Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

My experience as a poll worker in Pennsylvania

portal.drewdevault.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

291–300 of 358 posts

Re: My experience as a poll worker in Pennsylvania

#291

Post by totalZero »

mindslight wrote: post #27
dx87 wrote: post #15

This 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.

It's also possible that the officer in question purchased that hoodie because hoodies are warm and he likes its design, and that he happened to wear said hoodie on election day because it was cold. I don't really think it makes sense to speculate either way.

The US military is not a partisan tool nor a domestic political estate, so that message is not overtly supportive of one candidate or the other.

Re: My experience as a poll worker in Pennsylvania

#292

Post by watwut »

m0zg wrote: post #140
tgb wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This was literally predicted ahead of time based off the known demographics of the regions and the time it would take to count the ballots in different counties and the expected differences between in-person and mail-in ballots. It's absolutely misinformation to pretend that this is suspicious and should be investigated. https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/why-pennsylvanias-vote-...

Why is this not happening in non-swing states other than Virginia? And why does Biden's luck improve over time when _only_ mail in ballots are counted?

> Why is this not happening in non-swing states other than Virginia? And why does Biden's luck improve over time when _only_ mail in ballots are counted?

Cause voting is not luck based. Democrats are more likely to vote by mail. Partly because of covid, which they are more likely to believe is an issues. Plus, Trump and republicans discouraged mail voting and claimed it is fraudulent long before election. They did also tried to stop the mail counting and slow down post.

So, republicans were less likely to trust mail and more likely to vote in person.

Re: My experience as a poll worker in Pennsylvania

#294

Post by vonseel »

brink wrote: post #269
barumi wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A dog whistle for what? There's an awful lot of cagey presumption going on in every reiteration of this claim. I'm not a US citizen nor I ever set foot in the US, and even from afar the quasi-fanarical displays of support for the US armed forces is a hallmark of supporters of the Republican party.

As an American, American politics genuinely feels like a game of dodge ball where each team captain takes turns picking virtues that the other side has to be against. The left picked immigration so the right has to hate immigration, the right picked the military so the left has to hate the military. It's like our politics have to be polar opposites on everything, and it's exhausting.

I get you. And plenty of Republicans support the military but did not support Bush's invasion of Iraq / false hunt for WMDs and agree on limiting the size of our military.

This book had some great comments on military size and concomitant decline of power. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rise_and_Fall_of_the_Great...

Re: My experience as a poll worker in Pennsylvania

#295

Post by mulmen »

kube-system wrote: post #132
estebank wrote: post #13

As a non-citizen who had a chance to observe how the process works in California, I was struck by how little emphasis is put in the secrecy of the vote. The whole system looks reasonable except for how easy it can be for poll workers to know what you voted for. Beyond that, the system is clearly geared towards increasing participation and enfranchising as many people as possible (a good thing in a democratic system).

In the state where I'm at, things worked a bit differently this year because of all the mail-in ballots -- but typically when I vote in person, my name is crossed off a paper list of registered voters and then I am escorted to a voting machine to enter in an electronic ballot that has no identifiers attached. Obviously that's harder to do with mail ballots, because we have to be able to discern that one voter submitt…

Why is this harder with mail ballots? My state (Washington) uses a double envelope system. My name is on the outer envelope so I can't cast two ballots and the inner envelope protects the secrecy of my vote.

Or do you mean you have to verify that the ballot is actually submitted after the name is crossed off?

Re: My experience as a poll worker in Pennsylvania

#296

Post by anarazel »

stouset wrote: post #74
estebank wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not just party affiliation (which is public I think in at least most states) but also the procedures in place for discarding incorrectly filled ballots. Poll workers need to recover them and mark them as voided. It is not terrible , but it has a lower threshold of security than other electoral systems I am familiar with. Dropping a mail-in ballot in person seemed to have no plausible subreptitious election integ…

At least in California, all of these voided ballots are counted at the end of the day and tallied with the number of recorded ballots, the number of ballots issued, the number of ballots remaining, and the number of people who physically showed up to vote. To be honest, the numbers are always off by 1-5 (in a precinct of ~1,500 registered voters, with ~100 physical ballots cast) simply because poll workers are genera…

We were off by few in one of the crosschecks for a while. Turned out to just be voided mail-in ballots that in-person voters dropped off, which aren't supposed to be counted in the respective field. Which the manual doesn't really state (but one can infer it, it's clearly to ensure the total number of unused + used in person ballots match the supplied ballots). That manual could use some tightening...

I do quite like that permanent residents like me are allowed to be a poll worker in SF...

Re: My experience as a poll worker in Pennsylvania

#297

Post by mhh__ »

smt88 wrote: post #271
mhh__ wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. In the UK, everything is done on paper - even if there was potential for fraud, scaling it across the whole nation would take years and huge amounts of money (and even more hush money)

We had a presidential election in 2000 that was stolen in public by the GOP, despite being on paper. They did it with a technicality. They're doing the same with signature matching (your signature on your ballot has to match a different signature that could be many years older). Paper is safe from people outside the system, but not from politicized courts that are able to ignore paper ballots for minor mistakes.

Keep in mind the whole hanging chad situation is also impossible because we just use pencils.

But the legal aspect is troubling too

Re: My experience as a poll worker in Pennsylvania

#298

Post by nomercy400 »

tptacek wrote: post #92

This squares with my experience in Illinois after a couple of elections. * As a security/integrity issue, the ballots themselves are much less scary than the pollbooks, which are what we use to match voters against the voting rolls. * Everything's ultimately on paper; there are bar codes, which nobody loves, but they're auditable against the readable printed ballot. * Most of the security is physical/human; for us, e…

In my country we have a simple rule to prevent electioneering on election day: electioneering on election day is forbidden. Not 100ft, not 100m, simply nowhere.

Re: My experience as a poll worker in Pennsylvania

#299

Post by morelisp »

brandmeyer wrote: post #201
pjc50 wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> political rather than patriotic Unfortunately patriotism itself is highly political; the ultimate question of "my country, right or wrong" results in some people noticing that it is in fact wrong in some cases. Do they not teach Clausewitz in the US military? "War is the continuation of politics by other means". Every shot fired in anger is a political act. Not the politics of the person firing it, but those direct…

> Not the politics of the person firing it, but those directing the fire. ... you're almost there... and yet ... > It is possible to try to be non-partisan, but an apolitical military is an oxymoron. > > The US military is the guarantor of a host of political lines across the world; supporting South Korea or Taiwan or Israel or Germany or Bosnia is a political act. At the direction of the duly elected civilian leader…

Who is elected as citizen leadership is a matter of politics. What is lawful is a matter of politics.

Americans need to stop confusing "non-partisan" (or worse "partisan but not along R/D lines") for "apolitical".

Re: My experience as a poll worker in Pennsylvania

#300

Post by specialist »

scollet wrote: post #278
specialist wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not entirely certain that you're defending the gear. Or blaming the users. In case you are, I'll share two of my personal experiences. I hot fixed the VVPAT for my poll site's touchscreen. The cheap bent metal got warped, preventing correct operation. Imagine you had to change the thermal paper for a cash register made by lowest bid contractor designed by grifters who've never seen a cash register. These units we…

I will defer to your knowledge because it appears you have a deeper understanding of the internals. At a user level for me in this last general, the only issues I've observed have been independent of the machine(s). We are perhaps looking at different machines on different timelines and locale, but I don't doubt that there is a long way to go in terms of reliability and efficacy.

Thank you for followup.

Because everyone does everything their own way, it's very hard to generalize about elections in the USA. Which is a problem all on its own.

In reflecting on your direct observations (experiences), I'm chewing on why we have different assumptions. I'd say most of the time, most of the gear and procedures work pretty good. Prior to a botched local election in 2004, I had a very high opinion of my local election administration. And it was only after really digging into the problem space that I started to see when the reality didn't quite match the narrative.

One thing noob me didn't appreciate was that with FPTP form of elections, our system is unnecessarily brittle. My large county has at least one mandatory manual recount every general election. Triggered when the margin of victory is smaller than the error rate.

That's when the real drama starts.

Honestly, I feel ridiculous obsessing over jitter in the process when the correct fix is to switch to a more robust form of elections. If we switched to a combo of ranked choice voting and proportional representation, the stakes would be so much lower, and trust in the process would be so much higher.

Again, thank you for replying. I'm grateful that you and many others have leaned into this issue. More eyeballs (attention) is better.

Post reply on HN