Tag Archives: voting

“Sorting Error”

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Fifty thousand Franklin County, OH, voters were mailed the wrong ballots last week. It was a scanner sorting error. That’s what the county’s Board of Elections claimed last Friday.

The affected voters in Franklin County received ballots meant for residents elsewhere in the county and so contained incorrect information for local races[.]

That’s an interesting error. The local post office doing final sorting for the local final delivery routes didn’t notice the misaddressed envelopes? The mailman doing the actual final delivery didn’t notice the misaddressed envelopes as he put them in recipients’ mail boxes?

Franklin County has a population of some 1,300,000. Taking a naïve guesstimate of a typical family having two adults and two underage children, that works out to some 650,000 voters. 50,000 of them works out to a bit over 7.5% of the county’s voters getting the wrong ballots.

Stipulate, arguendo, that the scanner errors were entirely innocent, of the sort that fits in the stuff happens category.

That’s still an enormous error, an unacceptably high error, for mail-in ballots. Absentee ballots—generated one by each on an as-requested basis and on proof that the requester is both who he says he is and eligible to vote—do not have this sort of error, and absentee balloting does not have any error of this magnitude.

Innocent or nefarious, mail-in balloting is just too unreliable.

Update: Westmoreland County, Pennsylvania, population 349,000, is a heavily Republican county in the heavily Republican southwestern part of the State. 58,000 mail-in ballots were…misplaced on the way out the door; the intended recipients never got them. That’s roughly a third of the voting population whose ballots were lost.

[T]he Westmoreland County Election Bureau is placing blame on a contractor hired by the county to mail out ballots this election cycle.
“The first batch of processed and approved applications was submitted to the County’s mail house, Mid-West Direct on October 3rd. It has been brought to our attention today that Mid-West did not sent out the ballots on Tuesday as indicated.”

The first batch. The screwup supposedly has been fixed, and new ballots “are in the mail.” “Processed and approved applications?” Whose applications? Absentee ballots don’t get batched up; those ballots get sent to the requestor as each application gets approved. This is the county’s approval for mail-in.

This is yet another demonstration of the unreliability of just willy-nilly mailing out ballots instead of staying with on-demand and -proof absentee ballot voting.

Voting “Anti-fraud Measures”

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New Jersey is experiencing more voting…problems…on the heels of Paterson’s voter fraud that led to indictments of four city councilmen. Now, other voters

have received ballots meant for people who have moved out of the state and for deceased voters

Not to worry, though.

some election officials say they’re confident that anti-fraud measures will take care of it, according to local reports.

On the other hand, worry, though. If these election officials’ “anti-fraud measures” are adequate to the task, why didn’t they catch and prevent these ballots from being mailed to the wrong people? Why didn’t they prevent the graveyard ballots?

The Racism of the Left

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Separate from the segregationist identity politics so loudly practiced by the Left and its Progressive-Democratic Party is this. The Supreme Court has agreed to hear two Arizona voting cases

Arizona Republican Party v Democratic National Committee and Brnovich v Democratic National Committee involving Arizona election laws that ban ballot harvesting and voting in other precincts.

As the Editorial Board puts it [emphasis added],

The Ninth Circuit and some other lower courts have interpreted [the Voting Rights Act] Section 2 broadly to enjoin any law that allegedly has a disparate impact on minorities no matter if the laws have a non-discriminatory intent. The Arizona cases provide the High Court an opportunity to clarify and tighten the standards for Section 2 claims.
Liberals are warning that the Supreme Court in the Arizona cases could “destroy what remains of the Voting Rights Act,” as one headline howled.

And the money quote to end the editorial:

As ever, the left is playing racial politics as the election approaches.

There’s Voter Suppression

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…and there’s voter suppression. A poll taken two days after the first Presidential debate and run by The Wall Street Journal and NBC has Progressive-Democratic Party Presidential candidate Joe Biden opening up a 14-per centage point lead over incumbent President Donald Trump.

However.

Aside from the fact that the poll sampled registered voters, rather than more accurately sampling likely voters, the poll oversampled (Progressive-)Democrat registered voters by eight per centage points (and thereby undersampled Republican registered voters by the same amount), which greatly biased the results.

On the other hand, a Daily Express poll, taken after Trump’s diagnosis with the Wuhan Virus (but which methodology is not described) indicates a different status of the race:

68% said the illness would not affect their vote while 19% said they were “more likely” to support Trump and only 13% “less likely”.

And these poll results:

National Popular Vote

Trump (Republican) = 46%

Biden (Democrat) = 45%

Jorgensen (Libertarian) = 3%

Hawkins (Green) = 1%

Undecided = 5%

And

Battleground States – Popular Vote

Florida, Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin

Trump (Republican) = 47%

Biden (Democrat) = 43%

Jorgensen (Libertarian) = 4%

Hawkins (Green) = 1%

Undecided = 5%

Aside from having Trump in the lead in this poll, the other takeaway suggests that, despite low Libertarian support (in 2016, there was somewhat stronger Green support), a third party candidate could seriously affect the election’s outcome.

Which raises the question: is such evident bias in the WSJ/NBC poll an attempt to discourage Republican and Conservative voters from voting? It’s hard to believe these two news outlets could run such an incompetently done poll. In truth, though, they’re not alone. News outlets typically run such oversampled/undersampled polls.

Which makes the bias widespread, and the suppression, to coin a term, systemic.

Another Activist Judge

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…stacking the vote and demonstrating the need for judges at all levels who will be true to their oaths of office and rule based on what the law says and not on what the judge wants the law to say.

[L]ast week a [Michigan] state judge ordered officials to keep tallying ballots that arrive up to 14 days late, provided they bear a postmark of November 2 or earlier.

Never mind what Michigan State law actually says on the matter. The judge knows better than the people’s representatives, and she considers herself eminently qualified and obligated to stray from her judicial constraints and intrude into a political matter.

This also illustrates the need to get a Justice confirmed for the Supreme Court seat previously held by the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg—so Court ties can be settled by nine Justices, and not by a capricious Chief Justice.