Both parties are bad but the magnitude is totally different.
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?
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.
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.
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
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.
I’ve reviewed 3 articles on this: the three top results on the event from a google news search for
hinds county ballots. Those three articles do not back up what OP is claiming.There are many other articles. If someone else would like to step in and do some reading and add more sourced information about this, it would be greatly appreciated.
As of now OP’s claim about Republicans’ actions in this event is unsubstantiated.
Be skeptical, people
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.
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
Democrats have for years attempted to sue groups off ballots. They are the same. You just never pay attention.
Source please.
Can you cite even one instance with a link to proof? Goes a long way to counter the post you are commenting about.
Lying fascist located.
Found one!
Yeah you found a democracy supporter. I know you fascists don’t support it, but you really should.
Damn, guess the Russians didn’t fork out enough money for the premium troll farms this time around.
Okay. In your words what is Democracy?
True support for democracy would welcome as many parties as wanted to compete.
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.
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
At a school. Imagine! We vote in the churches across the street from the schools.
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.
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?
So this is what a competent country looks like. Must be nice.
Yep, and it’s compulsory voting, on a sensible day of the week and even pre-poll so you can just go in early if you want to. And sometimes there are sausages.
And sometimes there are sausages.
Okay you trying to hurt me? Because it seems like you’re trying to hurt me.
we call it democracy sausage and they tend to be at most polling places and run by local charities or community groups… it’s brilliant tbh - national pride in our democracy manifested in additional support to charity
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?
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 $.
Why is it possible to run out of something that could (should) be handled entirely digitally?
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.
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.
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.
Even if you could make a perfect digital system through encryption and keys and further complexities, to the layman this is effectively a magic black box that they have to trust does the job. If you can’t explain it simply to that layman without saying “trust me bro”, it doesn’t fix the primary problem we currently have with our voting system, the lack of trust in the system.
There’s a solution of vote not being anonymous, so that everyone can check if their own vote has been stolen, and everyone can see if there are anomalies in distribution of voters.
But then you have the issue of voter retaliation and discrimination. That already happens in certain places in this country if someone even thinks you vote a certain way. If there was a reliable way to find out who someone else voted for in the most recent election, there would be huge social implications.
What if you lose a job because of the way you voted? An employer would not have to disclose that as the reason or any reason at all. Most states are employ at will states where you can be hired or fired for any reason at all with a handful of exceptions. And even with those exceptions, it is very very difficult to prove if those exceptions have been broken.
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.
You absolutely can’t convince me that with a well designed system
Why in the world do you think we would have a well-designed system?
Then why don’t you create that system?
And then proceed to convince every American that it is good and reliable and will work because it only takes a vocal few to stir question about it. And it only takes a single person finding a small flaw that can probably skew results. And that one flaw that allows someone smarter than you or I, has the power to throw question into our already shaky political system. And you as the producer of the system are entirely liable.
We are already fighting about trust in our voting system, to add the complexity of computerized systems is not going to sway the vast majority of people.
You can’t ‘miscount’ a digital vote.
Yes you absolutely can. Look up flipped bits, look up rounding errors. Look up lossy data. Look up bit overflow. There are many many ways computers miscount things. Hell, many calculators have incongruent output to each other because they do math in a slightly different system.
Look up flipped bits
Those are easy to mitigate, even on a hardware level… But of you really needed to you could even do it on a software level.
Look up rounding errors
For integer numbers… Suuuure
Look up lossy data
What the fuck does compression have to do with this? Guess you needed to pad your text
Look up bit overflow
Even a 32bit processor will not overflow unless you go above 2 billion, and even if you were using 16 bits, that’s what the overflow bit is here to indicate… And if you’re coding using anything but assembly this isn’t anything you need to worry about
There are genuine concerns with digital voting, but you’re missing every single one of them with this response.
My point was not that these examples are issues to be concerned with in a voting system. Instead I was pointing out that computers fail at counting all the time. It’s also not even my full argument. You dissected one portion of my response and still missed the point I was making.
Sadly we live in an age where non-tech people, a bit like LLMs do, can say all those words and not understand them.
I genuinely think using PDP-11 level (in feel, can be more performant) machines as our PCs (with hardware accelerators for cryptography, some sound and some graphics) would be beneficial for the humanity. Limit them to things they can use differently from a squirrel using a wheel.
Somehow Brazil makes it work, there are many many layers of redundancy so that any tampering would not affect the result, or be obvious.
That’s awesome for Brazil. They discovered a perfect flawless man made system. I completely believe it is entirely tamper proof. It’s much easier to change whole datasets than to edit enough paper ballots to make a difference in a vote where many millions of people have submitted paper votes. Ctrl+a, del… Goodbye data. Not that it’s possible to do in the Brazilian system. But it certainly is possible in many databases…
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?
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!”
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!”
Butterfly meme - Is this Freedom ©®™
How do you run out of ballots? Why don’t they ship enough for every single legal voter?
Benefit-of-a-doubt answer that they aren’t acting maliciously: that would cost way more than necessary for the typical American voter turnout.
Intentional voter suppression.
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.
A more centralized system is ironically easier to rig too. But we’re getting there with decentralization as well.
The thing about decentralization is that all it changes is who exactly gets to fuck with you by being corrupt.
How centralized or decentralized a system is doesn’t matter as much as how accountable people on either end of that spectrum are able to be held.
Republicans also love to volunteer / run for local elections that oversee these logistics purely because they want to manipulate it in bad faith. It’s SOP for them.
Hell, they have even been caught multiple times putting up fake ballot areas, and “helping” non-native English speakers fill out their ballots, and being in full control of delivering those ballots.
Both sides are not the same.
