It’s safe to assume at this point that delays and chaos (and the opportunities both will provide for fraud) are the exact point.
This time around, Georgia is going to be prepared to “find” Trump however many votes he needs.
The real question is whether they’re going to bother actually doing the math to make it believable, or if they’re going to give Trump 105% of the state’s population worth of votes.
i am thinking they are going to scrutinize black neighborhood polling stations and say they didn’t match the hand count of total ballots with the digital total and therefore this polling station is invalid or something
Significant delay combined with the party that insists elections are supposed to be over at midnight. Seems like an obvious recipe to count certain votes first and then whoops out of time.
Exactly. Low-population areas are Republican-leaning and will get counted fast. Cities which are Democratic-leaning won’t have the staff to count it in one night.
Lots of places have rules about how many polling stations per county. It’s designed to create lines to vote in cities and no lines in rural areas.
How is this not shut down as obvious voter suppression. What other reason could there be for doing this? How do they justify it?
They don’t justify it, they just do it. Same with gerrymandering.
It’s not a bug; it’s a feature.
That same party already made it much more onerous for people of color to vote in Georgia which will mean fewer votes to count as well
And don’t even think about giving water to people stuck in line for hours in the heat. That’s a felony. (Okay its a misdemeanor, and a judge “paused enforcement” of it sort of.)
Fuckery Ahoy!!
Could one person go along the queue, giving out 1 penny’s.
Then a second person go along the queue, selling bottles of water for a penny?
Yes. Yes you can. At least you could about 4 years ago. I live in GA and was going to do this last election but turns out my county don’t enforce this dumb freaking rule so I did all that research for nothing.
Fuck. They passed it. Harris just lost Georgia.
Look into the details of what was passed. It won’t simply delay reporting, it will allow them to refuse certification of results based on almost anything, including “suspicious” results, i.e., Trump losing under any circumstance. They’ve also installed loyalists across the state to halt certifications based on that principle on purpose.
Georgia just successfully overthrew democratic elections in their state. They did it after working out loud and in public on it for four years, and no one did anything about it. I’m dead serious when I say that this functionally and practically, which is all that matters, makes it impossible for Harris to win Georgia.
Incredible. And incredibly sad.
So by law all ballot boxes will have their seals broken immediately.
Fucking Jenius, georgia republiQans! That’s such a vote-securing idea! Also when all your Big Lie accusations become plans, you’ve gone full seditionist, just FYI ok? Ok!
The delay is intended by Republicans, in order to cause a crisis that goes to SCOTUS… who seems to be owned and operated by the GOP. I’d say lets compromise… they can hand count and if not done by the cutoff then their votes simply are not admitted. Sucks to the non Republicans in the juristictions but hey, why let these dumbshits screw up the whole election?
reminder that they are hand counting ballots that the ballot marking machine printed out, instead having of the computerized polling system the Republican governor put in a few years ago to ensure accuracy count them.
TBF that same Republican governor deleted the data during an investigation into the vote count because he was overseeing his own election. Hand counting could potentially be more accurate…
As a Canadian and former campaign volunteer (and poll observer) this is really weird to me. Federal elections in Canada are always hand-counted. Results at each polling station are counted in front of volunteer observers from each party (as well as neutral observers) and then delivered to Elections Canada where they’re tallied (in front of lawyers from each party) and results are reported to the media.
It’s not a big deal and there’s no chaos.
It’s a lot more doable when you don’t have a 6 page ballot with several dozen offices on it and have planned and budgeted for hand counts. It’s hard to do with lots of positions on the ballot, little notice that it’s going to be done, and no money to hire staff to do the counting
HARRIS JUST LOST GEORGIA.
This is basically the first election result. Trump just won his first 16 electoral college votes. This should be HUGE news.
Trump loyalists now have the power to privately count votes and additionally have the power to not certify any results for reasons left intentionally vague.
Let me reiterate. HARRIS JUST LOST THE STATE OF GEORGIA.
I looked up this story on the Gateway Pundit because I’m a sadist i guess. The comments were…about what you’d expect. https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2024/09/huge-georgia-state-election-board-passes-rule-requiring/
Per the article
The resolution simply requires the hand counting of physical paper ballots at the precinct level to ensure it matches the total reported by the tabulators. This does not involve a hand-count tabulation of the vote totals but rather simply the total number of physical ballots cast at that particular precinct.
So, because in Tennessee, a QR Code error created a mismatch between the number of physical ballots vs tabulated ones, and they found the same code error in 64 out of 66 counties in Georgia’s tabulators, they are going to hand count the number of ballots to make sure it matches the number the tabulators counted. Especially, since they apparently found a bunch of additional ballots in some counties, as well…
I mean, this seems reasonable on the surface. But, considering the situation, it seems like it could all go really sideways.
Isn’t there another way they could count just the number of paper ballots? Like, as they come in, instead of later on, by hand? I’m not sure of the way thier system / machines work, or of a way that would convince everyone of privacy, but…like a laser counter that counts every time its broken, or something…Idk, there just seems like there has to be a better way.
Edit: so really, objectively speaking, this is an issue. One that wouldnt be caught unless they ordered a hand recount after the fact. I mean, obviously, this isnt an objective source, but, unless theyre just straight up making this up (which I suppose is a possibility), how is not having every ballot counted OK? Isnt there a better suggestion than breaking the seal immediately, counting everything by hand, and inviting all the issues that come with that? Something that could even be presented to the court or something as an alternative, that everybody could agree with. At least people could say they tried to solve the issue another way. If it gets rejected, then it would be plainly obvious there were ulterior motives. At this point, it sounds as if theres some plausible deniability behind the reasoning for hand counting.
I’m voting Democrat and I see nothing wrong with this. Yeah it may take time but at least it’ll be an accurate count. I think every vote should be hand counted.
The problem is that the people making this decision are a bunch of conspiracy-mongers who aren’t able to provide money to actually count the ballots. The point isn’t just to make it slow; it’s to create opportunity to conspiracy-monger and choose to not certify the results at all, so that peoples’ votes aren’t counted, and the Republicans can just install whomever they feel like in power.
Why does there need to be a rush to have them certified? We don’t have to know the winner on election Day. I’d rather it be correct and accurate than instant. How can you be against accuracy? Edit: it used to take weeks to find out what each state voted.
There isn’t a rush to do it; the problem is that their plan is to invent nonexistent problems and refuse to certify at all.
So basically like the whole hanging chads thing all over again?
Pretty much. Only way to stop it is for Democrats to have an overwhelming win so that things don’t come down to corrupt officials in a few states.
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They should hand count the ballots.
Idk what this is about but hand counting can be done on a massive scale and avoids all manner of screwups like Florida in 2000 that gave bush the election.
Even if you want that, it’s a really bad idea to set new rules for how to count ballots a few weeks before the election, when you don’t have time to hire people or train them to do it right. This guarantees chaos.
Polls close in a little under two months. We already know how to hand count ballots. Best to start early.
Early would have been a year ago. Not now.
That certainly would have been earlier. To be honest I think even if a person doesn’t have my own “hand counting is the best choice” views, planning on doing hand count in an election that was the subject of manipulation allegations two presidential elections in a row and is smart.
I mean, realistically even if you believe the machine count is fine, you’re most likely going to have to do an auditable hand recount anyway.
You trust random ass humans to be 100% honest in their counts?
If machine counting says 50/50 and hand counting says 30/70, you’ve got an indicator of a problem. What is your control if it’s all human?
Usually a hand count has several people count the ballot and if they disagree, an official gets called over to sort it out.
It’s why forcing a recount is not a good strategy unless you actually think you can win on it or have control of the source of ballots.
There’s too many people involved and the scale is too granular to make it possible to fake shit in a hand count without it being obvious.
The normal action with machine counts is to randomly select a subsample and hand count those to validate. It’s just slow, expensive, and error-prone to hand-count really huge numbers of ballots with lots of offices on them. And that’s the whole point of this decision — to make it so that people don’t have a reliable count of votes the next day, allowing the opportunity to toss out the voters decisions entirely.
If hand counting is so error prone then why do we hand count during recounts and as you said during spot checks?
I don’t buy it.
Perhaps support for hand counting is partly coming from people hoping it will cause chaos. I don’t think it will based on my own limited experience in elections and weather it will or won’t, even the stopped clock of people who want to prevent and slow down the count tells the right time twice a day.
Why is it such a big deal to know the next day who the winner is? They don’t take office until the next calendar year.
Because you can do it well at small scale at modest expense. It’s expensive to do well and fast for ballots with lots of offices and in large numbers.
This decision, unaccompanied by money to hire people, basically guarantees chaos.
