Alarms sound over high turnover among election workers
Experts are sounding alarms just over a year out from November 2024 that the presidential election could suffer from chaos and confusion after high turnover of local election officials and workers in key states.
Threats and scrutiny often linked to false claims of voter fraud have contributed to a surge of local election officials leaving their posts in recent years. The exodus could mean understaffed and inexperienced teams are left to grapple with continued conspiracies and misinformation surrounding the election process in 2024, with some running a high-stakes presidential election for the first time.
Richard Hasen, an election law expert and a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles School of Law, said he’s “quite worried” about the attrition of election officials and workers nationwide but argued it’s “not surprising” given the threats and harassment lobbed at many in the jobs.
Republicans will never stop trying to steal elections.
Fascists gonna fascism
The coup marches on.
This. Where are people assigned to protect election workers? I do think there is some agencies that can direct their efforts in protecting election workers. Democracy is not negotiable.
They're part of the coup.
If you care about this issue, you can go and be a part of the solution. Go to your state's Secretary of State website and sign up to help.
I did it and it was super easy and a little boring.
This whole thing depends on normal ass people like you doing it. Give it a shot.
Hell no. My big fat mouth will end up saying something to the first MAGAt that brings up voter fraud, and I'll* wind up either dead or in jail. Hard pass.
Edit: Added a missing word, which explains the downvotes.
Yeah it’s something I’d absolutely do in theory. In reality I’m a trans woman in a red state and that would have just enough possibility to go astoundingly poorly for me
I mean obviously if you can't interact with some... fuck I don't know how to say it nicely... some fuckhead ignorant asshole who's there to fuck with people because they're the lowest common denominator shithead..
then don't do it.
I only had two real issues when I worked it in Texas in 2019 and 2020. The Republicans opened late for a primary and their voters were standing there waiting before work while they were fucking around. I called the SecState line and that shit was open like 3 mins later and suddenly those assholes had a purpose.
The other was an electioneering issue. A dude with signs all over his car for a Democrat parked in a school parking lot illegally, right next to the entrance. I called that one in and he realized I was doing it and actually got in my face and tried the whole intimidation thing. I'm a pretty big guy so I stood there and tried not to escalate by laughing at him, but he was by far the worst interaction I had and that was a Democrat.
Having said that, those kinds of issues were exceedingly rare.
Full disclosure, my wife is an elected Precinct Committee Person or PCP.
She has a couple of jobs, #1 being as we're a 100% vote by mail state, she calls people who haven't submitted a ballot yet to remind them of deadlines for mailing.
The other thing she does, which I won't let her do alone, is monitoring ballot drop off locations to make sure nobody is engaging in intimidation or vandalism.
But there aren't anywhere near enough people like her.
Thanks to your wife for doing a mostly thankless job.
I've worked as a poll worker since 2019. It's actually a great thing to do. 99% of the people are wonderful. Voters are rarely the issue. However, Poll watchers have been getting worst and more confrontational. I dread 2024.
The worst thing about poll watchers is that they don't have the first idea of what they're watching for. They get upset because they can't identify normal election procedure. We saw this with the 2000 mules video.
ZOMG! PEOPLE DROPPING OFF MULTIPLE BALLOTS!
Yeah, that's allowed. One person dropping off multiple ballots is NOT a marker of fraud. That is NOT what determines if a ballot is valid or not.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Threats and scrutiny often linked to false claims of voter fraud have contributed to a surge of local election officials leaving their posts in recent years.
People leaving these posts can be a double blow — their exit leads to a loss of experience and knowledge of the complicated work, and they’re replaced with newer, inexperienced workers who are possibly more prone to mistakes or slowdowns.
“That seems like a really small, sort of nominal thing, except if voters are driving around looking for a place to vote, and they can’t find it, sometimes it doesn’t take that much to deter somebody from showing up out of frustration,” she said.
A downed website, a misposted spreadsheet or another small-scale technical error in any of the thousands of local election jurisdictions in 2024 could be an issue some seize on and circulate.
Some pointed especially to rapidly developing artificial intelligence tech, deep-fake videos and computer-generated images that could aid the quick spread of false information about the 2024 process.
A new report from Voting Rights Lab found that “election-related conspiracy theories, death threats, and intimidation tactics” have led to “an exodus of experienced election officials” in Arizona.
The original article contains 1,262 words, the summary contains 195 words. Saved 85%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
Or prone to trying to put their thumb on the scale. A lot of MAGA zealots think that the Democrats cheat and therefor have no compunction about cheating themselves. Those people would be more than willing to take such positions in order to influence the election outcome.
I've worked in elections and it's not an easy process. Most people just can't pick it up and run with it.
Deadlines, ballot printing issues, machine issues, training staff, weather, website issues, uocava, ada compatible machines, precincts, accurate address files, ballot shortages etc etc.
Shit is tough. My heart goes out to all the people who are doing this now under the unfounded scrutiny that this stupid old ball sack put on people. All of a sudden people with no knowledge about elections are "experts" and some are now running the show.
Hopefully liberal groups who are buying the voter files are watching for fucked deadlines to sue the piss out of these morons