Ah, those Republican poll watchers: here’s one phoning in his report on the election.
People were orderly and polite, they were helpful to one another but not to the point of electioneering, but uh-oh, there sure were a lot of non-white people exercising their rights. Just the existence of brown people voting was grounds for suspicion.
It never seems to have crossed his mind that maybe at an open civic function in which all people have an interest, he might see a different group of people than he’d find on the golf course at his country club.
I don’t know how it works in Arapahoe county, CO but in my county in SC we have specific locations we vote at because of our home address.
We don’t get to pick and choose which location we vote.
And yes there is some measure of snarling sarcasm in that comment.
This video turns my stomach. I guess Browns/Blacks coming out
to vote in record numbers is something to report to your higher ups, if you’re a Republican.
But Republicans are NOT racist, don’t you know?
Self-awareness fail.
This clueless idiot himself was “directed to come here” to this particular polling place BECAUSE the local population had a high concentration of “people of color” (and didn’t he REALLY want to say “nigras.”) The wrong color of people were expected to vote here.
How many “watchers” did the GOP send to the country-club precincts?
Thank goodness he was aided in his efforts by a Microsoft beta app.
Same is true here in Chiwaukee for election day voting. But for early voting, anybody in the county can use the county courthouse, and there is often a secondary voting place for each township.
Racist republicans entrusted with positions of power? I am shocked – SHOCKED – that this might be the case.
If he’s wondering why more white people got shot watching the newest of the batman movies, maybe it’s because Batman isn’t as huge a deal ot PoC? Not that I have a breakdown of DC or Marvel readership, but it seems plausible given how lily-white in general Comics are.
I guess not everyone hangs out at the same mall he does.
That’s how things are done in the UK as well.
Dutifully awaiting someone barging in here to explain how this isn’t racist and how we should all be ashamed of ourselves for assuming otherwise.
It’s a logical concern. If minorities aren’t rich enough to shop at the same mall as he does, how do they afford the voting fee?
What do you mean, there is no voting fee? Well no wonder all the poor people are voting. The GOP needs to fix this, stat, if they want any chance in future elections.
Watching a movie in a theatre and spending time in a mall both require money. The more money the longer you stay at the mall. Sounds like a filtering effect to me.
According to sociologist, we all live in subcultures in which we have selected in various ways the few people of the whole culture in which we live. It is very easy to think this sample is fair, but it really is not. Of course, the challenge is knowing that.
And yet having watched the video, any black people at all may have been too many for this guy.
Stay classy, Republicans!
My only question about that comment is whether this was early voting. His comment otherwise doesn’t make any sense. There are people who are that stupid out there, but not as many as most people tend to find among their enemies, by taking things out of context.
I suppose everyone has seen by now that Florida finally finished counting the votes in that state.
Tampa Bay Times link.
So, after trying to suppress the vote of likely Democratic Party voters by shortening the early voting days, restricting voter registration efforts, purging names off the voting rolls, etc. Republicans failed. They failed, in part, because voters stood in line for as long as 8 or 9 hours in order to cast their votes.
Florida Governor Rick Scott, who earlier claimed that voting in Florida went swimmingly, has finally admitted that maybe some improvement is needed.
No you’re not, you lying bastard. You did your utmost to reduce the number.
I worked on the 2000 census and it’s incredible to me how many people do not know who lives in their own neighborhood. If they would look around, they would see them but there is this peculiar blindness going on, it seems. Over and over I was told there were no Spanish speaking people in the area. Luckily for me I speak a little Spanish and got to meet a lot more of my neighbors than anyone.
When we moved to NM, someone working on the census actually “warned” me that I was moving to an area where white people were in the minority – about 10% of the population here are white. And… so? Why would anyone care? We are all Americans. But I guess some people DO care, still. Many of these people told me they would never move here due to the population. Sigh. On the other hand, good. Stay away, it’s very scary here.
I’m confused about the first part of the video, where he reports on the volunteers and says: “They weren’t saying anything, they weren’t electioneering, they weren’t being intimidating. They were just handing out food and drink …you know, all the glad hand stuff, all the sweet-lovey things they say …”
Ok. Why was this part included? It sounds like he had been watching to make sure that the volunteers weren’t trying to steer the voters in any direction and he didn’t see that and so that was fine. And so it is.
Was this part just meant to be a lead in to his complaint that too many people were black and now he thought that that WAS suspicious? Or are we supposed to see something nefarious in the first part, as if he was disappointed for some reason? Was there something wrong there? By including it, the people who made the video seem to imply it. I don’t understand.
Yeah, same in this precinct in Colorado. Funny, this “poll watcher” didn’t know most of his neighbors, didn’t know how many of them are, you know, more varied in skin color than he expected. As Arlo Guthrie once asked of Richard Nixon, “What else don’t you know.”
This is election day, November 6, according to the video — not advance voting.
In Houston, NAACP distributed drinking water to people who had been standing in line for four hours, in the heat. True the Vote complained of “irregularities,” and conservative blogs lit up with claims of vote tampering.
It’s almost too bad these “skeptics” aren’t familiar with the story of a martyred savior who got drinking water from a good citizen during his physical trial. It might change their odd, misanthropic views of the hurdles Americans should have to face to participate in democracy.
A further thought: Mark Twain, in a joke on Americans touring Europe, complained that in their time in France no one in his group “succeeded in making one Frenchman understand one word of their own goddam language.”
One strains for a hint that one of these so-called Christians understands one jot or tittle of their own godblessed or goddam religion (your choice).
Rev and Nerd
In Arapahoe County Colorado any registered voter can use any polling place. There turned out to be some that were much more popular than others, so poll watchers from both parties tried, with only limited success, to direct people to other sites where there were no lines. From what I have read in the local press, there was no malicious intent on either side.
Funny, this “poll watcher” didn’t know most of his neighbors,
They weren’t his neighbors. Therefore, under Christ’s instruction there was no necessity to love them.
Aurora, like many large and diverse cities, has racial “pockets”. It isn’t like a line on the map, but you can go to one mall and see hardly any minority races and go to another and see less than 1 in 4 white people. The town center area (Aurora Mall) is pretty diverse, which for many racist white people means “scary”. I can’t tell where this polling place is exactly, not that it really matters.
What would even be the point in a nefarious scheme to send minorities to one polling place? Except making that polling place have annoyingly long lines? I don’t get it, but I’m not a paranoid racist /shrug.
Why is this done differently in Arapahoe county? Or is that all of CO?
Sastra #17;
I’m not sure why it was included, but I’m glad it was. It illustrated (to me anyway) a very common attitude among the foxsphere that perfectly normal social behavior is somehow sinister when “Them” are doing it.
If you translate this from Tea Party to English it means they need to try harder to suppress the wrong voters.
I hope they aren’t out shopping for land mines or something.
myeck waters #24 wrote:
Yes, but what “Them” are we talking about? I don’t see the problem with a Republican poll watcher reporting in that the volunteers didn’t do any electioneering because you’re supposed to be wary of that. As I understand it, that’s why there are watchers. By putting it in the video, though, it looks like we’re supposed to see this as sinister. I don’t get it. The second part is where the problem comes in, isn’t it?
Thanks, machintelligence.
I assume it seemed to him that the brown people were being told to avoid some heavy-duty “voting challengers” that the Republicans had set up a the “right precincts” for brown people. Pennsylvania and Florida and Wisconsin ALL failed to suppress enough votes to deliver those states to Romney. I bet they’ll try harder in 2016, unless the GOP suddenly turns sane and tries to actually convince voters to vote for them.
The part atthe beginning sounds like he’s reporting on the folks supporting those waiting in line. To me it translates as “They aren’t electioneering, so I have no excuse to challenge their presence and make this process more uncomfortable for the people waiting to vote.”
As for saying it looks as if “everyone” [read: brown people] was told to come to this location, I have two interpretations. Either he simply can’t conceive of there being this many brown people in the local area, or “told to come here” is code for “were strongly encouraged to vote.” Or maybe he thinks they were told to come to this specific site b/c there would be support, both in the form of food and water, and in numbers.
On the whole it sounds as if he’s trying to explain to his higher-ups why he wasn’t able to stop brown people from voting. There are moments when his voice sounds to me as if he’s thinking, “I’m trying, but I’m not gonna do anything outright ILLEGAL, dammit.”
Isn’t the Watcher’s necktie in violation of something in this?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Flag_Code
They were nice to voters, but they weren’t electioneering. What the hell was going on? Why would anyone do that!?
… no wonder the guy was shocked
/sarcasm
I believe it was an experiment to eliminate neighborhood polling places and I didn’t hear of any other county trying it. Here is the information on the Arapahoe County website:
Since it had problems they may be reluctant to try it again. As they note, a lot of folks from Colorado use mail-in ballots.
@machintelligence: But could the nefarious intent even be? If all the people who came to vote were eligible to vote, what shenannigans does this poll-watcher think he’s witnessing? If people are voting where one wouldn’t expect them to, but they’re casting their ballots legally, who cares?
I bet there were uppity wimmins in line to vote too. Which, of course, means that there were mens somewhere, without sammiches.
Oh, the humanity!!
Why not just open the polling stations early, and close them late ? In the UK, for a general election, they open at 7am and close at 10pm.
It may be that the minority voters in Arapahoe County were less likely to use the mail-in option. They may also have been suspicious of someone directing them to a different vote center, or had no means of getting to one. I foresee more vote centers in the future if they continue to use this plan.
The poll watcher seems to have been surprised by the number of minority voters. Perhaps the person he called set him straight. Everyone in line when the polls closed got to vote (they handed out tickets) since they stayed open until everyone had a chance.
I like the idea but the logistics must have been a pain in the ass for local elections that are dependent on your school district etc..
I am not from around here so I may be missing something, but what in the name of the Blessed Virgin’s holy affair is a “poll-watcher”? Are the GOP taking lessons in electoral propriety from Zanu PF now?
Is this legal? Having people stand about watching the polls? What the fucking shit?
I like it too, and with computerized voting machines it should work pretty well, as long as the computers don’t crash and you trust the output.
I think the money saving aspect was a big factor.
It is standard practice to allow observers into polling stations in almost every democratic country in the world. Some will be representatives of candidates, and others will be third-party observers.
Sastra
After watching it, I don’t think there is the implication of anything sinister or otherwise an attempt to manipulate the viewer.
Of course, I cannot possibly know the actual motivations of the editors, but one reason could be fairness: We find the second call a bit off, but here is the same man sounding reasonable and factual beforehand. Another reason is to show that there were, in fact, no irregularities, even as reported by someone assumed to be biased. Another is to simply give the relevant content from any call he was making. (Again, I can’t know that this is all the relevant content, but it could be, and the only other recourse is to always give all the raw data, which is mostly impossible.)
Whatever, I didn’t have an intuitive reaction that suggested that there was something incongruous with the inclusion of the first call either. My possible reasons were sorted out before watching, and I didn’t find a reason to modify them after watching. YMMV, and as it does, I wouldn’t mind hearing further reasons or perceptions that might change my mind.
So it’s fine to have some bloke who is a member of one of the parties in a two party system, or is at the very least employed by and reporting to one of the parties, standing about reporting to the interested party that there sure seem to be a heckuvvalotta “people of colour” voting today, boy howdy?
This isn’t frowned upon? Isn’t stopped?
Invigilators and overseers are one thing. This is something else entirely.
“When I go the mall, I see, you know, this amount…”
No, I don’t know. What amount? I’m so confused. If only we had a standard unit of measurement for coloreds. It would make my barely disguised racism so much easier.
machineintelligence
Nothing currently in use in the US, AFAIK, is remotely trustworthy. The simple fact that these stupid corporations can’t even get the code right for a vote-counting device after – what, 20 years or so? -is reason not to trust them right there. Electronic voting could easily be reliable and secure, but it isn’t.
Fred Salvador #41,
It will make him an asshole, but it’s not illegal as long as he isn’t trying to influence the voters.
Sastra @17
The guy’s tone, and the “sweet-lovey” compound adjective tells you that he is alerting his right-wing friends to the “people who want free stuff are Obama voters” story happening in front of his eyes. He does not approve of any free stuff, especially for people of color.
@ footface (#32):
Republican poll watchers are trained to see vote fraud every time a Democrat tries to vote, and to do everything they can to stop Democrats from voting. And the idea that the Democratic Party commits widespread, organized vote fraud is an article of faith in the wingnut bubble.
From this guy’s final comments, it’s obvious that he thinks there are very few “people of color” in Aurora. He saw far more minority voters at the polling place than he expected, therefore, they must be ineligible to vote – maybe they’re undocumented immigrants, maybe they’re bused in from out of town, etc. And it’s a Republican poll watcher’s job to do something about that, so he called it in to HQ so they could decide whether to challenge the returns from that polling place.
F
The machines in Arapahoe County aren’t bad. They produce a final tally printout (twice) and both copies are signed by the election judges.One is mailed while one is hand delivered to the county office. The results are also posted at the polling place. I believe there was one machine that did not log the votes correctly, but it was caught during early voting. (It favored Obama.)
I ran a bake sale during the election at a poll with a heavy student population. Just before the polls opened, two older men in suits showed up. They already had belligerent expressions on their faces. I don’t know why they came to this area. We can barely get students to vote at all much less do so fraudulently. They made 3 or 4 phone calls total and the person managing election made 1-2 calls. I don’t know what they thought they were accomplishing. I doubt any of the voters even noticed them. The poll-workers griped more about each other than the poll watchers. At the same time, both men gave generously to our bake sale. I don’t understand that kind of personal generosity and simultaneous political antagonism.
Voting while employed by a god-fearing Republican … and then being sacked:
Link.
More here: http://www.sltrib.com/sltrib/news/55244189-78/coal-murray-font-mine.html.csp
If only we had a standard unit of measurement for coloreds.
Three-fifths is the absolute Constitutional limit originally prescribed. That would seem way too high for this fellow, of course.
@49
I thought that name was familar.
Murray owned that coal mine in Utah that collapsed and killed 6 people. Those trapped miners are still there and of course, dead. Also 3 rescue workers died in a second collapse.
IIRC, they were doing a risky maneuvar when it collapsed.
Murray sounds like a rather malevolent person.
I worked as an election judge in Boulder County, CO this election and many previous ones. Each county can have slightly different ways of implementing the state voting requirements.
In our county, you were expected to vote in your own precinct. That was because each precinct may have slightly different juridictions. The county has different lines for US congressional districts, state districts, education districts, and ballot measures. We only get the pre-printed ballots for the ones in our precincts. My voting location had two precincts and 3 ballot styles.
Anyone who arrives at the precinct to vote and is in the wrong precinct can choose to vote provisionally. That is to ensure they don’t vote in their home precinct and then come to ours. The provisional ballots will count if they are a valid elector and only cast one ballot. But it will count for EVERY vote that their home precinct and our ballot style match. So, your vote for president will count, your vote for US House probably will count (unless you cast a vote for US CD 4 from Boulder city rather than Longmont). Your vote for 3A will only count if you really were part of St Vrain Valley School District.
Boulder County also provides 7 voting centers. Anyone who goes to those, on election day, can have their home precinct ballot printed and cast that ballot. So we were encouraged to direct people at the wrong precinct to the voting centers instead of sending them to their home precinct.
Colorado also has mail-in voting and you can bring your mail-in ballot to any precinct up to 7pm of election day, in case you forgot to mail it on time. We also have 2 weeks of early voting including one Saturday that ended the Friday before election day.
Colorado does require voter id. There are a semi-lengthy list of ids that are accepted.
The precinct I worked at had a somewhat diverse electorate. Less than many, but more diverse than some. When I did early voting on Oct 22, the first day allowed, the voting center was more diverse.
There were no challenges at my polling location. We did have both a Republican and Democratic Poll Watcher for the day. Both were cordial to all voters.
I keep hearing about people having to queue for hours to vote. Why? In the UK it takes maybe ten minutes maximum. Maybe invest in a few more booths and staff? Considering the cost of an election that would be chump-change. It’s almost as though in some places voting is being deliberately made difficult, but that’s a ridiculous idea.
The polling location I worked had some small lines at times. It was pretty steady and usually had no lines. During the morning rush and between 4:30 and 5:00 we had lines of 4-10 people who waited probably 10 minutes or less. Quite reasonable in my humble opinion.
Note: the polling location I worked was one of the historically extremely active precincts for Boulder County.
That was with two full sides of options on paper about twice the size of A4 paper.
Back a few elections when we had 6 pages of that size, we had nasty lines. But those ballots took half an hour to fill out for many people. Therefore our lines were up to 2 hours.
Colorado made a lot of updates to mail-in and early voting. And we have less ballot initiatives to read through.
This is totally anecdotal but I live in Aurora and am registered to vote in Arapahoe County.
And I’m white. And I don’t go to malls. And FFS not to golf courses. And I didn’t show up at any of the polling places because I enjoy the privilege of mailing in my ballot. I enjoy the financial and housing stability that means I still live at the same address I gave eighteen months ago when I moved to Colorado and registered to vote here. I registered to vote long enough ago that I had time to request a mail-in ballot. The mail-in ballot arrived in plenty of time for me to research the people and issues I wasn’t already familiar with. I have a computer and internet connection in my home to do this easily. I can afford the postage to mail it in.
And even if I had schlepped myself and my Nordic-looking children to a polling place, if there was a long wait I enjoy the privilege of owning a car and could have easily driven to a less-crowded polling place, where nearly everyone would have looked like me.
I voted for Obama. As did my Trophy husband with the Nordic-sounding name who also mailed in his ballot. We are the voters this poll-watcher should be concerned about.
Aside from running unsafe mines all over hell and back and going after old-growth forests in Southern Ohio, Murray is well known in the Ohio/WVA mining communities as loopy as a shit-house rat. Hearstian-level paranoia and egomania. Laying off workers because Obama made him do it by winning is just the latest of his antics.
I love mail-in voting. In California, if you miss the mail-in date, I believe you can submit your mail-in ballot at any polling location in the state.
don1
Long lines were only a problem in some areas and there were probably different reasons. For example, some South Florida counties had particularly long lines (8 or 9 hours). I heard a couple of people talking about that situation on NPR and they cited several reasons. First, the early voting period had been significantly reduced from previous elections and Gov. Rick Scott refused to extend it. This resulted in more people trying to vote on election day. In addition, Florida had a huge ballot…10 pages!…which took quite a while to complete. Finally, they were using a new (to them) voting system that requires marking paper ballots and then having them scanned by an election worker, a slow process. California has used that system for several years, and it is time consuming to fill out the form and then you have a second line to get it scanned…thank goodness for mail-in voting.
anthropologistunderground — Surprising you had to put postage on your mail-in ballot. I don’t think California mail-in ballots require any postage.
The state pays for it then, because the Post Office won’t deliver it otherwise. Our government agencies are kind of frugal here in Colorado. Besides 65 cents is a bargain compared to standing in line.
I’m fairly certain there’s only one mall in my entire county, and while we have eight movie theaters (more than average, I think), most of them are in the city center. But we happen to have dozens of polling places per movie theater.
So maybe, just maybe, more people of color live in that neighborhood?
I can’t speak for all of California, but I’ve been voting by mail for 6-8 years in San Mateo County and my ballots absolutely do require postage. Except the couple of times I didn’t mail it on time and dropped it off at the polling station.
Just curious, but how do they cross check to make sure you don’t mail a ballot, then also go to a polling place on election day to vote?
It could take several days for a mailed ballot to arrive then be processed then be run against the voter registration list. Shouldn’t that mean they cannot have an accurate final count until 3 or more days after the election?
I don’t know how they check that I don’t also vote in person. I’m registered as a permanent vote-by-mail voter, so they might give me a provisional ballot or make some note if I try to vote in person. I really don’t know. However, late ballots aren’t a problem here in CA because they have to receive the ballot by election day. If I don’t have it in the mail by Monday the week before the election (8 days), I drop it off at the polling place in person. It still saves me from having to wait in line.
In Colorado it is the same rule. Mail-in ballots must be received by the County Clerk or dropped off at a polling place by the time the polls close. If your name is on the list as having requested a mail-in ballot, you can vote a provisional ballot at a polling place (if your ballot was lost or ruined). If they find you have voted twice you are in a heap of trouble. Provisional ballots are always counted, but not necessarily on election day.
I kept saying, “And…? AND…?” What is significant about there being a lot of brown people there!? How is this notable!? WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT YOU WHITE-ASS CONSERVATIVE CUNTFACE
crocswsocks, please don’t use sexist slurs here.
When I vote…
When I vote I have gotten my voting card in the mail some time before (beacuse BIG BROTHER KNOWS WHERE I LIVE) and I go to my designated voting place (the one closest to me because BIG BRO– etc.), where my name is on a list. I show my ID and my voting card and leave my ballots in a secured box. Three boxes, actually, but whatevs. My name is crossed off of the lists, and that is it. Had I mailed in my vote I would have given them my voting card then. But I suppose voting is easier in a nanny-state.
In Colorado, our mail-in ballots are counted before the provisionals. So first, they check the signature and name on the security sleeve of the mail-in ballot and mark you as having voted. Then they remove the ballot from the sleeve so as to not see any votes and place it in the scanner.
Then they review the provisionals and if you voted one of those, and you had a turned-in mail-in ballot, your provisional will be thrown away and you will be in trouble. I am not aware of that happening ever.
We do get a lot of people who received their mail-in ballots and didn’t vote it until election day or they simply lost it.
We also got about 15 people who claimed they never got a mail-in ballot, and about 10 of them did not know they were signed up for mail-in.
Since this is the first election where Boulder County tried hard to get as many people to permanent mail-in ballots, I was not surprised. I suspect they did not realize some voter registration forms have mail-in as default (not opt in).
Our local paper has a bunch of people complaining that Colorado has gone too lefty. We banned fracking, legalized pot, voted for Obama. Cory Gardner’s gerrymandered ultra-safe district almost voted in Brandon Shaffer. But that could be Cory is a Tea Party hack while Mr. Shaffer is a respected state senator with great ideas and former state senate majority leader – who unfortunately was term limited.
@ don1 (#53):
Unfortunately, the ridiculous idea is the reality.
In the U.S., in most areas, high turnout tends to favors the Democratic Party. There are more Democrats, and it’s argued that Republicans are more motivated to vote. So it’s in the interests of the GOP to keep turnout low, by any means – legal, illegal, or just plain shady – necessary.
Also in most areas, the officials running the elections are partisan positions. In some cases, they’re even elective. As a result, GOP officials make it more difficult to register, cut back on early voting hours, reduce the number of voting machines in Democratic areas, push for voter-ID and other laws to make it tougher to vote, etc.
machintelligence
I don’t mean to say that e-voting machines necessarily produce bad results. I’m saying that, as they currently are, they are inherently completely untrustworthy. The companies that make them have repeatedly demonstrated untrustworthy behavior. Diebold went so far as to change its name, at least for the division that makes e-voting machines, because their reputation was so bad.
How bad the machines can be is not always demonstrated, but the design flaws are still there. And really, nothing about electronic voting should be proprietary and closed-source hardware or software.
That really is amazing.
Blacks are usually concentrated in areas because either they were historically segregated there, or because of white flight when blacks enter an area.
I’ll take a wild stab and say this guy is the guy who would flee an area when blacks move next door.
But now, he’s the guy who finds it “suspicious” when there are so many blacks in a polling station due to that same concentration.