2016 Postmortem
Related: About this forumMY EXPERIENCE AS A POLL WORKER THE EPIC FAIL OF A PRIMARY
?Francesca Rheannon? to Long Island For Bernie Sanders
April 19 at 11:08pm ·
'I just got off my 17 hour shift as an election official in East Hampton, NY. I am from this area and went canvassing for Bernie for 4 days here. While canvassing, I found overwhelming support for Bernie in my middle class area -- nearly every house where I actually talked to voters (about 40% of the houses), almost all were for Bernie.
But today at the polls, many of those had disappeared from the voter roll book. In my own ED district, which is the district I was working in, out of 166 Democratic voters, 39 were forced to file affidavit ballots. (ONLY 2 Republican voters had to file affidavits.) That's close to 20%. Let that sink in for a moment.
Many of these voters were long term registered Democrats -- some were in couples where one person was on the rolls and the other was not. Most had not moved since the last election and had voted in the most recent elections.
Hillary won by 11 votes in my ED -- not counting affidavits. THE AFFIDAVITS MUST NOT ONLY BE COUNTED, THEY MUST BE ALLOWED.
It was impossible for me, an election official, to get a straight story on whether the affidavits would be counted. The "coordinator" -- the top person at the site -- let slip that they count the affidavits "proportionately". If she is correct, that means, I assume, they take a sample of the ballots to count. Not all. If that sample is based on the proportion of official ballots cast, then I imagine it would just reproduce the first results WITHOUT the affidavits.
But it's worse than that. If the voter has been purged from the Board of Elections rolls -- like 125,000 Brooklyn voters were -- then it seems the affidavits (because no one could tell me for certain WHAT would happen to the affidavits -- are not counted. If you can't prove you are a registered Democrat, then you won't be counted, it seems. (If you received a voter card, you have some proof. But not everyone did or they may not be able to retrieve it.)
The ruling that came down from the emergency voter protection suit was no remedy. It allowed for getting a court order to vote. The nearest judge is more than an hour from here. And I was strongly discouraged from even informing voters that a court order was an option (I had to fight to be able to tell people of their right to a court order.)
Finally -- this was NOT business as usual. This was my second election. The last one I worked at, exactly ONE voter needed an affidavit ballot in my ED. Every poll worker there, at all the ED tables (there were 4) was shocked at the number of voters who were not on the rolls. Many have been working for years -- and had never seen anything remotely like this.
The whole purging and affidavit process needs to be investigated on an emergency basis BEFORE the election results are decided. Bernie's folks need to be on top of this. They need to fight for an honest election. They owe it to us who have worked so hard for them.'
https://www.facebook.com/francesca.rheannon?fref=nf
https://www.facebook.com/groups/longislandforberniesanders/permalink/1578411902450676/
Carolina
(6,960 posts)To keep this post on top
HRC is a flawed candidate who depends on Brock ops, coin tosses, and voter disenfranchisement (by any means) to "win"
elleng
(130,974 posts)Bread and Circus
(9,454 posts)I have a feeling we will learn the full story when it's all too late at a time when we are told to "turn the page" and "move on".
Voter suppression is not for Republicans any more.
nadinbrzezinski
(154,021 posts)sadoldgirl
(3,431 posts)the election, the parties have taken on that role.
monmouth4
(9,708 posts)mrdmk
(2,943 posts)Of course one would think they would go and fix the voter database first which will take a while. Do not count on the database being fixed first. They will count the votes the way they want to and then say shame on everyone because Bernie is further behind. To further the insult, you need to keep your mouth shut and stop doing harm to your candidate. Of course all this will happen before the end of the week...