In My First Year Of Voting, I Was Appointed To Be A Supervising Judge At A Precinct In The Town Where I Lived
by a friend who was a Republican, he had this suspicion that a lot of people who didn't live in the precinct were voting there - and thus there was a possibility of them voting twice...
So the plan was to have his brothers alternate as Republican pollwatchers, and when one of these voters came up to vote, there’d have been a postcard sent to their registered address which showed that the person didn’t live there. And that voter would be challenged, and that made sense. Of course, there was another possibility - the voter lived in the precinct, and didn’t update their address, so they were a legit voter. The night before the election, the clerk in charge of the elections had apparently heard of this scheme, and told us, if a voter was challenged, that we had the choice to ask them to sign a statement that they lived in the precinct, giving their address, and to have them swear to the accuracy and truth of their statement under penalty of perjury. And we were also told that when we walked into the polling place, we were no longer Republicans or Democrats, we were sworn to be impartial, fair, and honest - and I took that oath seriously. And I followed it, too. At 19 years of age, this was my first election that I ever voted in, and I took voting and the right to vote seriously.
So at five in the morning, after a good four hours of sleep, I went to the place where the ballots and other election supplies were kept, and picked up enough ballots for the people registered, plus about 100 more just in case. These were paper ballots, by the way, we didn’t use machines back then. And I picked up the other election supplies - the pencils, a sharpener, the tally sheets on which we recorded votes using old-fashioned tally marks, the needle and twine which we sewed the ballots together with, the canvas bag, and the seals for the bag - and other supplies… like coffee. And I got to the polling place at six in the morning, and with the help of the other election judges, set up the polling place. At seven in the morning, we let in our first voters.
Everything went without a hitch for the first four hours, then we had a challenge. The Republican pollwatcher showed the postcard that showed the the voter was not at their registered address, and I showed it to the voter, and they said that they did in fact live in the precinct… So I chose to do the signed and sworn statement procedure, the voter complied, and I let them go ahead and vote. And did this for about fifty more voters - and the Republican pollwatchers were getting pissed off, to the point where one of them got disruptive, and I told him to sit down and shut up, or I’d have him arrested. And I damned well meant it, and he knew it, and he stormed out and called his older brother, who came screaming over to the polling place, and told me in no uncertain terms that he’d check each and every person that I’d allowed to vote using the sworn statement, and if even one of them wasn’t a resident of the precinct, he’d have me up on charges of election fraud - and I knew he could do it if he wanted to. Some people I suppose would back down, but I didn’t, just not the type, I suppose. The rest of the night went fine without disruption. At 7pm, we had a line out the doors and around the block, so I had those people come in the polling place and had the entry doors shut and locked. We got our last voter through at 9:30pm, and then the counting began.
As I wrote before, this election - the 1976 Presidential election - was done in my county on paper ballots. I suspect it was like that through most if not all of Kansas. We counted this way - we had a total of 4 judges besides myself, two Republicans and two Democrats, and we split them up into two teams, one person reading, the other recording the votes with tally marks for each candidate in each race. The rule was that the counts had to agree exactly twice in a row. We ended up counting votes three times - and this was all in the presence of pollwatchers and press and whoever else wanted to sit and quietly watch. We recorded all votes, including write-ins for Mickey Mouse, Adlai Stevenson, Timothy Leary, and other such notables… and we finally got done counting by 12 midnight, then strung up the ballots using the needle and twine, put them in the canvas bag with the tally sheets and unused ballots torn in half and spoiled ballots marked as such, sealed the bag with the metal seals provided and wrote on the bag the contents. And wrote the results on a form provided, signed it, along with the other four judges, put it in an envelope, sealed it, signed the flap in the box provided for my signature. And finally, at 12:30 in the morning, delivered it all, bag and envelope, to the County Courthouse, where the bag was set aside, bound for the attic for storage, and the envelope opened and the totals added to the counts, in my presence. The tabulation there was finished by 1:30am, and the totals for the state, all 104 counties, were known by 2:00am. No machines, just paper and pencils and hand counting and tally marks, totally transparent to all who wanted to watch.
That was 1976. This is now:
”Here’s Walter Kirn, broadcasting from Clark County Friday, on the seeming inability of Americans to count things, even in a state where reaching an accurate count every night is a matter of life or death:
Walter Kirn: This is a town in which umpteen-million quarters are dumped into slot machines every night and counted within hours. This is a town that counts for a living. If you’ve seen Casino, you know how it works. A few of those dollars may go into some people’s pockets, or they used to, at least before MGM…
Matt Taibbi: But if you’re off by a couple bucks, you end up in a hole a couple of miles north of the city, don’t you?
Walter Kirn: Exactly. If they counted money the way they’re counting ballots, those people would be in Lake Mead tied to a cinder block. So it’s increasingly hard for me, as at a certain level I’m just the average person, and the average person should not need to have a Jesuitical, theologically precise insight into all the different types of ballots, and all the ways in which they’re delivered, and all the stages at which they’re tabulated. The outsider, the American citizen, has every right to feel that these processes are simple, objective and rapid, and that they can’t have that confidence in that suggests to me that there is a lot to be a dissident about in this country.
The inability to get buy-in from voters, and especially from the losers of these elections, who must have the confidence that they lost fairly, is a systemic and spiritual failure. It can’t be addressed simply by criminalizing complaints or calling people names. It has to be addressed at the root. And there seems to be little prospect that it will be. So who wins and who loses now has become, to me, a secondary consideration. The real consideration is how do they maintain faith in a system that really would not suffice in a grocery store at the end of the day, when they open the till.”
The answer is simple - neither that system nor its purported results deserves either faith or credibility. It seems to me that any voting by machine should be automatically suspect - and should be prohibited by law - including mail-in ballots and the rest of that nonsense. Paper ballots and full transparency should be the rule - by law - and no votes gathered by any sort of other method should be given the least consideration.
Here’s something for Nelson, below:
Gerrymandering reduces my confidence that we are getting a representative government. And it's transparent. No need to speculate that if might be happening. Any significant fraud shown in the voting? Most of the doubt is promoted.