Very detailed Lemmy post I wrote about this fuckery and more
Local news article containing the quote about the voter registrar
On Homer Plessey Way, board member Daniel Milojevic stood outside the Bywater polling place in the Press Street Gallery suggesting people try the two Jefferson Parish locations.
He said the local registrar of voters gave the district only 300 ballots per location and told them they could expect about 20 people.
โWe had to confirm the number of ballots weeks ago,โ he said, before it was clear how high the turnout would be. Milojevic conceded that planning had clearly missed the mark.
As one astute gentleman asked while defending Reddit, and accusing me of spreading misinformation:
If hardly anybody knew, how did turnout exceed expectations within 2 hours?
Because the "expectation" provided by the registrar was literally 20 voters per location (60 voters in total) for the entire fucking city.
That's the thing though, is it just incompetence or is it an attempt to see what people are willing to let slide?
We definitely need a re-do bc otherwise it signals that we're ok with letting it happen again and again. Will there be enough ballots when it's time for us to vote for elections with more at stake like mayor or in the midterms?
I could see low expectations from the registrar of voters for turnout, but 60 people in the entire city? And they just didn't have any kind of plans if more showed up?
We're the first state to start using the DOGE voter database maintenance system. Will we end up with some kind of "glitch" that purges voters on top of being told the registrar made a miscalculation when estimating how many people would actually show up to vote?
The one thing I'll say in their defense is that a water district board seat, in a special election, is not typically something that generates votes. Perhaps they did that on purpose, thinking the low turnout would help one candidate. We're talking about school board election numbers. The kind of thing where a bus full of people could swing the whole election.
You'll know if it was on purpose or not immediately when we see who won and if they try to stick with the result. If they were out of ballots at 9 am, then they shouldn't even try to count the votes or declare a winner. With the need for a redo being so obvious.