Tuesday November 8, 2022 is Election Day in the United States of America. In addition to Congressional "midterms" at the federal level, many state governors and other more local offices are up for grabs. Given how things shook out over Election Day 2020, things could get a little crazy.
...or, perhaps, not! But here's the Megathread for if they do. Talk about your local concerns, your national predictions, your suspicions re: election fraud and interference, how you plan to vote, anything election related is welcome here. Culture War thread rules apply, with the addition of Small-Scale Questions and election-related "Bare Links" allowed in this thread only (unfortunately, there will not be a subthread repository due to current technical limitations).
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Notes -
Maricopa County has been reporting a lot of trouble with tabulators. Maricopa County is famous for being the location of "Sharpiegate" in the 2020 election.
Sharpiegate was ultimately confirmed. Not all of the ballots were printed on bleed resistant paper, some Trump votes were found to have been lost to bleed through. Not a large number, but it was a real thing.
Problems are being reported at 26+ polling locations. Voters are being told to leave their votes in a locked box to be tabulated at a different location later. There are worries about chain of custody.
Arizona currently has tight races for both the Governor and Senator, so this is going to be a major source of contention going forward.
"We've got about 20% of the locations out there where there's an issue with the tabulator, where some of the ballots that after people have voted they try and run them through tabulator, and they're not going through," said County Chairman Bill Gates in a video posted by the elections department.
Not only that but the person in charge is called Bill Gates. The memes write themselves honesty.
Y'know, if you're going to insist on the existence of a danger to democracy called "election denialism", you kinda sorta oughta make sure that there is no screwing up of the sort that makes it look like something dodgy is going on.
I don't think there is anything fraudulent, just general incompetence, but hoo boy. If I remember correctly, Maricopa County was one of the places in the 2020 election that gave rise to "this result seems very odd and possibly fake". Again, it was just a matter of a small amount of votes (I think about 3,000) causing it to flip from red to blue, but you really don't want to be always having something (ahem ahem) happening with the way you count votes, it begins to look like a pattern.
It's simply a matter of resources. I was talking to my girlfriend about this who in every mid-term and Presidential Election from 2008 to 2018 volunteered as a site judge in Philly. She was paid a max of 90 dollars for a 12 hour day, plus she got half a day training on setting up the voting machines and had a couple of other volunteers at her site. She often would have to stay late without getting paid any more until a police officer arrived to transport the ballots to the counting facility.
Whereas when I was running elections in a much smaller UK city, I had pretty much a hundred or more of council workers getting paid over time and time in lieu to do the polls and counting. We could train them throughout the year on whatever new set up we were using and do practice runs. And even then we pretty much always had some kind of issue every year. But you only see that internally because we only announced the votes when they were completed at the end. The fact we missed a box until the final sweep or a whole table of counters was reversing the piles in error would never show up in the results because it was caught by the final audit before we announced the final counts. Any challenges by the parties were usually dealt with prior to then as well.
Running a non-messy election is expensive and time consuming and even our electoral officers were getting their numbers cut, because compared to getting the bins collected it doesn't rile up voters in the same way so it's and easy way to cut budget.
I made close to 600 CAD in one day in the last Canadian federal election.
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