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.
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