( Log Out /  With just days left before the 2016 election, polling place resources — such as poll workers, machines, and poll books — have likely already been allocated. The state is expected to be one of the key swing votes in the upcoming election. During the 2004 election, the focus was on Ohio, and there was a news item that showed up at some point, very briefly, that stuck with me ever since. Trickle down is a myth. Researchers who used 2019 mobile phone data to track disparities in wait times found that majority-black neighbourhoods waited 29 per cent longer to vote. In … Follow our live blog for the latest news on the coronavirus pandemic. There were several reports of technical glitches, but state officials said the hours-long waits primarily were the result of "record turnout." Amy Coney Barrett is open to it.”; SCOTUS…. More than 600,000 voters have already cast their ballots in Georgia, including about 470,000 who have voted by mail. In … Sorry, but that’s just not acceptable – please fix this problem immediately; our democracy is at stake, so throw whatever resources at this as needed, no excuses accepted. When a person who has requested an absentee ballot shows up at the polls it takes longer to process them because the absentee ballot must be cancelled, contributing to longer lines, Barron said. Independent journalism is increasingly imperiled; ads alone can’t pay our bills. © 2020 www.caller.com. Heavy online traffic temporarily crashed the portion of the Texas Secretary of State’s Office website that allows Texans to check on their voter registration status, said spokesman Stephen Chang. That’s not cool at all. Will Barack Obama Strike the Last Nail in the Coffin of the American Labor Union? "All I can really tell people is get out there. This is an extremely important issue which is getting absolutely no mainstream media coverage, and I imagine the handful of people around the nation who are really taking this issue seriously and working toward a solution must feel like they’re just banging their heads against a wall. Setting aside the valid accountability, partisanship, and transparency concerns, these machines are incredibly expensive. Waiting in line for an election shouldn’t be that much of a problem, but despite legislation allowing employees to vote without consequence if they are late for work, in practice, these laws are not taken seriously. Let's give it a few days.". The radio station, Houston Public Media, reported that five of the Texas Southern's voting machines were offline for at least part of Election Day. So that’s the *good* news. Some voters braved lines for up to 11 hours on Monday. All rights reserved. While the first day drew high turnout, the Atlanta Journal Constitution noted that 253,000 voted early in a single day on the Friday before Election Day four years ago. If I've got to wait six or seven hours, that's my duty to do that," he told the Associated Press. " "The line at TSU, Houston, for the Texas Democratic primary, 30 min after the polls closed," Spieler said in a tweeted photo that was retweeted about 2,700 times. Some Georgia voters were forced to wait more than 10 hours to cast their ballots on the first day of early voting in the state. Lines snaking through parking lots in Texas. "We had 25 percent turnout in the primary," he said. Thank you. "Long lines are to be expected — voters need to be aware of all of their options, including three weeks of early voting, no-excuse absentee and in-person voting day of the election." With the future of our country and our democracy at stake, Fairfax needs to fix this problem, ASAP. "The line continues inside the building. Demand honest news. Change ), You are commenting using your Google account. I’m sure most of us, apart from hoping our candidates win, are hoping this doesn’t get drawn out in the courts for the next few months. A big part of it is concern and confusion over mail-in ballots. The result: lines to vote early/in-person in Fairfax County have averaged between one and two hours since last Friday, with the wait to vote at times reaching four hours or even more! “The media is hyping this corona thing.”. I'll do it happily. The prohibitive cost of voting machines. "Great enthusiasm on the first day of voting leading to long lines does not necessarily mean there's a systemic problem. A simple voting booth is much cheaper than the voting machine, and with a limit to how much can be spent in each precinct, fewer people can vote at the same time with a voting machine setup than with paper ballots. And we’re proud to say that we’ve been bringing you the real, unfiltered news for 20 years—longer than any other progressive news site on the Internet. patrick, I agree, but the thing is that they knew in advance that they had record amounts of registered voters, and they didn’t make accommodations for record numbers of voters. Mark Strassmann … And in densely populated, low-income, urban areas, the amount of money available per capita to pay for the election system is lower than in other areas. Nos partenaires et nous-mêmes stockerons et/ou utiliserons des informations concernant votre appareil, par l’intermédiaire de cookies et de technologies similaires, afin d’afficher des annonces et des contenus personnalisés, de mesurer les audiences et les contenus, d’obtenir des informations sur les audiences et à des fins de développement de produit. Now, again, Arlington County is very compact, but still, it shouldn’t be *that* easy to vote in Arlington and *that* hard to vote in neighboring Fairfax County. But this election is too important to not vote. We’re here seven days a week, 365 days a year. There are people working toward organizing elections with a high turnout and the imperative to keep wait times low in mind, including backup paper ballots during peak hours, but their efforts are largely ignored. Nearly 128,000 Georgians voted on Monday, up from 91,000 in 2016, according to the secretary of state's office. I have proof of that . The result of making it so difficult for people to vote early/in-person in Fairfax County means, not surprisingly, that despite Fairfax County being much larger than neighboring jurisdictions (PW County is about 470k; Arlington County about 240k), through Wednesday nearly twice as many people had voted in PW County than in Fairfax. ", "We're seeing extreme and tremendous turnout on the ground and around the state," Deputy Secretary of State Jordan Fuchs told AJC. It looks great to see so many people lined up to participate, but it really would be better if that many people could vote faster, because people do give up in long lines eventually, sometimes they don’t have a choice. From the front doors to the voting booth took me over 2 hours in line — and nobody in this picture has made it that far yet.". As videos of the 11-hour waits went viral on social media, experts who've watched this play out before urged caution. Here’s the basic idea: Voting machines are extremely expensive. Websites set up to track wait times at polling places (yes, they exist) beaming delays of five, six, seven, eight hours. Those must have been yesterday’s Spread the Word talking points on JohnMcCain.com because all the comments say the same thing. State Rep. Rafael Anchia, a Dallas Democrat who heads the Mexican American Legislative Caucus, said unless improvements to the voting process are made soon, the November general election could be a muddled mess. Making people vote to screw themselves over is their job, and like many Americans, they put all they have into it. Texas and Georgia shattered records earlier this week on their first days of early voting. Four long years ago, before I moved to a different country, learned another language, got married, and started working translating in the language I learned here, I was working at a small news production company, where my job was to process news being presented by the major networks, serious news, entertainment news, and news of the weird included, for a report compiled for major news outlets to have a written record of what’s out there, every day. With all the voter intimidation tactics happening right now, along with the clear lack of any effort on the national level to deal with the problem of voting wait times and voting machine availability or any intention on the part of the national media to report on this problem, voting is an act of patient defiance. They were talking about the correlation between voting machine costs, poorer, urban, densely-populated areas, and long lines at the voting booth. I’d rather vote for Nader, if I lived in a real democracy. Studies show their mail-in ballots are more likely to be rejected. Early voting is always a popular method for US citizens, whose election day always falls on a Tuesday and is never a public holiday. Lines will shorten after the initial rush.". … then let us make a small request. “I wasn’t going to let anything stop me, so I waited it out," he told a crew from Houston TV station ABC 13. Unfortunately, there are still a lot of unresolved issues with our voting systems, and the most media time has been given to a few ACORN workers who didn’t want to do their jobs and turned in false voter registration documents, which ACORN looked through and marked for further review by the state (for free, Joe Taxpayer), and turned in as required by law. Indecent Proposal: A $1 Salary and some Good Old-Fashioned Union Busting, Joe the Embodiment of the Reverse Engineered Conservative Logic Structure. PA needs to remember what happened when the steel plant shut down. If it wasnt for company’s like Phoenix Glass that part of PA would have gone out . Center”; “Open Franconia & North Govt. Previous poll closures disproportionately impacted communities of color, though it is unclear whether the same trend continued on Monday. We don’t need the visual aid of watching them line up to vote… Estela Cisneros, 33, from Houston, said COVID-19 concerns during the election are serious, especially for black and minority communities hit hardest by the pandemic. The Washington Post's Amy Gardner explains what’s behind the long lines. In many precincts, and in some entire states, electronic voting machines, built by Republican campaign financer Diebold, now their division, Premier Election Solutions, became mandatory. ( Log Out /  Every reader contribution, whatever the amount, makes a tremendous difference. Vote centers with longer wait times tended to have fewer resources, such as poll workers and electronic poll books, per voter. Of those, nearly 474,000 have been returned and accepted, which is more or less consistent with the national trend. Really, in these areas, voting machines are not a justified expense. Really, the difference between the two candidates, on any issue, is just a couple of percentage points. And the President hasn't stopped sending tweets about it. ", "I think the positive thing is that there's a lot of people out there waiting to vote," Fulton County elections director Rick Barron told Georgia Public Broadcast. In concerns over minority turnout in particular, the public’s focus has fallen … In more densely populated areas, however, there is also a higher per capita cost. Two states, Texas and Georgia, began a period known as "early voting" this week. Ugh. This is a problem which may have more of an effect on urban areas as well, and which certainly has more of an effect on working poor and working-class voters, rather than professional voters or business owners. It’s through the generosity of our supporters that we’re able to share with you all the underreported news you need to know. Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in: You are commenting using your WordPress.com account.

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