all federal judges who don't have a conflict of interest, or at least the appearance of one, on the case.
How do you run out of ballots? Why don't they ship enough for every single legal voter?
Step 1: Be opposed to free and fair elections.
Step 2: Determine which districts vote for you less often.
Step 3: Ensure that fewer ballots are delivered to those locations.
It is intentional, not accidental. They probably used low turnout from prior elections (due to voter suppression) as justification for not providing enough ballots for every registered voter.
They should, at a minimum, have a ballot for every single voter registered to that precinct.
That's what voter registration is for.
The problem with the US system seems to be that it's partisan all the way down. It's too easy for the parties standing for election to influence how the election itself is run and counted. This is, I guess, an effect of the USA's highly decentralized approach to elections: if the Republicans run a county, they get to decide how elections work in that county. A more centralized system wouldn't leave the same scope for tweaking each local election to get the desired result in that locality.
Intentional voter suppression.
Benefit-of-a-doubt answer that they aren’t acting maliciously: that would cost way more than necessary for the typical American voter turnout.
This is election fraud. Republicans know they can't win on policy or reputation, so the only way they can win is by removing voters.
This is election fraud.
When will the DOJ begin prosecuting?
Literally never because they always have some bullshit way to legitimize their actions. It is fraud in the colloquial usage of the word, but not legally if they have specific arguments like "we were just referring to previous (lowest they could find) turnout numbers to save the taxpayers money!"
This is such a weird thing to think about being Australian, where you can go to almost any local school to vote.
But you can still have you vote outside of the area you live in from basically any other polling place in the country (if it is a federal election). And the same can be said for state and local, go to the closest open polling to you, let them know you're out of district and they point you to the correct line, done.
So this is what a competent country looks like. Must be nice.
I have lived in several counties in Illinois and North Carolina. They have been urban or semi-urban counties. I have never experienced any problems voting anywhere I've lived. In fact, it seems like they bend over backwards to offer every option for voting. I am much more concerned about gerrymandering and effective bribery of elected officials using campaign donations.
At a school. Imagine! We vote in the churches across the street from the schools.
Schools, town halls, community centres, some libraries, some council buildings, certain community spaces like scout halls, basketball stadiums, rotary clubs etc.
Old churches that are now public halls are also opened as voting stations, and some actual churches while not open for voting due to conflicts of interest, do establish rapid housing programs so people can get legal addresses for electrotal enrolments in time for voting, and others will be open as census sites for homeless folk to record themselves on census night. I grew up in bum fuck nowhere and on election day if the weather was tolerance AEC would set up an open polling station on the local football oval just to move through the register faster than what the tiny local school could handle.
Since covid lock downs, eastern states especially have enhanced their postal and early voting processes.
For about 2 weeks before elections (local, state, federal) for the most part you can just walk into any of the above buildings, in litteraly any suburb town or city that's participating in the election, and cast your vote.
If you do your research on best venues and times, you can knock out your vote in 10 minutes flat. No queue.
Some people are eligible for postal votes too, you can request the ballot be mailed to you, or pick one up from the post office and cast your vote without leaving your home block.
But we're far from competent. While I love our preferential voting system, it's not well understood by the public, our LGA's are still subject to gerrymandering, and there are large swaths of our community that are legally prohibited from voting for various reasons that I personally feel is an unethical antidemocratic policy. There are also huge groups of indigenous peoples who do not have accessible electoral education, trustworthy polling processes, and are disenfranchised from the electrotal process, with little government support or funding for culturally appropriate programs for engagement. Despite our preferential voting, we have essentially devolved to a two party system with neither major party really being any better, do we want the party of bigots, or the party of other bigots?
In Germany it's overwhelmingly schools. There are several in every district everywhere, they are public buildings, they are easily accessible, they have enough room for events like this... It's a no brainer.
Not the hardware store? How you do you get your sausage?
i believe during times of sausage-related crises the state emergency services step in and air lift sausages from hardware store warehouses to effected polling places
they do not, however, transport onions by this means as they would cause unnecessary slip risk to the crew
The number of ballots is an issue, but the response to running out is far more important. There is "oh shit, well let's get more there, give some time to make sure votes are counted." Vs. "Stop the polls, this is all going to plan!"
Is this in Texas where the guy responsible was just indicted? He was supposed to look at all the places ballots were to go and instead just sent basically a divided equal amount to each location. He did this partly because he was doing this while at work at another job that was undisclosed to the local government while he "worked from home" for them. His new job was with some oil company paying considerably more, but he never resigned and just half assed his gov work to keep the extra $.
Edit - Source
Edit 2 - I'm apparently illiterate and missed the word Mississippi somehow. 😩
How many people will vote in a county is super predictable. There are only 2 reasons to run out of ballots
- Turnout is unusually high (Not likely).
- You printed less ballots than you needed (Really likely).
That's it, that's the end of the reasons. You can literally print the same number of ballots for the last similar election and you'd have a good chance of having enough at least for most of the voting with some good early indicators that you need more at the beginning of the election. To run out 2 hours into an election shows you didn't even print as many ballots as you did for the last major election.
The math for how many ballots to print is "last similar election * (county growth percentage * last election turnout percentage) * 1.05". That's it. That will cover enough ballots for pretty much any election except for an extreme one where turnout is WAY higher than what could be predicted.
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Enough ballots were printed but not all were delivered
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Ballots were printed but the wrong quantities were delivered to different polling stations
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Ballots were delivered and some "disappeared"
Not saying it's any of those things, but that's 3 more possibilities
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That math actually results in not having enough ballots in areas with more voter suppression if they actually turn out for the next election. The correct number of ballots is 105% of the number of registered voters so everyone can vote in any given election, with some spares for mistakes.
Inb4 assholes come out of the woodwork to both sides this.
According to this article on the event:
- The commission which screwed up the ballots order was composed entirely of Democrats
- All members of the commission took responsibility for the failure (meaning they didn’t identify who actually made the mistake)
- One commissioner blamed the failure on inadequate training from the Secretary of State’s office (which conflicts with the taking of responsibility for it)
- When interviewed, the commission was unable to list any concrete steps they had taken to ensure it doesn’t happen again
- (There’s no mention of any discussion of extending the polling hours)
So it really, really sounds like a bunch of Democrats disenfranchised the black voters of Hind county, then failed to take responsibility for the screw-up, then failed to take it seriously enough to actually fix it.
Happy to review any evidence to the contrary; this is the first I’ve heard of this debacle but the OP doesn’t seem to be backed up by the facts here.
Anyone have evidence of the Republicans’ alleged actions here?
https://mississippitoday.org/2023/11/14/hinds-county-ballot-lawsuits-dropped-mississippi/
In the Democratic Party’s lawsuit, a chancery judge ordered all Hinds County polling places to remain open an extra hour, until 8 p.m. The state Republican Party filed an emergency appeal to the Mississippi Supreme Court and asked the state’s highest court to overturn the order
Would it be a weird question to ask how many Black people were in that commission?
I mean, sometimes racism can take priority over party affiliations.
Just reviewed this AP article.
It agrees with everything I listed in the previous comment. Again, no mention of any proposal or debate around extending polling hours, nor of Republican opposition to this. It doesn’t refute OP’s claim; it simply doesn’t mention anything about it.
I just reviewed this article from WLBT (conceivably a local station?) that was published on election day, while this was happening.
It opens with this:
A member of the Hinds County Republican Executive Committee is considering filing a lawsuit to keep the polls open longer after a number of Hinds County precincts ran out of ballots.
“We’re trying to figure out how to do it,” said committee member Pete Perry. “We’re trying to make sure voters get to vote.”
In direct opposition to what OP claims, the Republicans were fighting to keep the polls open.
Again, still open to conflicting evidence, which support’s OP’s claim.
So far what I can tell is that Democrats dropped the ball, disenfranchised thousands of black voters, and then attempted to blame Republicans for it, after also claiming to take responsibility for the failure.
So a commission makes a mistake and this should lead to voter disenfranchisement? Why do you think that’s fine? Completely reasonable to request a small extension of 1 hour when the commission screws up (which inevitably means will happen sometimes independent of party affiliation).
Of course such committees take joint responsibility rather than pointing the finger at one person. These people are essentially volunteers and you will need people to volunteer in the future.
I agree with you about being skeptical here. It appears that this was likely just someone who screwed up. I doubt it was a conspiracy or intentional. In fact, both parties ended up suing to keep polls open:
As ballots ran short, groups filed two lawsuits to try to give people more time to vote Tuesday night. One was filed by the nonpartisan group Mississippi Votes, and the Mississippi Republican Party initially supported it. The other was filed by the Mississippi Democratic Party.
Trump said if minorities vote, Republicans will never win another election, so they're making sure minorities can't vote.
This was from November....what happened with this??
The people weren't allowed to vote. Simple as.
Fuck so they won
They don't want democracy unless it gives them conservatism. They'll fight to subordinate the entire country, including openly defying democracy and the peaceful transfer of power.
...again. They'll do those things again.
They aren't a political party, they're the white taliban. An illegitimate organization.
Get the fuck out of my face telling me both parties are the same
glances at Merrick Garland's DOJ and Kristen Clarke, the Assistant AG at the Civil Rights Division
You... uh... you gonna do anything about this?
Butterfly meme - Is this Freedom ©®™
Both parties are bad but the magnitude is totally different.
Why is it possible to run out of something that could (should) be handled entirely digitally?
Tom Scott does a great job of explaining this. Tr;Dr is paper ballots are a mature process that has the benefit of requiring physical access to tamper with, and governments who aren't great at IT and only do something at scale once 4 years is asking for trouble
Because there is no way to prove without a shadow of a doubt that any digital system is 100% reliable. Are all voting machines completely tamper proof? Running unique code that cannot be run elsewhere, and is 100% open source such that the source can be viewed by anyone without exposing itself to risk that a smart enough bad actor can cause havoc? Do these machines need to be networked? Are all the networks completely identical and have 100% uptime? I could go on for hours about the flaws in software.
The general response is usually something to the effect of "well paper ballots and human counting is also flawed" to which my immediate rebuttal is, humans have to write the code and develop the hardware and if humans are flawed, so to will the code they produce be. Digital voting is just the same human error with more steps. Nearly all of the issues with paper voting are present in digital voting and then some.
this is 100% correct
… but also, i do wish we had the best of both worlds: ONLY paper ballots are submitted as trustworthy, however machines that print on paper ballots (so if the machine stops working you can use a pencil as usual still). this ensures that people mark the ballots in a valid way, they can physically look at their ballot paper and ensure it’s what they want before submitting it, and the machine can record its ballots so they can be fed into a computer as a “preliminary” count so results are available ASAP, with the paper ballots confirming validity - the preliminary count is meaningless other than speed; paper ballots are the source of truth
Digital voting is just the same human error with more steps. Nearly all of the issues with paper voting are present in digital voting and then some.
I wonder if one can use ghost keys for an anonymous voting system, which still ensures that a voter only votes once, and still makes all votes verifiable.
That would have much fewer issues.
Running unique code that cannot be run elsewhere, and is 100% open source such that the source can be viewed by anyone without exposing itself to risk that a smart enough bad actor can cause havoc?
No need to use some fantastically obscure hardware. Source code being open is not bad.
A voting system is the easiest thing to emulate. Except for load.
You don't have me convinced and I genuinely don't understand how this could be the popular opinion. You absolutely can't convince me that with a well designed system it would be easy to cheat when compared to a piece of paper.
Why the hell would software need to be more complex than a few text lines that store the results of your selections? An amateur coder could create a simple multiple choice selection system in an afternoon.
Why does anything other than a local network need to be involved? It can literally function similarly to paper ballots and have a central recipient machine that collects the results that is then handed over to a ballot authority. Please keep going on for hours about the flaws instead of simplifying the problem.
A machine that is sitting in a voting hall is as easily tampered with as a paper ballot, and it's not going to be done by the average person. Anyone who could manipulate these machines could figure out how to mess with a paper ballot.
You can't 'run out' of a digital vote. You can't 'miscount' a digital vote. If both methods have issues, why choose the one that is OBVIOUSLY easier to manipulate? Oops! Someone misplaced the piece of paper you put in. The year is 2024 and all of the possible issues you've just brought up can be solved but it seems that it would be way too easy to actually have accurate vote counts and one less voter suppression tactic in the pocket of shady governments, so they won't.
Because people can understand paper ballots, while tech is complicated and people don't want to understand it, so they instantly think it's unsafe.
it's a war and all is fair. if you expect your opponent to play nice, you're naive. we know they're going to cheat to win. what are WE going to do about it?
