Earlier quoted context omitted.
Then it is not the flag of the United States.
How would you describe what it is then?
Art
My experience as a poll worker in Pennsylvania
241–250 of 358 posts
Re: My experience as a poll worker in Pennsylvania
#242Earlier quoted context omitted.
"The intention behind the rules" is a thing that lives in your imagination. It cannot be quantified. That's the point of having written rules. Expecting that poll workers will read and adhere to The Rules as stated isn't some wild fantasy. It's literally what they signed up to do. It's foundational to the idea of an election having any legitimacy at all. It does not require taking a position on "the ban on electionee…
> "The intention behind the rules" is a thing that lives in your imagination. No, it's pretty straight-forward. There's no healthy democracy that believes that a blatantly partial and biased individual counting the votes generates confidence in the elections being fair and democratic. The whole idea that you can violate such a fundamental principle in such a blatant way is something that goes totally against basic de…
> No, it's pretty straight-forward.
Great! If it's so straight-forward, can you please quantify the intention behind the document entitled "Guide for Election Board Officials in Philadelphia County"[1] for me? ... I'll wait.
In the meantime, I'd love to hear more about how impossible it is for "blatantly partial and biased" poll workers to effect the perceived fairness of an election. Would you have confidence in an election where each poll worker made up their own version of the rules?
[1] https://files7.philadelphiavotes.com/election-workers/Primar...
Re: My experience as a poll worker in Pennsylvania
#243Similar experience here in Georgia. It sounds like there is more to do on setup morning here, since we had to show up at 5am (and didn't have things really ready until 6:30 or so). There are so many seals to check and record; lots and lots and lots of paperwork.
In Georgia, the ballots are printed from a terminal that the voter uses and then scanned, leaving both an electronic count and a paper trail (the ballot itself is ejected from the bottom of the scanner into a sealed ballot box).
However, our scanners jammed 40 minutes into the day; after a couple hours, a technician managed to come to our precinct and opened the ballot box and revealed that a lackluster design in the ballot box caused the ballots coming out of the scanner to sometimes curl up and jam. Without any realistic solution, we just had to open the ballot box every time it jammed (supervised every time to ensure no monkey business) and push any stuck ballots out of the way of the scanner so that more could be scanned. Amusingly we had good success regularly giving the machine a good shove to dislodge any stuck ballots.
We also had problems printing receipts---in our case, we only need to print 3 from each scanner, but we ran out of scanner receipt paper. Since another precinct called us during the day looking for extra receipt paper... it wasn't available. But, we dodged a bullet, since there was just enough paper to print 2 of the 3 receipts. (1 gets posted on the door of the polling place; 2 go to the county. We wrote an apology on the receipt and only sent 1 to the county. I verified on the Secretary of State website that the votes tabulated for our precinct matched what our receipts printed. Cool to be able to double-check like that!)
I spent a while thinking about what a pollworker would need to do to illegally cast ballots. It would be a tall order indeed and would require cooperation and secrecy from everyone there, since the only way to cast a ballot is to scan it, and everyone can see the scanners at all times. I can't see it realistically happening in any precinct.
Re: My experience as a poll worker in Pennsylvania
#244Earlier quoted context omitted.
So you're saying no one would have died from CoVid-19 if Trump weren't in office? Citation needed.
It seems likely that if the national response to covid had tracked with, say, the NY State response, that yes: we'd have seen far fewer deaths. The first 60-100k, mostly in the northeast, probably couldn't have been saved. The initial outbreak happened too fast and too hard. But after that, NY has been flat. They controlled it. The same could have been true for the rest of the country, yet we collectively chose not t…
The NY state response included sending sick patients into nursing homes. Had other states done that uniformly we'd have even more deaths, not fewer.
Re: My experience as a poll worker in Pennsylvania
#245Earlier quoted context omitted.
And even if you do secure it, if Joe McCitizen can't understand it, it does you no good.
There are plenty of things that people do online without really understanding how it works, but they still do it. Online voting could be done securely over the network and could be authenticated with a certificate associated with one's voter registration that's anonymized in a way that doesn't reveal any information about the voter other than whether they have already voted. Also, it can be an option in addition to v…
> Online voting could be done securely over the network and could be authenticated with a certificate associated with one's voter registration that's anonymized in a way that doesn't reveal any information about the voter other than whether they have already voted.
There's a lot of handwaving in this sentence about what can be done. We can't even secure computers when the fate of the entire world _doesn't_ depend on it. You think we can do a better job when control of a nuclear power with the world's largest economy rests in the balance?
> like you can do now with taxes
I'm not terribly worried about the consequences of someone filing my taxes for me.
Re: My experience as a poll worker in Pennsylvania
#246This part seems incorrect: > There are strict laws regulating police and poll workers while the polls are open. Police are not allowed within 100 feet of the polling location, unless they're actively voting or there on official business at the request of the election board. Additionally, anyone working at the polls in an official capacity is not allowed to wear any clothing with political messaging. One of the office…
"The American flag with the military oath of enlistment" is not "the American flag", but rather an attempt to make some kind of statement. At best it's political support of the military, at worst it's a possible dog whistle.
Wait, a dog whistle? For what? Fellow soldiers that have dog tags?
Re: My experience as a poll worker in Pennsylvania
#247Re: My experience as a poll worker in Pennsylvania
#248Biden only gets lucky in PA a full day after that if you look at vote share per batch, well after in-person votes are counted, and the later you go, the luckier he gets. The pattern is the same in every swing state except Arizona, and in Virginia as well. If you plot out Edison data that has vote count updates, in "normal" states (both Biden and Trump dominant), things are chaotic initially (when in-person votes are…
Its not "lucky" at all, this was an orchestrated outcome. Theres 2 components to this: 1. Mail in ballots were heavily partisan. The president made a point to instruct Republican voters to vote in person, and not by mail. And many other correlated factors (eg. COVID and social distancing has also been heavily politicized, influencing whether a voter would vote in person vs mail in). 2. Mail in ballots were delayed. T…
# 1 would fit, if there were a proportionate number of mail-in ballots for Jo Jorgensen and Kanye West. If you have 10,000 ballots, some of those will be expected. Tens of thousands of Biden-only? Repeatedly? Doesn't pass the sniff test.
Re: My experience as a poll worker in Pennsylvania
#249Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why just those states, though? Other states show more-or-less similar distributions of in-person to mail-in ballots. It's only these handful of swing states (WI, MI, PA, NV, GA) that have such a massively different ratio of votes in-person vs. mail-in.
> It's only these handful of swing states (WI, MI, PA, NV, GA) that have such a massively different ratio of votes in-person vs. mail-in. No, its not. Its only those states that got a lot of attention to their count because they were swing states ; the states that were easy to project very early on, no one outside of the media decision desks making the call cared about the details. And lots of them didn't have rules…
In Florida, early votes were counted as soon as they were received. In Pennsylvania, by state law the early votes couldn't be counted until the polls closed. That's the main reason for the difference in timing and the large shift.
Re: My experience as a poll worker in Pennsylvania
#250Earlier quoted context omitted.
I voted in Allegheny County. We filled in bubbles on paper, and then at the end, put our ballots in what looked like a scantron machine. It had a screen with a simple confirmation message (something like "thank you for voting") that lit up after it scanned your ballot. I also wasn't asked my party affiliation.
Wow, that's much different. I wonder if the machines are unique to Philly, then.
I worked the polls in Allegheny, and while the broad strokes are similar to what you described, there are definitely a few differences:
- Most people fill out their ballot on paper with a pen, but a voting machine is also available to generate a ballot (anyone can request to use the machine, but it's intended for those with disabilities). Either way, the voter then feeds their paper ballot into a central counting machine (most districts only have one, but some have more).
- Police are in no way involved (unless the poll workers call them to attempt to address an issue during the day). The judge of elections is responsible for picking up the materials a few days beforehand and then dropping them off at the county office at the end of the day.
- Only four receipts are printed: one to go to the county office, one stays with the minority inspector for a year, one is posted outside the polling place, and... I can't remember what happens with the fourth.
In any case, though, thanks for writing this up in detail -- it's good to read how other places do it, and for those that haven't been a poll worker, it's good to read how at least one place does it!