Which Australian ststes use voting machines?
The ACT? Thats not really a state - c’mon.
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Speaking at CPAC, the annual main event for fascist whack-a-doodles, Filthy Rich kook conspiracist, Mike Lindell - there, fixed that opening sentence…
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I think the only thing The Machines have taken is Mike Lindell’s brain - and replaced it with a potato.
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In at least some parts of the USA (New Mexico for one), you mark the ballot, run it through the tabulator, and the marked ballot goes into a locked box. The tabulator just counts (you know, "Ein zwei, …) and the ballots are available for hand counting if necessary. No hanging chads, too.
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An upgrade, eh?
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Mike Lindell
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Or by crack heads. Exhibit A, the pillow guy.
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His claimed coke habit was just ploy to explain being found naked in a back alley after a freak electrical storm.
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I think his solution is “just let the republicans win already.”
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Like he’d prefer actual hand-counted paper ballots. Fuck off.
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He sounds sane.
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I always do a double take when I see headlines about weird shit at CPAC, It’s something quite different up here.
CPAC, the Cable Public Affairs Channel, is Canada’s only privately-owned, commercial free, not for profit, bilingual licensed television service. Created in 1992 by a consortium of cable companies to preserve an independent editorial voice for Canada’s democratic process, CPAC provides a window on Parliament, politics and public affairs in Canada and around the world.
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If the Australian Electoral Commission didn’t insist on giving us pencils, they wouldn’t have to issue very specific clarifications.
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I hope it’s a thorough flush into a really big, long drain. I want to hear the air burbles to verify they’re all permanently disposed of.
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Just to give you some context, here’s an example of one of Australia’s lower house ballots.
Our upper house ballots are slightly more complex + cumbersome but there is always the opportunity to vote ‘above’ the line - that is, for a ticket of senators.
We don’t vote on bills, proposals, tax code modifications etc. We don’t have elected offices for judges, law enforcement, district zoning commissioner etc. Our council elections are held independently of state and federal elections - although they have a disappointingly lower turnout which results in some… less than stellar councils…
In federal elections, votes are counted by hand at the booth, and a best guess two-party-preferred split is made at that point - but counting continues after election night - critically, a second count against the electoral roll.
Most everyone votes - or, rather, most everyone turns up to a voting booth, has their name ticked off on the roll, and then is free to number the ballot or… draw something obscene on it. It’s a (broadly) free country.
You sometimes get a sausage + sauce sitting on a buttered slice of bread afterwards. You fold the bread around the sausage. No one should ever refer to the sausage + bread combination as a ‘sausage sizzle’ - which is the event of cooking or preparing sausages on a barbeque for sale and consumption, often for fundraising purposes. Only complete monsters eat the sausage + bread combination from the middle out.
You will sometimes get mustard on yourself.
The electoral process always goes smoothly - and the AEC, the nonpartisan electoral commission, has an amazingly sassy social media presence that works to undo conspiracist thinking and approaches that seem to drift in from … well - but elections are still fraught, and we always dance this line between a party representing a kind of cackhanded centrist ‘competence’ and another party (of parties) that seem increasingly to be advocating for an ‘everyone must be sacrificed before the great god Moloch’ platform and people still vote for them more than half of the time
…
The sausage is still okay tho.
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That’s what we do in Australia. Works fine.
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Doesn’t the UK hand count?
It’s not really as difficult or labor intensive as people make it sound.
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Here’s one from a city in Michigan from 2020.
Could each clerks office count them by hand? Sure.
The problem is, did you see our election in 2020? Every candidate wants to watch the count, recount, challenge the totals, on and on.
It’s a mess. Didn’t used to be like this until some a-hole convinced a bunch of idiots that the election was rigged.
Filling in the circle and then scanning them is the fastest most secure way to tabulate leaving the original paper ballots intact just in case.
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