Very detailed Lemmy post I wrote about this fuckery and more
Local news article containing the quote about the voter registrar
On Homer Plessey Way, board member Daniel Milojevic stood outside the Bywater polling place in the Press Street Gallery suggesting people try the two Jefferson Parish locations.
He said the local registrar of voters gave the district only 300 ballots per location and told them they could expect about 20 people.
“We had to confirm the number of ballots weeks ago,” he said, before it was clear how high the turnout would be. Milojevic conceded that planning had clearly missed the mark.
As one astute gentleman asked while defending Reddit, and accusing me of spreading misinformation:
If hardly anybody knew, how did turnout exceed expectations within 2 hours?
Because the “expectation” provided by the registrar was literally 20 voters per location (60 voters in total) for the entire fucking city.
So perhaps some degree of incompetence/not having any clue how many people would show up. Not necessarily malicious intent. Seems like it was such a shitshow it’ll force a redo. Clearly it should.
Elections official here, though in a different state.
We had the same thing happen here for a conservation district. Here are a few facts for our situation, it may be different than this news item, but it’s similar.
Conservation districts handle their own elections, they aren’t done by the state/county.
The last time they had an election, votes were in the low hundreds, this last time votes were in the thousands.
Our conservation district doesn’t get “official ballots” they just had something simple and when they needed more they printed more, but they were not prepared for the amount of work involved.
Conservation district elections here are not distributed to all households, they are an “interested parties show up” sort of deal. I believe in the old days you had to be a land owner to vote in then. These days I believe you need to be a resident. I’m the past no one really cared much about them, they decide things like where to plant trees to fight erosion and stuff like that. They aren’t making “political” decisions.
Please keep in mind that this wasn’t a normal election like you think of, it was more along the lines of an HOA election in terms of how it is conducted.
I don’t know if some party just googled “election” and mobilized for this, but this kind of turnout was new and unexpected.
I have no problem believing this district was blindsided by this.
It’s important to remember that this is a different sort of election though.
How are we still giving Republicans the benefit of the doubt? What will it take?
That’s the thing though, is it just incompetence or is it an attempt to see what people are willing to let slide?
We definitely need a re-do bc otherwise it signals that we’re ok with letting it happen again and again. Will there be enough ballots when it’s time for us to vote for elections with more at stake like mayor or in the midterms?
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?
We’re the first state to start using the DOGE voter database maintenance system. Will we end up with some kind of “glitch” that purges voters on top of being told the registrar made a miscalculation when estimating how many people would actually show up to vote?
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.
Nah, there’s been a few recent elections and ballot initiatives that are explicitly designed to undermine democracy and set up separate courts. This is definitely on purpose.
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.