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.
“We had to confirm the number of ballots weeks ago,” 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.
Elections official here, though in a different state.
We had the same thing happen here for a conservation district. Here are a few facts for our situation, it may be different than this news item, but it's similar.
Conservation districts handle their own elections, they aren't done by the state/county.
The last time they had an election, votes were in the low hundreds, this last time votes were in the thousands.
Our conservation district doesn't get "official ballots" they just had something simple and when they needed more they printed more, but they were not prepared for the amount of work involved.
Conservation district elections here are not distributed to all households, they are an "interested parties show up" sort of deal. I believe in the old days you had to be a land owner to vote in then. These days I believe you need to be a resident. I'm the past no one really cared much about them, they decide things like where to plant trees to fight erosion and stuff like that. They aren't making "political" decisions.
Please keep in mind that this wasn't a normal election like you think of, it was more along the lines of an HOA election in terms of how it is conducted.
I don't know if some party just googled "election" and mobilized for this, but this kind of turnout was new and unexpected.
I have no problem believing this district was blindsided by this.
It's important to remember that this is a different sort of election though.