Raffensperger blasts proposed rule requiring hand count of ballots at Georgia polling places (www.wabe.org)

submitted 3 months ago by grue@lemmy.world to c/politics@lemmy.world

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cross-posted from: https://yall.theatl.social/post/3474840

From WABE Politics News:

Georgia’s secretary of state on Thursday came out against election rule changes pending before the State Election Board, specifically rejecting a proposal to count ballots by hand at polling places […]

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[-] grue@lemmy.world 37 points 3 months ago

Sharlene Alexander, a member of the Fayette County Board of Elections and Voter Registration, submitted the proposal to have three poll workers hand count ballots, sorting them into stacks of 50 ballots until all have been counted and the three workers have arrived at the same total. If that number doesn’t match those recorded on the voter check-in system, the electronic voting machines and the scanner recap forms, the poll manager is to determine the reason for the inconsistency and, if possible, correct it.

We're starting to see the tactics the MAGA fascists will be using to try to delay the reporting of results and/or manufacture disputes, in order to punt the assignment of GA's electoral votes to the corrupt SCOTUS and thwart the will of the voters. With this rule change, it would only take a few MAGA poll workers in a few key precincts to keep "accidentally" miscounting and make that happen.

[-] just_another_person@lemmy.world 8 points 3 months ago

Then looks like we'll have to win in more states then. I don't like polls except for sentiment, but it's all building up in Harris' favor right now.

[-] grue@lemmy.world 5 points 3 months ago

As a Georgian, I'd like to not be disenfranchised, thank you very much!
They're going to be pulling this shit, or similar, in all the other states too.

[-] just_another_person@lemmy.world 1 points 3 months ago

That's why EVERYONE needs to be checking their voting status between now and November.

[-] grue@lemmy.world 2 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

This has nothing to do with kicking people off voter rolls and everything to do with preventing valid votes from being counted after they're cast.

Everyone should indeed be double-checking their registration, but that's a different issue and won't help counter this.

[-] JustZ@lemmy.world 1 points 3 months ago

They've been doing this type of shit for years.

Legit three years ago, I was at the local property records office and there was some old bag conservative in there with no job cross-referencing the voter rolls with the land records, just looking for people who might not be registered at the correct address, or who have recently moved but haven't reregistered in a new town yet, to challenge their names on the roll.

On the other side of the coin, to the Republicans in the state legislature keep trying to raise a bill that's filled with all these loaded terms about transparency and the right to petition and open government, and what the law does is says that at any public meeting, members of the public have a right to be heard up to fifteen minutes. Under the current law, there is only a right to be heard at one or two public meetings on a subject and limited to three minutes. Like, I'm not sure exactly how the law is written now, but it's something like public comment is only required when the item is added to the public agenda for public discussion/hearing and before it's voted on. The new law would give numbers of the public the right to speak at any public meeting in which the topic is discussed.

It's like, the government has work to do, and this is a way to jam up their work by giving every whack job MAGA dumbass 15 minutes to waste at very meeting. It's a very obvious attempt to stop the government from working.

These aren't even new tactics.

[-] grue@lemmy.world 2 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

Legit three years ago, I was at the local property records office and there was some old bag conservative in there with no job cross-referencing the voter rolls with the land records, just looking for people who might not be registered at the correct address, or who have recently moved but haven’t reregistered in a new town yet, to challenge their names on the roll.

That's a different tactic than what is being discussed in this article. It is happening -- and what's worse, they've made it easier/automated it -- but we need to be figuring out countermeasures for this problem, not distracting ourselves by making everything about the other thing.

On the other side of the coin, to the Republicans in the state legislature keep trying to raise a bill that’s filled with all these loaded terms about transparency and the right to petition and open government, and what the law does is says that at any public meeting, members of the public have a right to be heard up to fifteen minutes. Under the current law, there is only a right to be heard at one or two public meetings on a subject and limited to three minutes. Like, I’m not sure exactly how the law is written now, but it’s something like public comment is only required when the item is added to the public agenda for public discussion/hearing and before it’s voted on. The new law would give numbers of the public the right to speak at any public meeting in which the topic is discussed.

Public comment at meetings is good, actually. This is why you earned my downvote.

These aren’t even new tactics.

To be clear: the tactic that this article is about is new.

[-] JustZ@lemmy.world 1 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

Yeah public comment is good. Opening up every single public meeting for an unlimited period of question and answer which is what this bill I was talking about proposed, is intentional sabotage of government. There is limited time for public comment at public meetings, The amount of time allowed should absolutely not be increased fivefold and allowed to go on until there is no one left that wants to speak. It would ruin the government's ability to function.

The article you linked says right on it that those 288 people had to sign up in advance to speak. The bill I am talking about would allow anyone to show up and be able to speak at any hearing, not just hearings held for the purpose of public testimony, but any hearing on which the subject matter is discussed.

[-] grue@lemmy.world 1 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

I understand that basically allowing the public to collectively filibuster would theoretically be bad, but -- as someone who is very much paying more attention to local politics than most -- the likelihood of that happening is incredibly insignificant compared to the danger of government bodies abusing it by censoring public input to shield themselves from legitimate criticism.

[-] JustZ@lemmy.world 1 points 3 months ago

How small is your town? Where I live every single committee with grind to a halt and the phone to members would resign before they sit there in meetings until 3:00 or 4:00 in the morning every night listening to internet trolls who have been sent out to waste everyone's time.

[-] grue@lemmy.world 1 points 3 months ago

It's Atlanta, so... not small?

[-] JustZ@lemmy.world 1 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

Maybe the far right does not have this sort of local organizing presence in Atlanta? I was expecting you to say some super small town that nobody's ever heard of. I'm in a blue state but in a rural community and I promise these brainwashed morons show up to every meeting spouting conspiracy theories and bitching about government this and government that. That they are as bad as sovereign citizens except that are way more of them, and sometimes the people in charge actually take them seriously. And if they can't conjure up any bullshit, they will simply read forwarded emails into the record for three minutes before they get cut off.

[-] grue@lemmy.world 1 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

Maybe the far right does not have this sort of local organizing presence in Atlanta?

I laughed so hard that my daughter literally just walked into the room to ask me what was so funny after I read this. You do realize what state and region Atlanta is in, right?

I will give you some credit, though: it is true that the City of Atlanta itself (not the metro area with population 6.3M, but the incorporated central city with population 500K) is, for the most part, very Democratic. We definitely have different factions within the city (e.g. socially-conservative black democrats vs. white progressives), but the Republicans in the city are more of the rich businessperson type than the sovcit dipshit type.

As such, things like Atlanta City Council meetings (which is what I was thinking of when I wrote that) and other public meetings within the City really don't tend to have those sorts of problems to any great extent. Instead, Atlanta's problem (both "City of" and the metro as a whole) is that the region is very Balkanized and when fuckery happens, it often tends to come in the form of one jurisdiction trying to impose bullshit on another (e.g. the state government fucking with the city, Fulton County fucking with the city, the city fucking with the school system, Cobb County fucking with the Atlanta Regional Commission, the state government fucking with MARTA, etc.). In other words, the far right are represented in other places where they don't need to disrupt the meetings to get their way.

I guess it's also possible that other parts of the metro could have enough intra-jurisdictional ideological diversity that they have boards where the "public filibuster" problem outweighs the "censoring public input" problem, but I don't go to public meetings out in the suburbs (or at the state government level, for that matter) so I wouldn't know.

[-] Coelacanth@feddit.nu 17 points 3 months ago

There are going to be major shenanigans in November. I fear Trump loyalists have had too much time to prepare this time and gotten too emboldened. I love riding the high of the current wave of rare optimism, but it just feels like there is no chance Harris just wins, gets certified and sworn in and that's that, right? Either Trump wins legit, or they manage to steal the election.

I really hope I'm wrong.

[-] cybermass@lemmy.ca 7 points 3 months ago

It won't be a steal, it will be an insurrection and civil war.

[-] grue@lemmy.world 2 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

it will be an insurrection and civil war.

I'm terrified that that might be the best-case scenario. Right now, it's looking like non-fascists are so complacent and in denial they might let the MAGAs get away with coronating a dictator without even a fight.

Frankly, there ought to be hundreds of thousands of people in downtown Atlanta right now protesting the blatant corruption of the state elections board, but there aren't.

[-] Coelacanth@feddit.nu 1 points 3 months ago

I'm not sure there will be an insurrection. I don't think his base is as energised as it was in 2020 leading into 2021, and I also think the actual consequences for the insurrectionists probably deter people from attempting it again. I might be wrong.

I still stand by my prediction that the single most likely outcome of the election is enough Trump/Republican loyalist election officials refuse to certify votes, leading to neither candidate reaching 270. The decision will then be thrown to Congress, where Trump will win.

[-] grue@lemmy.world 2 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

I still stand by my prediction that the single most likely outcome of the election is enough Trump/Republican loyalist election officials refuse to certify votes, leading to neither candidate reaching 270. The decision will then be thrown to Congress, where Trump will win.

That's what I'm talking about: I'm terrified that non-fascists will accept that blatant tyranny and fail to revolt. That is a worse outcome than civil war.

(Also: more likely thrown to SCOTUS than Congress, since (a) the VP is a Democrat, and (b) not only does SCOTUS have a MAGA majority, no less than three of them helped perpetrate Bush v. Gore.)

[-] Coelacanth@feddit.nu 1 points 3 months ago

I'm 90% certain revolt won't happen. Probably more. The age of revolutions has passed, especially in America. The standard of living is too high, the weapons of suppression are too powerful. To quote the great Disco Elysium: "the material base for an uprising has eroded."

[-] grue@lemmy.world 2 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

In other words, thwarting the tactics described in this article is a do-or-die imperative because we have no backup plan. And that's really bad news, because (a) pretty much every countermeasure I can think of only further disrupts the election and thus plays right into their hands, and (b) as far as I can tell, we're not even trying to do anything about it.

Oh yeah, and also: unless we go even further and crush the MAGA movement entirely (imprison the traitorous leaders and deprogram the cultists), they're just going to keep trying until they succeed.

[-] Serinus@lemmy.world 4 points 3 months ago

With the recent Supreme Court ruling, Biden can just say no. He can order the military to do whatever is necessary to secure democracy.

A coup and a counter-coup might not look much different. That certainly is a problem. I expect we'll do our best to avoid it, but we'll do what's needed if it comes down to Kamala getting 270 electoral votes denied only by Trumpers refusal to certify.

Some supporters of the GOP, notably some specific foreign ones, are fine with that. They'd rather see Trump in office, but they'll be happy with anything that destabilizes the US while making their own elections seem better.

If Kamala loses the election legitimately, well, we just lose. Dem leadership will abide by the results of a reasonably fair election.

[-] CaptainSpaceman@lemmy.world 8 points 3 months ago

Magats want battleground states to be a mess, but the SoS in GA is responsible for elections and Brad prolly wants to keep his job.

[-] grue@lemmy.world 6 points 3 months ago

Raffensperger spoke against it, but he's not the one who gets to decide -- the MAGA-controlled elections board does.

[-] MediaBiasFactChecker@lemmy.world -3 points 3 months ago

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this post was submitted on 16 Aug 2024

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