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naraburns  nihil supernum  2yr ago (text post)   Edited 2yr ago   19147 thread views

USA Election Day 2022 Megathread

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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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.

There are worries about chain of custody.

In most jurisdictions, on-site tabulation wasn't done until relatively recently, unless you go back to the days of lever machines. My own precinct in Pennsylvania didn't have them until the 2020 primary. Before that, it was all electronic and all you got was a plastic card that you'd literally throw on a pile on a table when you were finished. At least then, I guess, you could make the argument that the poll worker didn't know what was on the card. Before that, though, we used punchcards, and you'd drop the ballot into a box and trust that it wouldn't be tampered with. Before that it was hand marking paper. Hand-delivering ballots to the local board of elections was the norm throughout most of American history, especially in more rural locations that didn't tend to have mechanical voting machines.

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.

The original Sharpiegate claim was that tabulating machines rejected ballots filled out with a sharpie marker, and that poll workers were intentionally giving people sharpies to invalidate their ballots. What you're claiming was "confirmed" appears to be a different theory involving bleedthrough, not necessarily machine invalidation.

Either way, what is your source that Sharpiegate v2.0 was confirmed? I was able to find some confirmation that bleed through is possible, but every source I found indicated the ballots were printed off-set to avoid any issues with bleed through. What is your evidence that bleed through caused votes to be lost? How many votes exactly?

You're doing the lord's work. Please keep up the civil discourse and I will work to do the same. Don't listen to the fools wanting to destroy our beautiful corner of the internet.

"Why bother? Boo outgroup." Don't.

The article is misstating the original claim. It was always about bleed through. Republicans had seen bleed through issues in the past, that's why they were so concerned.

They were offset, but some ballots weren't properly aligned. It wasn't a significant number, but my recollection is that they found some.

my recollection is that

You know the "source: trust me, bro" joke? You are doing it to us right now. Knowing how fallible human memory is, we can't take vague recollections as meaningful evidence.

It wasn't a significant number, but my recollection is that they found some.

Do you have a source besides your recollection?

I thought that the bleedthrough was supposed to have been leading to machine invalidation, in that the part with the bleedthrough would be read as having multiple selections, and thus a spoiled ballot?

If ballots were indeed being invalidated because of sharpies, your explanation is a plausible one. But what is the evidence that ballots were invalidated? Maricopa election officials issued this statement back in Nov 4 2020:

sharpies do not invalidate ballots. We did extensive testing on multiple different types of ink with our new vote tabulation equipment. Sharpies are recommended by the manufacturer because they provide the fastest-drying ink. The offset columns on ballots ensure that any bleed-through will not impact your vote. For this reason, sharpies were provided to in-person voters on Election Day.

Has anything come up since to contradict their claims?

The Cyberninjas report definitely shows that the sharpies were bleeding through -- apparently they only examined ~7k ballots for this issue and found none where it caused invalidation -- so probably not a major impact, although they suggest that they found some ballots misaligned due to being printed on normal office printers, which suggests that the offset method was not necessarily failsafe. They promise a full evaluation by some kind of machine analysis, but I'm not sure whether they delivered on this. (ninjas are great on initial action but don't necessarily keep their promises)

This is not an issue I care about either way particularly, but a couple of things occur to me:

  • Why would you use a sharpie at all? The excuse at the time was that they dry faster than other pens, which seems to me false; normal ballpoint pens have essentially zero dry time, and even the expensive rollerball ones seem faster than a sharpie, which will definitely smudge for a few seconds after use -- and certainly bleed through when ballots are printed on office paper.

  • It sure is hard to find anything other than "Sharpiegate lol, that was totally debunked dummy" results on Google these days -- I was only able to find the cyberninja report (which actually examines the issue in a serious way, and seems to give a fair assessment of the results) because I remembered that some organization with a dumb name had audited the Maricopa ballots, and thus could search for it directly.

Why would you use a sharpie at all?

...When filling in my ballot selections this afternoon, while laboriously scribbling in the tenth little square, I found myself thinking "man, I wish I could use a sharpie for this". This despite having read the sharpiegate claim here this morning,

Thank you for digging that up! That's at least plausible indicator that bleed through might theoretically be a problem. I agree with you that the sharpie drying claim is suspicious, based solely on everyday experience, but I also have no idea what kind of paper is used in ballots. The Cyberninjas did, and they could've spent $20 at Office Depot and thoroughly tested this theory out.

@DradisPing could the Cyberninja report be what you remember? If so, does it help you recall where you picked up the other claims of Trump ballots being invalidated because of bleed through?

Sorry had some stuff to do earlier.

So from the time I remember seeing articles like this focussed on bleed through https://itnshow.com/2020/11/07/arizona-election-official-seems-to-confirm-that-bleed-through-from-sharpie-markers-do-impact-votes/

It was a well known issue, Sharpies had been banned in previous elections for that reason. That's why the woman was freaking out.

The response was there was no need to worry because of a combination of offset printing and VoteSecure paper to avoid bleed through issues. It turns out the paper wasn't used in all cases.

https://rumble.com/vjw41g-audit-team-caught-them-ballots-were-on-wrong-paper-stock-verifies-sharpiega.html

https://www.westernjournal.com/az-audit-revelation-wrong-paper-used-ballots-confirm-sharpiegate-according-az-sen-president/

So the paper thing irked me because it was a specific broken promise. If a printout was misaligned then it would register as an invalid over vote.

Someone fairly prominent on Twitter was claiming they found a handful of instances of bleed through invalidating Trump votes, but I can't for the life of me remember who.

Someone fairly prominent on Twitter was claiming they found a handful of instances of bleed through invalidating Trump votes, but I can't for the life of me remember who.

If your only evidence of ballots being invalidated from bleed through is that you remember someone prominent saying that on Twitter, do you still stand by that belief?

If this were in any other country, the UN's election monitors would cry foul. And not entirely unreasonably. Even assuming that the election is entirely legit and no one involved at all means badly, with a process like this, what reason does anyone have to believe that?

Ultimately, you can't have a functioning democracy if you can't convince the losers that they lost a fair game. In order to do that, it is imperative not to have procedural problems during the elections, let alone systematic procedural problems.

I'm trying to figure out

A) How this wasn't caught and prepared for way in advance?

B) Why there isn't an established backup protocol to handle this eventuality?

C) Why is this treated as normal an unavoidable by the respective authorities handling it?

There's no surprises here. The date is known well in advance, there's various tried 'n' true approaches to the process. The list of excuses for botching it is pretty short.

The only explanation that doesn't require incompetent and malfeasance is a basic shortage of labor or materials or something due to ongoing supply chain issues.

EVEN THEN, such an issue should have been noted in advance of the election.

Using a throwaway account for op-sec. I'm a regular lurker and inconsistent poster here. I'm a believer that there is some persistent Democrat election fraud in Philly, Chicago, Atlanta and a few other blue cities in the form of organized ballot harvesting in ways that are, let's say, creative. I don't think the same is structurally possible in Arizona for Democrats in volumes that would matter enough to predictably swing an election.

Maricopa, despite being a Democrat stronghold, is not THAT Democratic. There are precincts in Philly and Chicago that return 95%+ for Democrats. Arizona, you might get 70% D in certain precincts in Maricopa, and the 30% that vote R are damned proud about it. Because AZ is purple and this is the west, we like to fight about politics with our neighbors. Do you think that the Republican poll watchers in Maricopa jurisdictions will take bribes to look the other way? No, they raise holy hell about it if they get a sniff of malfeasance.

I'd go out on a limb and say that the problems in Maricopa are just normal human fuckuppery, and not some sinister ploy by Katie Hobbs and her ilk to steal the election. If you voted early on-site in any Maricopa jurisdiction, guess what. You filled out a paper ballot and stuck it in a lock box, just like the voting locations with automated tabulators are having people do today. You even used a sharpie-type marker to do it. So I think the concerns are overblown and we'll end up with Governor Kari Lake anyway.

You should probably add

D) Did this actually happen?

I don’t see a source, and ymeshkout seems to be questioning the conclusions on sharpiegate.

Voting needs to come with a receipt/tracking number similar to UPS/FedEx. Should be able to enter in your number and match that your vote was processed. This doesn’t seem like a difficult control to add.

I don’t know about other places, but I can track my ballot here in Utah.

I've been thinking, US is so low trust we should probably use the purple thumb. Only in person votes and everyone gets inked when they vote.

Hard to make it so that said tracking doesn't allow someone to confirm to others which vote they cast, which then opens up the possibilities of threats and bribery.

Isn’t that point kind of moot when remote voting has become the norm in Arizona?

I think bribery to be an overblown concern. You can already bribe people today, without them being able to prove that they voted the way you prescribed. Sure, some of them will take money and still vote the other way or not vote at all, but this does not make bribery ineffective, it just pushes up the cost of buying a vote. Ability to prove who you voted for would affect the market price for a vote, and so would probably increase amount of bribery on the margin, but is by no means required to make buying votes an effective strategy.

Think threats and power differentials. Take a look at the history of why the 'secret ballot' is also called the 'Australian ballot'.

These seem to me concerns of marginal importance to election outcomes. They might happen, but I can scarcely imagine that making vote verifiable will make these significantly worse than they already are. Like, what do you mean by “power differentials”, in concrete terms?

So, when Australia was colonized by the Brits, they used it as a penal colony. Of course, they didn't go full Lord of the Flies with the convicts, but sent good, upstanding Brits to run the place and maintain good order. After serving out their sentences, many convicts did have the option of returning to Britain, but lots of them chose to stay. They were free citizens, but obviously, their jibs were cut a bit differently than the better class of good, upstanding Brits who were sent to run the place. The convicts were even free to run for elected office, and some even did. Yet somehow, confusingly, even as time went on and there were many more freed convicts than there were good, upstanding Brits, none of these convicts ever won any elections. Maybe everyone just realized that it was better if good, upstanding Brits continued running the place.

Other folks disagreed, and they managed to implement the 'Australian ballot', where each individual's vote would be totally, completely secret. Suddenly, magically, freed convicts began winning elections and were able to curtail some of the harshest abuses curious practices of the good, upstanding Brits.

There is a reason why people who are working on digital elections really care about a property known as "receipt freeness", that is, that there is no possible way that anyone possesses any information whatsoever which could be used as a receipt to prove how a person voted. The ideal would be for the government to be able to publicize an encrypted database which cannot in any way be used to demonstrate how any person voted, but that each individual can take with them a piece of information which can be combined with this database to verify that their vote was correctly counted (yet still not reveal how they voted).

Okay, and do you have a concrete story for today? Say, all votes are on paper, the scheme is that everyone take home a carbon copy of their own ballot. What problems do you expect it to bring, today?

Stage one is people who are out and proud about their partisan identity showing off their ballot receipts.

Stage two is this becoming a social norm in environments where "everyone" votes the same way, such that not showing your receipt with a correct vote is defecting (cf pronouns in wokestupid spaces or prayers in secular-but-tribally-Christian ones).

Stage three is defectors suffering professional consequences such that there is no longer a meaningfully free vote.

I think this could happen within 2 years given the current level of partisan bitterness in America.

Different effects in different places. This is a vast country with lots of different local cultures. The example above shows how a local culture can produce very perverse results. We can eliminate any concern in any locale if we just take to heart the lessons of those who came before us and insist on a secret ballot.

If you had asked me 5-10 years ago how the history of freedom of the press (as in 'printing', not as in 'journalist') mattered at all in the internet era, I probably wouldn't have been able to predict what actually transpired in the following years. But I hope I would have thought that it was a hard-fought, good lesson that society learned in the past, so it shouldn't be trivially dismissed.

Feels like a risk worth taking compared to right now where I have no confirmation of what happened to my ballot once it’s dropped in the box.

But you at least know that a physical ballot was dropped in a physical box.

You're not going to have someone show up at your door later to provide reward or exact penance for your vote.

That cat already seems well out of the bag with widespread postal voting.

Are partisans involved in monitoring the chain of custody?

I expect something to get disputed either way, but the big dogs might shut up if their vassals are watching the process.

It's standard practice in elections to never do anything without both a Democrat and a Republican present. I assume the laws don't mention those parties by name, but I'm not sure exactly how they are worded. And by "a Democrat and a Republican", that probably means an election official attesting they are of that party, not, say, someone who currently or has held elected office for that party.

Who would you suggest monitor instead? Nonpartisans? Where can they be found?

They could at least set up an independent authority to run the elections. Here in Australia, both the Federal government and each of the State governments have their own Electoral Commission which is an independent agency that explicitly is meant to be non-partisan. In the US, as best as I can tell, elections are run by under a division by each State's Secretary of State, who is a partisan, elected official. A similar thing I always found silly in the US is that how judges are allowed to be members of political parties (even if they're appointed by governments they could at least give some effort to maintain non-partisanship). Same with most election redistricting.

Obviously, you're not going to be able to weed out every partisan or partisan influence from agencies, but the American approach seems to be 'well, we can't completely get rid of partisanship, so why even bother, just go full partisan and hope things balance out'. I have worked in elections in Australia in the past, and honestly when people describe how things are done in the US I am shocked about how mismanaged and partisan the whole thing is, my experience of Australian elections is extremely positive, non-partisanship seems to actually work at least to some extent.

The UN will be happy to help observe your election.

hehehehehehe

Katie Hobbs, the Dem candidate for governor in Arizona, is the current Secretary of State of Arizona and so is in charge of administering the election. I'm guessing lots of voters are going to be turned off of Hobbs because of this election screwup. Hobbs's opponent is ultra-MAGA so-called election denier Kari Lake who won the Republican primary in part with the help of Democrats who believed that Lake would be a weak candidate. Lake has turned out to have lots of charisma and is skilled at going on the offensive so if she wins should would be an obvious choice for the Republican Vice Presidential nominee.

This is just so far beyond parody that I can't handle it.

Katie Hobbs, who refused to debate or engage with the campaign in any meaningful way, is also in charge of running the election and now immediately in the morning the system that she (yes, she, since she is literally tasked with it) set up is collapsing.

And while all of this is happening, she is asking for a promotion. Insanity.

It does seem like candidates shouldn't be able to run their own elections.

But I don't recall people on the right having a problem with Brian Kemp as secretary of state overseeing his election to governor.

Maybe this can become a cross-party issue?

Ken Paxton and the rest of the Texas GOP establishment made a lot of noise about election security in Houston, to the point of sending task forces. Significant or not, this is a category where I wish the perception of interference was career-ending.

Hobbs's opponent is ultra-MAGA so-called election denier Kari Lake who won the Democratic Republican primary in part with the help of Democrats who believed that Lake would be a weak candidate.

Just to correct a typo.

Thanks!

"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.

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 😀

Blame Bush versus Gore. After the hanging chads etc. some American elections switched to electronic voting machines to avoid similar problems

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 wouldn't be surprised if some of those printers cause problems too and need to be taken care of

I didn't know it would be that clip when I clicked on the link, but I was hoping it would be that clip.

Here is an example of how it works in Poland, a country with a population size close to California.

There was a second round of presidential election on July 12th, 2020. The poll station closed at 9 pm. Next day, on 13th, the national election committee, announced the results.

https://pkw.gov.pl/uploaded_files/1594724319_obwieszczenie-pkw-20200713-1915.pdf

There were 20 million votes to count, almost all cast in person (out of 30 million eligible voters). No machines were used to cast votes, all of them were done on paper. No machines were used to tabulate them, all tabulation is done manually. Nevertheless, the official results are announced less than 24 hours after the polls close, and unofficial results (ie, enough stations reported results to give 99%+ confidence in election outcomes) are available around midnight the same day.

There is literally no excuse for the idiocy that we see in US every election.

There is literally no excuse for the idiocy that we see in US every election.

How many unique questions are on Polish ballots? IIRC British ballots have only one question typically, but my American one had about 60 odd questions from various overlapping jurisdictions. There are almost certainly more unique suites of ballot questions than voting locations in my county.

But the wide variation in election quality speaks to differing standards and equipment across states and even between adjacent counties.

The one I gave as an example was particularly easy, as there was only one question with two possible choices.

However, for a better analogy, in the national “local” election (555 seats to provincial assemblies, 6,244 seats to county councils, 32,173 seats to commune councils, and 3,162 local government heads, close to 40 000 elected seats in total) in 2018, the official results of Sunday election (and the elections are always on Sunday in Poland, by the way) were announced on Wednesday afternoon.

I don't think you understand the nature of the problem. In general european elections will ask each citizen a handful of questions (for example two votes: one for the senate and one for the parliament). The US has far more elected positions than the average european country and also likes to aggregate local and general elections all in one (probably because general elections happen so frequently). So a normal US ballot will ask the citizen to vote for national elections but also positions in the state and county administration and include things like: seats on the supreme and appeals courts, sheriffs, various public attorneys, one or more referenda questions, seats on the school board, things nobody knows what they are, like comptrollers, etc.

Random example of a ballot

Of course they could just use two ballots, put the one or two national questions on one and everything else in the other and then use two ballot boxes, and then just count the national votes first. I guess it never occured to them.

The only people civic minded enough to turn out to run our elections are also 70-90 years old.

So it becomes a problem to have them do counting of ballots given their cognitive decline.

Where are you?

Don't people get paid?

In 2018 according to my gf's recollection she was paid 90 dollars to run a poll station for 12 hours as a volunteer. You're basically reliant on civic minded people to bother with it at that point I think.

civic minded people

And exceptionally politically "involved" people.

Oh, that's too bad.

I remember being paid like $300 for working as a vote counter (lowest at the totem pole) in Sweden during the 2009 EU parliament elections, so that was pretty attractive for me as one days work as a student.

That's wild. NJ is normally $200 for the lowest level volunteers for the day. The two times I did it during Covid, they paid extra, for $400 and $325.

Hahaha… oh wait you’re serious.

They either don’t get paid, or paid only a nominal amount, like jury duty.

The only people civic minded enough to turn out to run our elections are also 70-90 years old.

So it becomes a problem to have them do counting of ballots given their cognitive decline.

IME, 70-90 years olds in cognitive decline are typically challenged by computer-like machines. Why do we think that they are worse at manual counting than at everything involving the custody and machine tabulation of votes?

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