State of Georgia goes to court to defend voting machines that recorded 243% voter turnouts

Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2018/08/09/just-peachy.html

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let me hazard a guess…these are RED districts…AMIRITE?!

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From Ars: “McClatchy’s data comes from a federal lawsuit filed against the state. In addition to the problem in Habersham County’s Mud Creek precinct, where it appeared that 276 registered voters managed to cast 670 ballots, the piece describes numerous other issues with both voter registration and electronic voting machines. (In fact it was later corrected to show 3,704 registered voters in the precinct.)”

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The American love of gadgets and machines has brought us many great things - but good elections is not one of them.

We need a national standard for a single, highly-audited, open source voting machine or we need to go back to paper and pencil which serves the rest of the world just fine. Why we have to enrich some politician’s idiot nephew who wants to sell the latest rube goldberg voting machine is beyond me.

With the debacle of the last election, maybe we will finally do something about this scandal

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There are only 243 registered voters, of course they’re red. I’m not sure how much that matters though, votes can be stuffed into any precinct regardless of political lean. If there are suddenly more Republican votes than you might expect from a normally Democratic leaning district, well, maybe Trump’s just resonated with those black inner city single mothers.

i suspect that the actual failing here is that there should be way more than 243 voters in a precinct. Even a very rural county should be able to show more than that. Probably a result of overzealous purging of voter registrations that accidentally hit a rural county instead of an urban county.

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I thought increasing voter turnout was a good thing? We should be applauding 243%!

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I think you missed the irony I was pointing out…

Republicans have routinely stated that voter fraud is wildly rampant and the cause for “too many Democrat votes being cast” and yet when any funny business (whether voter induced or process induced) it seems to come from the Red side of the fence.

So…YES…the political leaning matters. Do not make a false equivalence that Blue and Red both have voting discrepancies.

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Having just cast a ballot in a primary this week, it didn’t strike me as odd that Michigan mandates paper ballots, read by scantron-type machines, which are not connected to the internet in any way. The machine spits out a paper tally at the end of the day, and the paper ballots are delivered to the County in case the need for a recount arises. Results are then transmitted to the State. Somewhere in this mix are three types of verification methods to ensure an accurate vote count.

I guess Michigan understands that political winds do change over time. The petition drive to get an anti-gerrymandering constitutional amendment onto the November ballot may or may not have been a motivating factor for the State to take action to ensure honest, secure voting. :smirk:

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Republican insistence that voter fraud is a huge problem always seemed like them projecting to me.

That said, you can certainly find instances of fraud in places like Chicago, but almost never the “one person casts multiple ballots all over the state” that the Republicans claim to be worried about.

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Oh, it’s certainly projection. Remember when former Diebold chief executive Walden O’Dell promised to deliver Ohio to President George W. Bush in 2004?

The moment electronic voting became a thing exit polls suddenly stopped matching results, known as the red shift. There are hundreds of articles about why exit polls don’t match (embarassed Bush/Trump voters, etc…) but seemingly no one points out the obvious, republicans are cheating.

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Today’s XKCD is relevant:

I suspect that Kemp is shitting his pants because Abrams ran an effective get out the vote campaign during the primary, visiting every GA county, and pushing every eligible voter to do just that.

They also had a story this morning discussing how Kemp feels that shifting to paper ballots for November is in his own words “dangerous”.

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The most dramatic failing in the state’s 16-year-old voting machines was in Habersham County’s Mud Creek precinct, where 670 ballots were cast, even though only 243 voters are registered in the precinct.

Winning!

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And it’s not like Kemp is 1) an ass-hat, and 2) overseeing the elections.

Nothing to see here. Move along. Take your 243% extra friends with you.

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Came for yesterday’s extremely on-point xkcd. Leaving satisfied.

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mad-carrie-b

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Who needs Russians when we have Brian Kemp right here in Georgia?

Going into the Republican primary a couple of weeks ago, polls showed Kemp at 44%, Casey Cagle at 41%, with 14% undecided. A week later, Kemp was the winner, with 69%, and Cagle at 30%.

Nothing dodgy about that at all.

Stacey Abrams has her work cut out for her in November.

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I’m glad I’m not the only one who thought that was weird… I didn’t think the secret recording of Cagle had had that much of an impact.

Roger that.

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Note that this may mean they know they have 1,000 registered voters in that district, but for some reason the system is only showing 243. It may be a bit too early to start freaking out over this particular instance.