Microblog Memes

Elections official here, though in a different state.

I'm glad you commented bc I have a question you might be able to answer. The district covers 5 parishes (we do parishes instead of counties) but the news article states the registrar of voters provided the number of 300 ballots at each location and expectation of 20 voters.

Only 3 of the 5 parishes actually had voting locations, so voters from 2 parishes had to travel to vote.

Each parish has its own registrar. It's unclear which parish the registrar that provided that estimate is from, but why would anyone expect the estimated number of voters in smaller parishes to be exactly the same as larger parishes?

I don’t know if some party just googled “election” and mobilized for this, but this kind of turnout was new and unexpected.

The only reason there was an election is because the incumbent candidate was suddenly challenged by a commercial fishing captain. Keep this in mind, and remember that because of our proximity to the gulf, fishing and seafood is still a pretty big industry for the state.

It was all very odd, and caught people's attention mainly because:

A. Typically people on the board hold these seats unchallenged for as long as they wish to remain on the board.

B. The district covers 5 parishes, but this board member is from New Orleans/Orleans Parish. She runs several urban gardens and contributes to local farmers markets. This is likely why she was able to mobilize so many voters, and why the news of the vote spread like it did.

C. Some weird things that have happened regarding voting the last two times the city voted, has everyone on high alert for attempts to sneak corruption through without people realizing it.

The election was on Saturday. As it turns out, the Tuesday before the election, the Louisiana Senate President had signed a bill to change the regulation process for seafood safety and testing. It is still sitting on the governor's desk, just waiting to be signed.

The bill also gives oversight of seafood regulation to the Louisiana Department of Agriculture and Forestry. The conservation board the candidates were running for also just happens to fall under the jurisdiction of this same department.

Louisiana lawmakers send seafood safety, oversight bill to Landry's desk

House Bill 652, authored by Rep. Timothy Kerner, R-Lafitte, dissolves the current Seafood Safety Task Force under the Department of Culture, Recreation and Tourism and reestablishes it within the Agriculture Department.

Kerner said the bill was carefully amended to ensure that domestic shrimpers are not inadvertently swept up in new enforcement efforts.

If this is all be one big coincidence, it certainly is an odd one. Rather than risk some kind of typical Louisiana good ole boy corruption BS, why not just allow everyone that wants to vote, the chance to vote?

It turns out the incumbent candidate from New Orleans won, but they're not releasing any numbers of how many votes she actually won compared to the other candidate.

I voted for her, but I still strongly believe they should call for a re-do bc this all sets a very bad precedent for the future. Even though it's not a normal election, our tax dollars fund this board. You should not be able to turn voters away, and then just shrug it off as incompetence or special circumstance.

Hey now, its Louisiana. No shortage of corrupt legacy Democrats. William Jefferson being a hallmark example.

The whole state is pay-2-play. Also, incidentally, an absolute hotbed of smuggling and espionage going back to the Huey Long era. Tons of Soviet-Era spying. Tons of FBI ratfvcking. Tons of mob activity. Like, when you hear about the CIA move coke in from Colombia, it's a coin-flip chance the product was moved through Miami or New Orleans.

I could see low expectations from the registrar of voters for turnout, but 60 people in the entire city? And they just didn’t have any kind of plans if more showed up?

This is the kind of election where usually only people who specifically are invested in the thing bother, I wouldn't be surprised if the last time one of these happened they literally did average about 20 votes per polling place, and their plan if more showed up was supplying 15x more ballots than they needed last time, just in case. Which wasn't remotely enough.

The one thing I'll say in their defense is that a water district board seat, in a special election, is not typically something that generates votes. Perhaps they did that on purpose, thinking the low turnout would help one candidate. We're talking about school board election numbers. The kind of thing where a bus full of people could swing the whole election.

You'll know if it was on purpose or not immediately when we see who won and if they try to stick with the result. If they were out of ballots at 9 am, then they shouldn't even try to count the votes or declare a winner. With the need for a redo being so obvious.

I'm willing to agree with malicious intent if they try keep the result. There should be no need to count the ballots, with the need to redo being so obvious.

Much easier to protect and verify than any electronic system

And electronic voting goes against the principles of a fair and free election.

One of the principles of such an election is that a layman can understand the process to verify the legitimacy of the election. The average citizens needs to be able to understand the election process.

Electronic voting either allows the state to track who voted for what and/or allows people to vote multiple times, or it is not possible for a layman to verify the legitimacy of the election.

Electronic voting are just plain anti democratic.

Edit: I am ignoring here the simple fact that closed source code is unverifiable and any voting machine running with e.g. windows would return unverifiable results. So I am ignoring the issues of the software stack of this machines, which we shouldn't.

Paper Elections are dead easy and safe to perform

There is a reason nearly no one other real democratic country uses stupid voting machines, but undemocratic shitholes like Russia love electronic voting and machines

It’s not checks that are the issue, but the scalability of the offensive and the inevitable opaqueness of countermeasures.