re: #472 ipsos

Meanwhile in Georgia…

My sister’s best friend lives in Forsyth County, one of the exurban ring counties around metro Atlanta. Just found out last night that her friend went to vote near the end of the day and was in line at 7 when the polls closed.

The friend says the poll workers told the people in line they had to go home (!) and wouldn’t be allowed to vote (!!) and so she left (!!!) without voting.

“She’s not the brightest bulb,” says my sister about her friend.

And yes, she would have been a Stacey Abrams voter.

Multiply that by how many polling places across Georgia, and how many votes that should have been cast were never cast, and thus won’t be captured in any theoretical recount?

This makes me so angry. We KNOW how to make elections run smoothly. Up here in western New York, there’s rarely any line at all to vote. We have a half-dozen precincts that all vote in the auditorium of our town hall (one of a dozen polling places around our town of 20,000 or so). You go to the table of your precinct, the nice old ladies look you up, you sign your name, you get your ballot and you go to one of the kiosks where you fill in the circles with the felt-tip pen. Then you go to one of three or four scanners and run the ballot through the hole. I was in and out in under five minutes and would have been quicker if I hadn’t run into a high school friend on the way out and chatted for a bit.

Five-hour lines for voting are a choice that election administrators make. We need a national standard. This is ridiculous.

you show up in line before closing time you get to vote

no one loses their franchise because the BOARDS OF ELECTIONS/ADMINISTRATORS intentionally or incompetently screwed up the planning and execution of voting day