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.
How long did it take to count races in the 1990s?
It just seems like pure insanity to me that we use these machines to do our elections.
Blame Bush versus Gore. After the hanging chads etc. some American elections switched to electronic voting machines to avoid similar problems, and now new and exciting problems have come in their wake.
Like the Poles in the comment below, Ireland does paper ballots and manual counting (we even had a mini-scandal when the government of the day, back in the 90s, wanted to introduce electronic voting and bought some machines, but there were so many legal challenges that the machines sat in a warehouse and were never used).
The counts are the best part of the election 😀
Really? Were the hanging chads worse than the 400 voting-machine voters who cast negative 16,000 votes? That was even in the Florida 2000 Presidential election too!
It actually looks to me like Maricopa is trying to get things right: voting machines for accessibility, but instead of storing results on a chip they print a human-readable paper card ballot. The ballot can be immediately scanned for a quick count and to double-check for problems, but then it ends up in a lockbox for recounts or disputes... and if the tabulator isn't working, it just goes in a different container for hand-counting. I wouldn't be surprised if some of those printers cause problems too and need to be taken care of(NSFW audio), but they're independent enough that you could just spoil any half-printed ballots and send someone to another voting machine. Scanners are usually more reliable than printers, but having redundant tabulators too would have been a good idea in hindsight.
I didn't know it would be that clip when I clicked on the link, but I was hoping it would be that clip.
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