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.
Just a slight correction in that it doesn't sound like the City of New Orleans has much to do with this election, as it's an election for a district the covers three parishes, the whole region. If anything, it seems like there may have been an effort to provide disproportionally more votes to the two more conservative parishes by giving the same total number of "available votes" to each polling station, whereas Orleans Parish could've hands-down elected their preferred candidate otherwise.
I actually found out it covers 5 parishes but they only had voting locations in 3, which makes the first come first serve thing even more bizarre.
The election was for one member on a board. The only reason there was an election was because a new candidate challenged the incumbent candidate, which usually never happens. Usually people remain on the board for as long as they would like to hold that position. Why this seat in particular?
The incumbent is the only board member from Orleans, and runs community gardens throughout the city, so I would argue that if anything, Orleans has a considerable amount to do with this particular election. How did the registrar even come up with that number if this is the first of its kind of election for this district?
I believe another member of the board will have a seat that can be challenged soon. If that seat is challenged, whichever Parish that board member is from hopefully gets a lot of support behind them of the people of the parish feel they're doing a good job.
Also find it a little suspicious, this guy challenging her seat is a commercial fishing captain, and recently Louisiana Republicans passed a bill to deregulate seafood safety and hand oversight to the department that controls this board.
Actually found out the district covers 5 parishes but they only had voting locations in 3.
There is a separate registrar for each parish, so who is the "official" registrar they mention in the article and how did she generate that expect around 20 voters at each location number?