'It was just chaos': Broken machines, incomplete voter rolls leave some wondering whether their ball
This discussion thread was locked as off-topic by LostOne4Ever (a host of the Latest Breaking News forum).
Source: LA Times
California voters faced a tough time at the polls Tuesday, with many voters saying they have encountered broken machines, polling sites that opened late and incomplete voter rolls, particularly in Los Angeles County.
The result? Instead of a quick in-and-out vote, many California voters were handed the dreaded pink provisional ballot which takes longer to fill out, longer for election officials to verify and which tends to leave voters wondering whether their votes will be counted.
This years presidential primary race has already been one of the most bitter in recent memory. Before Tuesdays vote, Bernie Sanders supporters accused the media of depressing Democratic turnout by calling the nomination for Hillary Clinton before polls opened in California.
Those feelings havent gotten any less raw Tuesday as hundreds of Californians complained of voting problems to the national nonpartisan voter hotline run by the Lawyers Committee For Civil Rights Under Law.....
Read more: http://www.latimes.com/politics/la-pol-ca-voting-problems-20160607-snap-htmlstory.html
Figured problems would happen here. Meh.
msongs
(67,591 posts)JDPriestly
(57,936 posts)Unfortunately, it is not analysis and opinion. It's what happened.
It was miserable for many, many people.
Frances
(8,551 posts)I fill my absentee ballot at home and then drop it off on election day where others are standing in line to vote. I also have the option to mail it or to drop it off at designated sites.
tom_kelly
(971 posts)counted. Now, I have doubts whether my polling place vote will be counted. I hope things get cleaned up after this election. It has been so blatent.
Gene Debs
(582 posts)gotten worse. If they haven't "cleaned things up" after sixteen years, why would they after this?
Snarkoleptic
(6,002 posts)LibDemAlways
(15,139 posts)Saw a woman handed a provisional ballot today and figured she just wasted a trip to the polling place. I suppose we can, as a country, continue to labor under the illusion that our votes count and our elected officials represent us, or we can accept that we've been sold down the river by corporate-owned politicians mostly in it to line their own pockets, and we're basically fucked. As a member of the reality based community and having witnessed this primary season, I'm going with the second choice.
Fantastic Anarchist
(7,309 posts)"If voting changed anything, they'd make it illegal."
tblue37
(65,630 posts)pnwmom
(109,032 posts)At some point you just have to trust. Unfortunately, Bernie's been encouraging so much distress about election fraud that some people might have decided it was pointless to even try.
LiberalFighter
(51,647 posts)Every process is tracked.
Kokonoe
(2,485 posts)Last edited Wed Jun 8, 2016, 01:50 AM - Edit history (1)
Active DUers should already know that a voter fraud is just one person.
Election fraud is what it is.. election fraud.
Thanks for the Hillary support though, And I love ..um democracy.
Thank you for your election edit.
JDPriestly
(57,936 posts)The numbers of new voters, newly registered in the weeks before the election were large and therefore the printed lists of voters at the polls were not up-to-date and omitted the names of new voters.
Also, decline-to-state-party-preference voters were, as we understood it, allowed to vote in the Democratic Primary and to come into the polling place to pick up a Democratic ballot. But, at the polls many poll workers gave them the pink, provisional ballots. The pink, provisional ballots will not be counted for 21 days.
Whatever the "final" results tonight are will not really be final. I cannot say how much the total will change when the provisionals have been counted after 21 days, but it will change.
We shall see. I worked election protection before. There were problems. In Ohio in 2008, there were two precincts in the polling station in which I observed the election. One precinct was mostly African-American and the other was mostly white. I will let you guess in which precinct the machines "broke down," which group of voters had to wait and wait for the machines to be "repaired." It should not be difficult to figure it out.
Today was worse than that.
OwlinAZ
(410 posts)Just another sign of decline in the nation.
Who trains these poll workers are they just given a list of does and don'ts?
With the media so hell bent on being the first to report anything, true or fantastical, is there any remedy for legal voters who are not allowed to cast ballots?
It seems worse every election. Elections are run like a back alley crap games.
How about we fix it?
pnwmom
(109,032 posts)He said that Bernie's campaign needed to do more voter education, including at the rallies. For example, eligible voters could have voted by mail. They would have received a postcard with a box to check off, showing which ballot they wanted to receive. Then they would have been sent a Democratic ballot to mail in.
Part of the reason Hillary did so well is that they had all this nailed down. They made sure their voters had their ballots and returned them. Instead of putting on a lot of TV ads, they had phone banks with people who could speak Spanish, Chinese, etc.
P.S. It's too early to know what the situation is with the provisionals. Maybe some of those people met the deadlines and were incorrectly left off the voter rolls. Others missed the primary deadline but will be able to vote in the fall. We don't know yet how many of the provisionals will be eligible to be counted.
JDPriestly
(57,936 posts)But lots of the Bernie voters are young and new to voting.
Hillary voters tend to be more experienced and older.
A big problem is the fact that there were so many, many new registrations. The lists simply were not fully updated. People with a smart phone could look up the actual status of the new registrations, but the poll workers' lists did not reflect that actual status in many situations.
pnwmom
(109,032 posts)is that CA voters are accustomed to primary ballots that list multiple parties' candidates -- but that's not how it works with the Presidential election.
None of the problems are Hillary's fault. You should blame the patchwork CA elections process. It was worse this year because so many independents wanted to vote for Bernie; but they had to take extra steps -- and take those steps on time -- in order to do so.
And don't forget -- none of these problems affected the Rethugs because they didn't allow anyone to vote in their primary except R's. The reason Dems are being criticized is because they allowed non-affiliateds who requested a Democratic ballot to receive one.
http://capitolweekly.net/nonpartisans-ca120-pickle-election/
SouthernDemLinda
(182 posts)perhaps they read about it in.....
www.huffingtonpost.com/.../electronic-voting-mach
THE HUFFINGTON POST
Electronic Voting Machines Still Widely Used Despite Security Concerns
10/22/2012 03:51 pm ET
Gerry Smith
Technology reporter, The Huffington Post
For years, researchers have been aware of numerous security flaws in electronic voting machines. Theyve found ways to hack the machines to swap votes between candidates, reject ballots or accept 50,000 votes from a precinct with just 100 voters.
Yet on Nov. 6, millions of voters including many in hotly contested swing states will cast ballots on e-voting machines that researchers have found are vulnerable to hackers. What is more troubling, say some critics, is that election officials have no way to verify that votes are counted accurately because some states do not use e-voting machines that produce paper ballots.
After the hanging chad controversy of the 2000 election, Congress passed a federal law that gave states funding to replace their punch card and lever voting systems with electronic voting machines. But computer scientists have repeatedly demonstrated that a variety of electronic voting machines can be hacked often quite easily.
Every time they are studied, we find further problems, said J. Alex Halderman, a computer science professor at the University of Michigan who researches voting machine security.
Its simply a matter of reprogramming these machines to be dishonest, Halderman added. Thats what we found six years ago and its still true today, and many of these machines are still in use.
In 2008, researchers at Princeton University found that it took seven minutes, using simple tools, to install a different computer program in a voting machine that steals votes from one partys candidates, and gives them to another. That machine, the Sequoia Avantage, is still used in at least six states by 9 million voters, according to Roger Johnston, who heads the vulnerability assessment team at Argonne National Laboratory.
Last fall, Johnston and his team of researchers found that Diebolds AccuVote voting machines could be hacked to change voting results by inserting a piece of electronics into the machines. Diebolds AccuVote voting machines are used in at least 20 states by 21 million voters, according to Johnston.
Ive seen high school science fair projects that are more sophisticated than what is needed to hijack a voting machine, Johnston said in an interview.
Most voting machines are made by two manufacturers, Election Systems & Software and Dominion Voting Systems, which was formerly Diebold Election Systems. Neither company returned requests for comment.
Researchers say its difficult to determine whether voting machine manufacturers have fixed cyber-security flaws because the companies do not share their software code publicly. In addition, there is little pressure on them from elections officials to do so, Johnston said.
The voting manufacturers are in denial, Johnston said. They are not doing anything about these problems, but their customers are not asking them to, either.
However, there is no evidence that hackers have ever manipulated votes in a U.S. election, experts say. And many election officials insist security concerns about voting machines are overblown. They say that security on Election Day is much stricter than, say, what a team of computer scientists with unlimited time in a laboratory might face to hack a voting machine.
Its important to keep in mind that having full and open access to these systems is quite different than how these systems are available to voters on Election Day, said Jessica Myers, a voting systems certification specialist at U.S. Election Assistance Commission, which certifies e-voting machines.
Butler County, Ohio in a key swing state with more than 240,000 registered voters has been using AccuVote machines since 2005, according to Lynn Kinkaid, director of the county board of elections. One reason they still use the machines is that elderly people like them because you can enlarge the print, he said.
Kinkaid said the countys e-voting machines are tested before each election, encrypted and not connected to the Internet.
We are very sure our machines are safe and secure, he said.
Lehigh County, Pa., which has about 236,000 registered voters in another swing state, has been using Accuvote voting machines since 2006, according to Tim Benyo, the countys chief clerk for registration and elections.
Benyo said the countys e-voting machines are certified by the state, and prior to Election Day, they are locked, sealed and never left alone. He said there have been slight modifications to the machines software over the years, but nothing drastic.
I am familiar with some reports of them being able to be hacked, Benyo said. But my concerns are limited because these machines are not left alone with anybody for a long enough period of time.
However, Halderman, of the University of Michigan, was part of a team of researchers in 2006 that found a hacker with access to an AccuVote voting machine for just one minute could install malicious code on the machine to steal votes.
Lehigh Countys e-voting machines do not produce a paper record for voters because it is not required by the state, Benyo said. One-quarter of registered voters nationwide will cast ballots on Nov. 6 using electronic voting machines that do not produce paper ballots, according to VerifiedVoting.org, a nonprofit whose mission is to safeguard elections in the digital age.
Without paper ballots which are counted using optical scan systems elections officials have no way to go back and conduct an audit to see whether votes were counted correctly, security researchers say.
You really cant tell whether vote totals are accurate unless you have a paper ballot, said David Dill, founder of VerifiedVoting.org.
In 2006, Maryland lawmakers passed a bill that called for state election officials to stop using Diebolds AccuVote-TSx touchscreen systems, which the state has used since 2002, because the machines contained security flaws and did not produce a paper record, according to Computer World magazine.
But after the law passed, Gov. Martin OMalley chose not to fund the purchase of new e-voting machines that produce paper ballots, according to Donna Duncan, a spokeswoman for the Maryland State Board of Elections. On Nov. 6, polling places across Maryland will still use AccuVote touchscreen machines that dont produce paper ballots.
We have absolute confidence in the voting equipment, Duncan said. The security measures we put in place, we believe, are sufficient.
pnwmom
(109,032 posts)and it makes no sense. It lowers their credibility on real election fraud.
For example, Hillary had no motivation to suppress voting in Arizona -- the poll closures were in the most Latino county, which supported Hillary heavily. And it turned out that the Republican elections person was behind that.
Same thing in Brooklyn. A Republican had ordered the vote purge six months ago and it affected Hillary just as much as Bernie -- maybe more, since all 5 NYC boroughs had heavy Hillary support. (Upstate was where Bernie drew most of his voters.)
And now, same thing in L.A. LA is a strong county for Hillary, based on polling and demographics. She wouldn't be behind any voter suppression there.
And yet Bernie supporters seem determined to blame her for any problem that occurs anywhere. The all-powerful Hillary.
P.S. People here were posting about those electronic machines during the NY primary, alleging rampant fraud there. They didn't know that NY switched to all paper ballots years ago, with optical scanners. They didn't even bother to check the facts before accusing Hillary of somehow altering the results with those machines.
After seeing so many overwrought and under-thought out claims about Hillary related to election fraud, I'm starting to get skeptical about the whole subject.
Retrograde
(10,209 posts)it's a vote by mail ballot, and any voter can request one, either permanently or on a per-election basis.
No reasons need be given, unlike absentee ballots in some states that require you show you'll be out of the state for the election or are permanently disabled.
Yeah, I'm a nitpicker.
JDPriestly
(57,936 posts)glowing
(12,233 posts)mobile. Permanently signing up for voting ballots at one's home works when you have been at the same addres for a long time. If you are challenged, you are more likely to know if you haven't moved. Plus, people should be able to go and vote easily. It's
A civil right that we get to have... Women didn't endure the suffrage movement to just have their votes thrown out because they weren't on a roll log or because their party was switched irregularly.
What would happen if more of the country paricipated? Everyone complains America voting in apathetic, but really the systems aren't set up to handle large turnouts.
And don't even get me started on the non-verifiable voting machines owned by private corporations!'
Retrograde
(10,209 posts)but one is not forced in this state to vote by mail. I'm old enough to remember the struggles to get the vote extended to 18 year olds, and I'm sometimes disappointed that they don't take advantage of what their predecessors fought for.
glowing
(12,233 posts)NOT done anymore in school. I forget that it was lowered to 18 myself. I know nothing of a "struggle"... No one talks about that.
RobinA
(9,940 posts)you have to affirm that you will be out of state, but not prove it. I was genuinely out of state this year and voted absentee for the first time. I always wonder what is the surest way have having your vote counted. I actually liked the absentee process, it was fairly simple.
pnwmom
(109,032 posts)based on the demographics. So maybe her win should be even bigger.
ThinkCritically
(241 posts)JDPriestly
(57,936 posts)My very diverse area on the East side is staunchly, strongly and proudly Bernie.
And we had enormous problems.
It is the wealthier West side (near the coast) and Valley (suburbs) that are more conservative and more likely to go for Hillary.
I'm not in those areas, so I don't know how the voting went there.
But in my Bernie side, it was terrible.
I have done election protection in the Kerry and Obama campaigns before and never seen anything like the terrible goings-on that I witnessed today.
OwlinAZ
(410 posts)pnwmom
(109,032 posts)Orrex
(63,334 posts)every Clinton victory has been dismissed as rigged and fraudulent, while every Sanders victory is praised to high heaven as the unvarnished Will Of The People. That's been true of every poll result we've seen as well as every primary election of the entire cycle.
Funny how that works.
beastie boy
(9,655 posts)Two more to go.
JDPriestly
(57,936 posts)one after the other, pink provisional ballots.
Clinton won in NYC and there were a lot of questions about fraud there.
Sorry, but the statement made in your post is not substantiated by the facts.
pnwmom
(109,032 posts)occurred in Brooklyn -- and turned out to have been caused by a Rethug-based purge done 6 months earlier.
Orrex
(63,334 posts)Orrex
(63,334 posts)And with each primary victory for Clinton, Sanders' supporters here have indeed claimed fraud and voter suppression, often when such claims are flatly absurd (as when they claimed that New York's primary rules--publicly available and wholly transparent--unlawfully disenfranchised Sanders' beloved Independent voters).
So perhaps you'll forgive me if I ignore your objection that my claim is not supported by facts.
sheshe2
(84,209 posts)you must have all known that before today. You have voted before, correct? Why did you not vote on an absentee ballot? Something is fishy here alright. Seems only Bernie votes were depressed. Because, media????? Hmmmmm. Lol~
LenaBaby61
(6,982 posts)That voting irregularities and outright voter fraud exist, and that there is antiquated voting machinery in a country with the wealth that our country has...
But in Hillary Clinton's case...
ALL of the primary states--even the Southern primary States--she won were rigged for her to win them Yeah, I guess she colluded with Republican SoS and with Republican Governors down South (Like in Florida), and she cooked up this scheme which helped her win almost all of the Southern states. And we know she won states like Ohio, New Jersey and New Mexico, so I'm assuming that Republican Governors like Kasich of Ohio, Christie of New Jersey, Martinez of New Mexico and Gov. Dennis Daugaard of South Dakota were also ALL in on the "fix" for Hillary to win those primary states too
SouthernDemLinda
(182 posts)From:
Show Me The Votes #showmethevotes
showmethevotes.org
An Open Letter to Bernie Sanders
Dear Bernie,
If you want to win the presidency and elect a revolutionary congress, you must find a way to force accurate counts of votes across the country. There is no reason to believe that machine generated vote counts are accurate when they are not checked for accuracy. This is particularly difficult in places like South Carolina and parts of Kansas, where no paper trail exists to even attempt a public recount. Or Arizona where manual hand counting of ballots is not permitted.
I live in Kansas. Im a professional statistician and an ASQ Certified Quality Engineer. I find certain patterns in election results quite disturbing. Graphs of Oklahoma primary results are below. Both exhibit a common and concerning pattern: as the number of votes cast in a precinct increases, so does the vote share for the candidate favored by the Washington establishment. This pattern is NOT due to random chance nor do voter demographics explain it. In the fall, the Republican candidates across the board can be expected to show such a pattern wherever machine counting of votes is combined with poor to non-existent auditing of those results. The pattern is consistent with election rigging.
Citizens like myself have had little success in forcing our officials to show the paper trails so we can have confidence in their reported results. Ive been trying for more than three years to get access to the paper records that would allow me to assess how accurate our computer tabulated official vote counts are. After my latest legal setback, it will be another year before I might get permission. In the meantime, we will be having another election on non-transparent voting machines.
You, as a candidate, have the right to demand manual recounts. Well, in some places anyway. If you were to do so, irrefutable evidence of problems with vote counts will emerge in some of those places. If and only if your supporters can find and correct those problems can your revolution win at the ballot box.
In states that have paper trails, I suggest you start asking for manual recounts of the paper ballots and Voter Verified Paper Audit Trails (VVPAT) where you can. Whether you won or lost the contest doesnt matter. The point is to evaluate the size and number of discrepancies and check for bias. Laws vary from state to state. Typically there is a short window of time to request recounts. Many jurisdictions will balk and try to keep you from doing so by various legal maneuvers. But there will be many opportunities through the primary season. You have supporters that can be trained and provide labor hours when needed. A 100% manual recount isnt necessary. A random sample of precincts is sufficient.
If you recount and find discrepancies, you might receive additional delegates. More importantly, if you were to demand recounts, it would highlight the fact that in many states, those machine counts are never audited or verified with the original paper records. Most citizens are shocked to discover that their vote counting process is not verified, or in some places, verifiable. I know I was when I first discovered this truth about Sedgwick County Kansas in 2012.
Thank you
Beth Clarkson
?
The Charts below show the cumulative share of the vote each candidate acquires as the size of the precincts increase. This model clearly shows that as the size of the precinct increases Clinton and Rubio gain a larger share of the votes while Sanders, Trump and Cruz lose votes. This is NOT a random fluke, this is a consistent pattern with machine counted votes. While in OK, this trend was not enough to change who won the election, it may have had an impact on the number of delegates each received.
Chart eta: Link to data at OK.gov
eta2: Ive updated the
charts with labels for the Dem candidates and added
Kasich to the Rep chart.
Chart
allinthegame
(132 posts)Filled it out two weeks ago and all those early returns were those. If you are really concerned about your vote....do it early and mail it in.
Kokonoe
(2,485 posts)Who would bother to research paperwork for free.
Provisional ballot = Throwing away your vote
JDPriestly
(57,936 posts)Kokonoe
(2,485 posts)Hardly an amount that would tinge the election.
JDPriestly
(57,936 posts)I don't know whether it will be statistically significant. It seemed like an awful lot of provisional ballots were being given out, far more than appropriate.
Decline-to-state voters are by law eligible to vote in Democratic primaries. Many of them were young Bernie voters who did not want to register as Democrats. (Don't ask me why. We tried.) Others were voters who had registered and were shown as registered on-line but who were not on the printed lists. I was told that the polls got updates as recently as yesterday, but the numbers of new voters was I suppose just so enormous they could not list them all and print out the full lists.
It was a mess, and there were a lot of provisional ballots. The "final" totals for today will not be the real final totals. How much they will diverge from the final tallies in 21 days, I do not know and could not guess based on my limited experience and observation.
pnwmom
(109,032 posts)as Dems or non-affiliated will be counted.
Others will not be. For example, people who were registered as members of the American Independent party. Independents -- non-affiliateds -- who mistakenly checked off that box were not able to vote as Dems. According to one newspaper's survey, a large fraction of "members" of that party didn't realize that it was a rightwing party, or that it was a party at all. They thought they were registering as Independent -- and, as such, that they would be able to vote for Bernie on the Democratic ballot. But they were wrong.
JDPriestly
(57,936 posts)pnwmom
(109,032 posts)if they thought that they had a lot of supporters there. That should have been a big part of their GOTV operation.
The Democratic party could have had a closed primary, like the R's. Instead, they allowed non-affiliated voters to request Democratic ballots. But after that, it was up to the Bernie campaign, not the Democratic party, to seek out these voters and make sure they were properly registered and able to vote.
JDPriestly
(57,936 posts)We went around putting hangers on doors with all that information.
But at the polls everything was very new and confusing to many of the young Bernie supporters and to people of other cultures who do not understand the voting we view as commonplace.
I don't think that people from other states understand the diversity that is California.
I went to canvass at a house today. The mother of the voters was on the porch. She came to me and said she has a visa and is living in the US for some time. She said she could speak English but can't read or write it. She asked me what she could do to become a citizen so she could vote too. I told her to check out courses at the public high school.
This is a more common situation in Los Angeles than it is elsewhere in the country. To take advantage of new voters and people who are new to our ideas and customs about voting is very cruel. But I saw it happening today and was very disgusted with it.
Hillary's first campaign speech that I noticed was about voter disenfranchisement. It takes many forms. I saw an obscure, subtle one in California today.
The final results in California will not be in for at least 21 days after today if the rest of California was handled as my area of Los Angeles was.
pnwmom
(109,032 posts)has the requisite English skills.
Did you know Hillary had phone banks with volunteers explaining how to vote -- in multiple languages? And following up on whether voters received their ballots in the mail and returned them? She did understand California's diversity. Bernie could have spent a greater effort on that and less effort on giant rallies (which are extremely expensive, by the way) that didn't really help with GOTV.
Hillary did have some built-in advantages, but they weren't unfair advantages. She had already campaigned in California 8 years ago, so she knew the terrain. Most of her voters were regular Dems, so she didn't wasn't as dependent as Bernie was on getting non-affiliateds to vote for her. And her support was primarily drawn from older voters who had experience in the process, not young people who'd never voted for her before. And those older voters not only voted, but they were also heavily involved as volunteers -- on those phone banks I mentioned. Phone banks aren't as glamorous as giant rallies with rock music, but they get the job done.
alfredo
(60,085 posts)There are questions about the voter's eligibility. Some will be thrown out if it is found the voter was ineligible. That's a far cry from all of them being thrown out.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Provisional_ballot
Yes it is Wikipedia, but in this case they have it right. I'm a precinct judge, and have been since pre HAVA days.
Kokonoe
(2,485 posts)Hence, in the dumpster they go.
There is nobody looking at them.
alfredo
(60,085 posts)Retrograde
(10,209 posts)The people in each county registrar's office who are paid to investigate them, for one.
California does count provisional ballots - if they are valid. I've listed a number of reasons why people could be given provisional ballots in other posts.
jaysunb
(11,856 posts)In and out in 5 minutes.
JDPriestly
(57,936 posts)chaos. Just awful.
jaysunb
(11,856 posts)Snarkoleptic
(6,002 posts)n/t
warrprayer
(4,734 posts)Democracy Bush 2000 style
Beaverhausen
(24,480 posts)Anecdotal, yes. But...
chapdrum
(930 posts)then what does it say about our democracy?
yuiyoshida
(41,880 posts)" OF COURRRRRRRRSSSSEEE!"
bbgrunt
(5,281 posts)JDPriestly
(57,936 posts)It was a mess in our local polls here in my area of California.
Made Hillary and the Democratic Party look bad and become the brunt of rather bitter jokes among some young people I met today.
hedda_foil
(16,380 posts)The rules, as have been discussed here, weren't made clear at all, and the only recourse after getting a mail ballot with NO presidential choices was to personally show up with that ballot at the voter's precinct on election day and exchange it for a Dem ballot. That's a huge chunk of votes that didn't happen.
We have got to get away from the arcane state by state rules for primary elections in favor of clarity.
LiberalFighter
(51,647 posts)Clarity is an issue for national campaigns figuring out the laws in each state. That is where state and local parties help out.
MattP
(3,304 posts)But don't let facts get in the way of your conspiracy
nikto
(3,284 posts)cui bono?
Hillary.
JDPriestly
(57,936 posts)and lack of organization at the Democratic polls.
No one votes Republican in my part of Los Angeles so those voting booths were empty when I was visiting the polls.
One of the poll workers in a polling place I visited insisted that would-be voters go home and get their 'SAMPLE BALLOTS' which are courtesy ballots sent to the voters. When they didn't have those sample ballots it appeared to me that she was giving them the pink slips -- the provisional ballots.
My area is strongly for Bernie. We shall see if there were more provisional ballots in my area than in Hillary areas of Los Angeles. We shall see. It is possible that this was a perverse Hillary trick on the voters in my area. If the percentage or even number of provisional ballots on Los Angeles' East side is greater than in the Valley or West Side, I will be suspicious.
But it was a very poorly disorganized primary election.
I spoke to a woman who said she had voted Democratic for 29 years and learned suddenly today that she is now registered as either Libertarian or a Green party. She was not allowed to vote in the Democratic Primary at all.
It was another Hillary primary day -- lots of cheating, confusion and voter disenfranchisement. I would like to think it is not Hillary's fault, but it has happened so consistently across the country that I really can't assume that it is just innocent coincidence.
OwlinAZ
(410 posts)of Nevada and New York. Almost makes one think, 'Why bother?'
pnwmom
(109,032 posts)that many independents had mistakenly registered as members of the American Independent Party, and so weren't eligible to vote on a Dem ballot. When they asked for one, their names wouldn't show up as eligible, so they would have been given a provisional ballot. Which, in the end, wouldn't be counted.
The other problems you describe are ALSO not Hillary's fault -- unless you want to say that the problems in caucuses were Bernie's fault.
JDPriestly
(57,936 posts)American Independent. I did not see one incident of American Independent Party registration. Not that there aren't any, but that was not the problem I saw today.
Retrograde
(10,209 posts)said she voted Democratic for years. Did she ever vote in a partisan primary in California? Does she realize that in General Elections one's party doesn't matter? Does she remember what she registered as? Did she bother to look at what was written on her sample ballot - back when she still had time to correct this?
And was she now registered as a Green? Or as a Libertarian? She can't be both at the same time.
kadaholo
(304 posts)...the same!
highprincipleswork
(3,111 posts)HooptieWagon
(17,064 posts)catchnrelease
(1,948 posts)He is the SoS here. I'm assuming he is a Clinton supporter as he headlined a fundraiser in Riverside in May.
[link:|
grendelsd
(23 posts)After voting for nine years at the same address, suddenly my ballot was made 'mail only'. Crap, I don't even ever read my mail and the thought of trees dying so that I can vote is very offensive.
jaysunb
(11,856 posts)Better get a move on it to the nearest post office.
stopbush
(24,405 posts)Where are the stories about that?
c-ville rook
(45 posts)however, voting in more affluent areas seldom is an issue. Whether you, yourself, are affluent or not.
libodem
(19,288 posts)Response to ThinkCritically (Original post)
tomsmom22 This message was self-deleted by its author.
avaistheone1
(14,626 posts)It's totally shameful.
wordpix
(18,652 posts)Today I saw the "high speed" train Acela on the Northeast corridor crawling along at about 20 mph, this in CT. Wow, we've really moved into the 21st Century with our high speed rail.
Igel
(35,423 posts)And state by state or county by county.
If you don't like how it's done in your state, that's where you fix it. If there's not enough money, that's where you get more. If you have incompetent people on and working for the BOE, it's because the locals running things are incompetent. If you have incompetent poll workers, it's because those who sign up to work the polls are incompetent.
Next time your county or city and state are working out the budget, push for more money for elections. If it's that important, get more money for elections at the cost of more taxes at the local level; if you can't get that, get them to move money from other budget categories. That might mean less money for roads, for courts, police/fire, social services, for other local services. The thing is, nobody defends and argues for elections funding.
As long as you think that it's the central government's problem, meaning "somebody else's," it'll never get fixed. If they get things set up perfectly in Vermont, unless you live in Vermont it does you, personally, no good. Think locally, act locally. We worry about saving the world or the country while our own little piece of it goes to hell.
LibDemAlways
(15,139 posts)banana republic? Of course it is.
Corrupt elections. Corrupt media. Crooked politicians. Crumbling infrastructure. Enormous income inequality. Oligarchy.
Checks a lot of boxes.
vkkv
(3,384 posts)billhicks76
(5,082 posts)Jack Bone
(2,023 posts)merrily
(45,251 posts)mdbl
(4,976 posts)The every vote counts statement is a sham. It should be changed to every million votes count, because that is the amount you have to be ahead to get past whatever systemic breakdowns that occur - everywhere it seems.
Nitram
(23,104 posts)The fact is, a majority of the people have spoken, and it is Clinton they have named. Let's come together and kick Trump's butt.
He lost. Fraud is their go to excuse. Shameful how they just refuse to believe that there are actually more Hillary fan voters than Bernie voter
And the 22 States he won were totally clean.
valerief
(53,235 posts)cui bono
(19,926 posts)Gee, wonder why that is?
.
blackspade
(10,056 posts)rather than the symptom of a 'problem'
SusanCalvin
(6,592 posts)Just a really, really broken system. Thanks, HAVA.
LostOne4Ever
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