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.
I'm glad you commented bc I have a question you might be able to answer. The district covers 5 parishes (we do parishes instead of counties) but the news article states the registrar of voters provided the number of 300 ballots at each location and expectation of 20 voters.
Only 3 of the 5 parishes actually had voting locations, so voters from 2 parishes had to travel to vote.
Each parish has its own registrar. It's unclear which parish the registrar that provided that estimate is from, but why would anyone expect the estimated number of voters in smaller parishes to be exactly the same as larger parishes?
The only reason there was an election is because the incumbent candidate was suddenly challenged by a commercial fishing captain. Keep this in mind, and remember that because of our proximity to the gulf, fishing and seafood is still a pretty big industry for the state.
It was all very odd, and caught people's attention mainly because:
A. Typically people on the board hold these seats unchallenged for as long as they wish to remain on the board.
B. The district covers 5 parishes, but this board member is from New Orleans/Orleans Parish. She runs several urban gardens and contributes to local farmers markets. This is likely why she was able to mobilize so many voters, and why the news of the vote spread like it did.
C. Some weird things that have happened regarding voting the last two times the city voted, has everyone on high alert for attempts to sneak corruption through without people realizing it.
The election was on Saturday. As it turns out, the Tuesday before the election, the Louisiana Senate President had signed a bill to change the regulation process for seafood safety and testing. It is still sitting on the governor's desk, just waiting to be signed.
The bill also gives oversight of seafood regulation to the Louisiana Department of Agriculture and Forestry. The conservation board the candidates were running for also just happens to fall under the jurisdiction of this same department.
Louisiana lawmakers send seafood safety, oversight bill to Landry's desk
If this is all be one big coincidence, it certainly is an odd one. Rather than risk some kind of typical Louisiana good ole boy corruption BS, why not just allow everyone that wants to vote, the chance to vote?
It turns out the incumbent candidate from New Orleans won, but they're not releasing any numbers of how many votes she actually won compared to the other candidate.
I voted for her, but I still strongly believe they should call for a re-do bc this all sets a very bad precedent for the future. Even though it's not a normal election, our tax dollars fund this board. You should not be able to turn voters away, and then just shrug it off as incompetence or special circumstance.
Well shoot... My whole comment just disappeared. I'll do bullet points.
Even though my state is vote by mail, smaller districts like the conservation district follow different rules based on their founding documents and may do elections completely differently. Ours did theirs in person because that's what their framework is.
Ballot ordering should be based on history. If they only had that little available, it suggests to me that may have been historically sufficient. What was the turnout last time? How much money would it be worth spending on ballots and polling places for that many/few voters?
I agree that they shouldn't be turning anyone away. In my state we can print ballots on demand if we need them. I wish every state was invested in preventing disenfranchisement.
This was the first of its kind of election in the district, so I would really like to know where they got those estimated numbers, and if they went only by one parish voter registrar when determining the numbers for 5 different parishes
According to the news article "300 ballots would be available at each of the eight polling places" so that's a lot less unreasonable than I was thinking. The fact that this race got a news article is also noteworthy, in the past these races weren't considered important enough. I'm sure that helped bring more people in.
I also wonder what the regulations governing that district say. Maybe the law says something about having a certain number of ballots and closing the election after they are cast. If that were the case this would be a legislature problem, not an elections office problem.
Remember kids, sometimes the law requires or allows stupid things.
This is the first time there has ever been a challenge to a seat and an election in this district, so where did they get the idea that estimated voters would only be ~20/location?
They said that they got it from the registrar of voters, but each parish has its own registrar and the district covers 5 parishes. So which parish/registrar came up with that number, what was it based on since it was the first election? Why was the same number applied equally when taking 5 different parishes into consideration?
Those are all good questions, but I do want to point out that if they were really expecting 20 voters at each location and had 300 ballots at each, it suggests that they were trying to be well prepared and got bad information/advice somewhere. This would argue against bad intent.
That doesn't mean they still didn't screw up, but it could be the difference between conspiracy and just unprepared