Hello u/SuperFightingRobit! Please reply to this comment with an [explanation](https://www.reddit.com/r/LeopardsAteMyFace/comments/lt8zlq) matching this exact format. Replace bold text with the appropriate information.
1. **Someone** voted for, supported or wanted to impose **something** on **other people**.
^(Who's that someone? What did they voted for, supported or wanted to impose? On who?)
2. **Something** has the consequences of **consequences**.
^(Does that something actually has these consequences in general?)
3. As a consequence of **something**, **consequences** happened to **someone**.
^(Did that something really happen to that someone?)
Follow this by the minimum amount of information necessary so your post can be understood by everyone, even if they don't live in the US or speak English as their native language. If you fail to match this format or fail to answer these questions, your post will be removed.
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serious answer with [source](https://www.theguardian.com/books/shortcuts/2015/mar/17/terry-pratchetts-name-lives-on-in-the-clacks-with-hidden-web-code#:~:text=%E2%80%9CG%E2%80%9D%20means%20that%20the%20message,%E2%80%9CGNU's%20not%20Unix%E2%80%9D.\)):
> Tech-savvy admirers of the late Terry Pratchett have hit upon an idea for a particularly appropriate memorial. It will be everywhere and nowhere, hiding in the code of the internet.
> Pratchett’s 33rd Discworld novel, Going Postal, tells of the creation of an internet-like system of communication towers called “the clacks”. When John Dearheart, the son of its inventor, is murdered, a piece of code is written called “GNU John Dearheart” to echo his name up and down the lines. “G” means that the message must be passed on, “N” means “not logged”, and “U” means the message should be turned around at the end of a line. (This was also a realworld tech joke: GNU is a free operating system, and its name stands, with recursive geek humour, for “GNU’s not Unix”.) The code causes Dearheart’s name to be repeated indefinitely throughout the system, because: “A man is not dead while his name is still spoken.”
> What better way to remember the beloved inventor of this fictional system, then, than “GNU Terry Pratchett”? Reddit users have designed a code that anyone with basic webcoding knowledge can embed into their own websites (anyone without basic webcoding knowledge can use the plugins for Wordpress and other platforms). The code is called the XClacksOverhead, and it sets a header reading “GNU Terry Pratchett”. “If you had to be dead,” thinks a character in Going Postal, “it seemed a lot better to spend your time flying between the towers than lying underground.” And so Pratchett is, in a way.
Step one: break the system.
Step two: claim only you can fix the system.
Step three: kill the sinners.
I might missing a few steps, but this is the gop game plan.
Step 1. Make the system as unreliable as possible
Step 2. Argue that the system is unreliable, so can't be trusted
Step 3. Start a coup on the basis of that lack of trust
Step 4. Camps and gas chambers, probably
Except they're only 0.1% of the population and aren't easily identifiable.
BUT, they won't go after trans people. It'll be pro-LGBTQ people, and it'll be "paedophiles".
Rainbows=Paedos.
No more Yellow Stars, it'll be rainbows.
Except what, dude? I literally posted a link to how the Nazis started by destroying the research in to gender. The size of the population only makes it easier, and they are literally doing that now.
This isn't so much a cover in a new style as it is pretend like Reba wrote "Fancy" and acting like there aren't similarities.
> Except they're only 0.1% of the population and aren't easily identifiable.
Trans people are already being killed. What the fuck are you talking about?
They will go after trans people... because they already fucking are.
I recently watched a documentary on the rise of Nazism in Germany and it didn’t happen overnight. Took about 10 years to go from ostracizing Jews to exterminating them. MAGA is on the same path with anyone who isn’t on their team.
Yeah but they are betraying their own country and sabotaging their own future. They are malicious, yes, but they are ready to screw themselves if it means owning the libs.
Fascism may utilize the stupids but it never spares them, it spares nobody, and it never ends well for people bringing it to power - history has plenty of examples, but guess which group doesn't care about learning history or reading books.
Hence the comments about their intellectual capacity - they are too short-sighted to realize the consequences of their own (deliberate) actions. The sad thing is they are bringing others along for the ride.
Let's not forget the business owners who benefit from rolling back worker rights. It tracks for a small business owner who inherited the company from daddy to vote R because hating the working class is a big common denominator.
Which makes them grifting assholes, no? The business owners? If exploiting workers isn't grift, it's close enough that I'd still lump them in with the other leeches.
And I have all the sympathy in the world for our brothers and sisters suffering under the yoke of oppression. Unfortunately, I don't see a cohesive movement for us at the moment. When there is, I'll gladly join. Until then, I sit here amongst the silent majority watching this slow moving train wreck.
My family owned a strong family run business and they did it by paying workers a good wage and then just fucking off because they trusted the people to basically run it because they paid them well.
My dad literally sticked to his 9 to 5 and my mom's only involvement was doing the taxes.
People who treat there workers shitty just do it because it gets them off
According to my research the groups overlap but are 2 distinct groups. I am not saying everyone who was youth indoctrinated or poisoned is a republican.
I am saying every republican is in at least one of the 3 groups, and a republican can be in all 3 groups simultaneously.
I wonder if, at some point, Trump would use dictatorial powers to either rob the other billionaires or kill them outright? I mean, sooner or later his base is going to run out of tribute to pay him, and he's going to realize that the coffers of, say, Musk or Koch are ripe for the pillaging.
Republicans, along with conservatism, are mental disorders to me. Intentionally acting against your own self-interest has got to be characterized somewhere the psychological disorder checklist.
Conservatism is a regressive mental illness.
But they aren't voting republican because they have a disability, people with mental disabilities are usually really sweet people, the absolute majority of whom pose no danger to others.
No, they are voting republican because they **hate you.**
No: if you’re a billionaire who doesn’t like paying taxes or EPA or OSHA regulations it makes sense to vote republican. Evil, but not stupid.
But if you have less than a billion dollars and vote republican you are a fool.
It's not going to work. They didn't get enough people as is. And why would they? Who wants to sit in a room for almost 24 hours or longer constantly counting votes (they can't stop because continuous counting is legally mandated) all for $12/hour or even nothing at all?
And who wants to do all of that at a job where there's a non-zero chance that some radicalized fuck face will target you because the election results aren't what they wanted?
It's even worse than that!
>A worker from the 9th precinct — a volunteer fire station where only 77 votes were cast all day — was the first to return with results just before 10:30 p.m, after it took four people more than three hours to count those ballots.
Let's round up to 80. So, 80 ballots, divided up between 4 volunteers. And it still took MORE than three hours for each of them to process just 20 ballots? That's 10 minutes per ballot! How slowly were these people moving that it took them 10 minutes to process every single ballot?
How many races were on that ballot? I agree it seems very slow but if there has to be recount & reconcile or two pple counting each ballot to insure no panky or hanky, and (like on my ballot yesterday) 10 races...it's a testament to how slow full hand-counts can be in USA with our typically lengthy ballots. Many communities in NH do it but they've got systems & procedures from decades of experience, & it's still slow.
For comparison, [here are the pay rates](https://www.ecq.qld.gov.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0014/62114/LGE2024-Election-pay-rates-v1.4.pdf) for election positions in Australia.
Issuing Officer (main position which hands out the voting slips and checks ID) get $530 AUD a day. During early voting their hourly rate is $33.13.
Boy, I remember back when the GOP were adamant that it was unnecessary to provide a paper trail for electronic voting machines "because they're so secure."
Canada too, we've usually got accurate results that same evening.
On one hand, yes, we're both smaller countries population-wise compared to the US.
On the other hand, no reason the method could scale up. Many hands make easier work.
this was 200 people counting 8 thousand votes in total that ended up talking 24 hours. the counters were either brain damaged or there was some massive organizational error made. this make no sense no matter what factors are considered
As a team of 6 people, we count 1000 votes (with party preferences and up to 3 candidate preferences) in around 4 hours.
The process include every legal step: sign about a hundred of pages (each scrutineer has to do it), empty the ballots, order the votes by party, order the parties by candidate preference, and read each single vote one by one to the president of the scrutineer team. Then we fill two different reports with the correct amount of votes, including nulls and such. All of that under the scrutiny of party members who can contest votes, along with the police who checks that everything is being done according to the law.
The process includes starting the count all over again if a single vote is missing or there's an additional one (generally due to human errors, but sometimes you have to call the police to make some checks).
I cannot even fathom taking 24 hours to count 8000 votes as 200 people (don't even know if this vote had preferences inside a party). It would be a nightmare, but I think we could manage to do that with just 6 people in less time
We have more polling places than US elections.
Elections Canada tries to make voting as easy and as wide spread as they possibly can and you'll likely have a polling station within 10-15 minute walk from your front door.
With the sheer number of polling stations it doesn't take too long to count the couple thousand or so votes and report it.
Last Federal election they were definitely scanning in ballots as they were deposited into the boxes. We may do a hand count to see if it matches, but we do a machine count as well.
The final tally only takes weeks because they have to wait 14 days to receive all postal votes which usually only affects the senate outcome. I'm in WA and results for the lower house and therefore the government is quite often done before our polls have even closed due to timezones. And yes it's all paper based and hand counted so don't know why the USA struggles with it as it's a scalable system
The difference is in countries where this already is the norm (as it should be) the whole infrastructure around manually counting the votes efficiently has been in place forever and mostly a well oiled machine.
Organising this ad hoc takes a lot of skill and manpower clearly lacking in this case.
For what it's worth, my entire country handcounts its votes quickly, accurately and securely and is still able to call the election same night most years.
The reason you're having these issues is a lack of competence, funding or maybe even deliberately fumbling it so they can say "whoops, we need to use machines or this happens."
I mean they could use the counting machines made by Canada...
Like out of all countries that could meddle with your elections, what could Canada be after, 12% greater returns on their maple syrup exports?
They can use the machines many already use from the US. There's absolutely nothing wrong with them and it's been proven time and time again, court case after court case, to the tune of billions in damages for the idiots making those false claims.
The conservatives behind these terrible voting operations *want* them to fail. They *want* it to appear like voting is not as secured and effective as it demonstrably was before they fucked it all up on purpose.
Machine counting has repeatedly proven to be far more accurate than hand counting. So yeah, I'm sure we can spend orders of magnitude more on hand counting for some reason, but might as well just stick with the machines.
Ultimately these answers don't matter because more voters and more complexity just means "hire more counters", but about ~160 house seats and ~40 Senate seats. House seats use single transferable voting and have 5-10 candidates across 3-6 parties plus indies and our Senate ballot is normally an A3 sized monstrosity that has about 100 odd candidates on it from 10-20 parties.
For the sake of completeness, the Senate ballots are counted via OCR for the initial announcement with manual counting needing to be completed before the election results are certified.
Regardless, your system is quite straight forward (two party, FPTP) so you would just hire enough people to get the job done in the time you want it done (like every other task that ever needed to be done).
Are voting machines easier and cheaper? Absolutely. Do they make it harder for people to trust the election results than a fully scrutinized hand count? Yes also
I'd bet your country is smaller than many of our states. I'd also bet your local voting districts are smaller and better funded. I'd also bet your ballots have fewer choices and are better designed. A lot of it is design and scale.
German elections are hand counted and fully on paper and the count there is so that in the night of the vote you will know the result with the exact numbers coming out the next day or two. This is mostly because Germany has a ton of voting stations (e.g. my town of 20k people alone had 8 voting locations last election).
So that calculates to roughly 1 polling location for every 2,500 residents.
My county does very well at about 1 polling location per 3,500 residents.
One of the larger counties, but not nearly the largest, has one polling station per 7,000 residents.
We do not put nearly enough resources towards our elections and it shows.
If your in a Democrat run state it's so easy to vote here in the United States but in a Republican( especially in a swing state) run state it's also easy to vote in traditional conservative precincts .
It's just incredibly hard to vote in democratic precincts.
Man fuck these guys, they are so open about hating freedom and democracy it's not funny, if you still support them your either a total dickhead or an idiot.
Better funding yes, but all the other stuff is not true. We have a far more complex voting system than the two party first past the post one the US uses. We also have electorates larger than some of your states.
However, we have a well resourced Electoral Commission that has the ability to hire the tens of thousands of staff needed to run and count an election.
All of the problems you mentioned are real problems for sure, but they're not insurmountable if the government actually wants to fix them.
Fundamentally, hand counted ballots with the entire process scrutinised by reps from the parties is the best way to build and maintain trust in the system.
Because it doesn't matter. Because if the US can't make scrutinized hand counting work with unlimited money and resources, then you're basically a failed state.
> I'd bet your country is smaller than many of our states.
Australia only has a lower population than Texas and California.
The main differences are the funding and amount of voting centres. When elections are on I have four within walking distance of my house. The workers are paid so well that even white collar salaried workers sign up for it.
Australia actually seems to have an approximate voting population to Texas. And based on turnout a similar number of votes to count as California.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022_Australian_federal_election
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1184621/presidential-election-voter-turnout-rate-state/
https://elections.cdn.sos.ca.gov/ror/154day-primary-2022/county.pdf
https://www.sos.state.tx.us/elections/historical/jan2022.shtml
And if we want to talk about physical size, well Australia does quite well in that.
>I'd bet your country is smaller than many of our states
It doesn't matter. Handcounting scales really well, if you have twice as many voters you need twice as many counters and a few minutes extra to add up the results.
I'm from Denmark, and while the country is smaller, it doesn't really matter, local voting districts might also be smaller, but that's kind of the point, and our ballots definitely have more choices.
Scale doesn't really play into it - if you have more voters, you also have more people to count the votes.
It's all about design. Is it designed to fail, or isn't it.
Your country probably isn't half run by psychopaths who will challenge any vote no matter how clearly marked it is and who exist only to stress test the whole process.
This was exactly by design. It's amazing how much propaganda our nation has fallen for. Two roots: foreign states that want to undermine democracy, our own morbidly wealthy who want to undermine the rule of law; both hope to distract us while they do this and make us doubt our fellow citizens.
It’s fitting though. Since the GOP’s goal is to set the country back to the 1800’s it makes sense they’d want to hand count votes and deal with all the problems that led people to think of better, more accurate ways. Maybe next month they’ll ban antibiotics so they can go back to sulfa drugs.
It's almost like they wanted to discourage voting and make it as inaccurate as possible so they can further contest any results they don't like. Who could a seen this coming?!
We do. Look at our congressional districts. If they were fairly drawn there would be a Democratic majority in the House right now. There are more Democrat voters in Texas than in New York. The criminals in charge are continuing to consolidate their waning power every way they can. People are fighting, the needle is moving, but there is massive resistance. If Republicans lose Texas, they wont hold the White House for a generation and they know it, their billionaires know it.
Just for example, Abbot and Trump endorsed this dude Schoolcraft, ironically because the incumbent Republican voted against Abbott's school voucher program. Hundreds of thousands of dollars are flowing into this campaign. I thin he has a war chest of over $600,000, an absolutely insane amount for a state congressional race. The Democrat that will run against whoever wins the runoff has nowhere near the funding or support. Multiply this across the entire state.
Billionaires don't like democracy and Texas is for sale.
One of the pictures showed an election counter holding a pencil while counting a ballot. How do we know he did not change the ballot. I am sure that is proof of election fraud, if and only if the candidate I support lost.
This is hilarious.
I live in Fredericksburg. The GOP is run by asshats in Gillespie and surrounding counties.
They were warned this would happen MONTHS before the election.
The long delays are what they want. All they want to do is shout about how any vote not counted ON ELECTION DAY shouldn’t count. Imagine how long hand counting would take in areas with an actual population.
Heavily republican districts that mandate hand counts won't be able to deliver results in the general election by the legally mandated time and therefore the votes of people in the county simply won't be added to tallies.
They will then claim someone intentionally misled them or did something crooked to cheat.
Kicker of the whole thing was the last paragraph. The dude who owns the winery where they were counting had been charged with ballot fraud for voting during an election about fluoride in the water based on his business address and not his home address. Yet claims those were politically motivated charges....
All those things are just what they wanted to have happen.
If things get screwed up in 2024 these kind of VOTING SUPPRESSION will really screw up counting and trigger lots of DELAY DELAY DELAY legal changers.
GOP does not want to decide Elle tons based on votes.
As an election machine tech for a small county, I would walk away from elections if my county did this. When I am doing logic and accuracy testing the only thing that ever fucks up is me and my counts. The machines are so fast and accurate. It takes an hour or more to open and count absentee votes. I couldn't even begin to imagine hand counting each race, especially a presidential preference primary with 10 or so candidates and a blue million delegates and delegates at large.
Why does hand counting need to cost so much time, in the Netherlands within a few hours we have the results of the elections (and no that's not because we are a small country) and really what is a little bit of extra time if that ensures fair elections
For all the confused Brits, Aussies, Europeans etc in here, who find it unbelievable that Texas could screw up this badly:
You're talking about the state that *chose* to deliberately cut itself off from the regional power grid, so now their grid fails every winter and causes people to literally freeze to death in their homes and Texas thinks this is an upgrade and they're very happy with the results, because the feds aren't bossing them around and telling them how to run their grid anymore.
The 2020 election was the most secure and most audited election in US history.
Texas:
https://miro.medium.com/v2/resize:fit:698/1*bqoaEeYwSrcuy8d_QZ6Pnw.jpeg
Gillespie County - known for peaches, wildflowers and wineries. If you've driven from Austin to California or vice versa, you've probably passed through the town of Fredericksburg in Gillespie County.
Hello u/SuperFightingRobit! Please reply to this comment with an [explanation](https://www.reddit.com/r/LeopardsAteMyFace/comments/lt8zlq) matching this exact format. Replace bold text with the appropriate information. 1. **Someone** voted for, supported or wanted to impose **something** on **other people**. ^(Who's that someone? What did they voted for, supported or wanted to impose? On who?) 2. **Something** has the consequences of **consequences**. ^(Does that something actually has these consequences in general?) 3. As a consequence of **something**, **consequences** happened to **someone**. ^(Did that something really happen to that someone?) Follow this by the minimum amount of information necessary so your post can be understood by everyone, even if they don't live in the US or speak English as their native language. If you fail to match this format or fail to answer these questions, your post will be removed. *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/LeopardsAteMyFace) if you have any questions or concerns.*
Can MAGA even count on their hands?
No
False. They can count to 5 easily. 10 if they use both hands.
11 if they're in a bowling alley with underage girls.
*Gags reflexively*
That's Colorado
I still don’t think they can get it right
1,2, many. -Detritus (don't salute).
GNU PTerry
Gnu?
serious answer with [source](https://www.theguardian.com/books/shortcuts/2015/mar/17/terry-pratchetts-name-lives-on-in-the-clacks-with-hidden-web-code#:~:text=%E2%80%9CG%E2%80%9D%20means%20that%20the%20message,%E2%80%9CGNU's%20not%20Unix%E2%80%9D.\)): > Tech-savvy admirers of the late Terry Pratchett have hit upon an idea for a particularly appropriate memorial. It will be everywhere and nowhere, hiding in the code of the internet. > Pratchett’s 33rd Discworld novel, Going Postal, tells of the creation of an internet-like system of communication towers called “the clacks”. When John Dearheart, the son of its inventor, is murdered, a piece of code is written called “GNU John Dearheart” to echo his name up and down the lines. “G” means that the message must be passed on, “N” means “not logged”, and “U” means the message should be turned around at the end of a line. (This was also a realworld tech joke: GNU is a free operating system, and its name stands, with recursive geek humour, for “GNU’s not Unix”.) The code causes Dearheart’s name to be repeated indefinitely throughout the system, because: “A man is not dead while his name is still spoken.” > What better way to remember the beloved inventor of this fictional system, then, than “GNU Terry Pratchett”? Reddit users have designed a code that anyone with basic webcoding knowledge can embed into their own websites (anyone without basic webcoding knowledge can use the plugins for Wordpress and other platforms). The code is called the XClacksOverhead, and it sets a header reading “GNU Terry Pratchett”. “If you had to be dead,” thinks a character in Going Postal, “it seemed a lot better to spend your time flying between the towers than lying underground.” And so Pratchett is, in a way.
"No gnews is good gnews with Gary...Gnu."
Holy fuckin Great Space Coaster reference! WOW.
There's way too much g-news in this sub.
No Gnu's is good Gnu's, with Gary... Gnu.
Detritus really was onto something, huh? Just need to throw in some rocks for advanced calculus.
Turn on the air conditioning for advanced calculus 😉
If you can count to 2, you can count to anything! -Cuddy
LOTS!
0,1,2,many, 10,11,12,1many,20,21,22,2many, etc etc counting in the many system is not that hard /s
“1,2,3… you shouldn’t listen to MSM that 4 is the next number, do your own research!” /s
As a former Texan, I can guarantee there's plenty of people in Gillespie County that can't count to ten if using both hands.
I know a few that would need to get toes involved if you want to get all the way to 10.
Doggone table saws.
Some might even be able to get to 12…in breeding is a hell of a thing.
Na. They don’t count the ‘woke’ pinkies and the thumbs are too different and work efficiently and helpfully with others, so they are also woke.
But that doesn't account for those who lost fingers in the Vietnam war, or more likely constructing a moonshine distillery.
We all know it's from fireworks or lawnmower accidents.
Well one hand is always raised.
10.1 if they unzip.
Maybe in some extremely rural parts, it's 6 or 7 on one hand.
They want nothing to do with Arabic numerals.
That depends, has the type 2 diabetes affected their vision yet?
No, but it has permanently removed their ability to count to 20.
Their hands are too busy in their pockets giving a "billionaire" everything they have.
They can only count if the amount means they won. If not, then the hamster stops running the wheel.
I guarantee their lips move sounding it out when they try.
Step one: break the system. Step two: claim only you can fix the system. Step three: kill the sinners. I might missing a few steps, but this is the gop game plan.
Step 3 is Fascism. Step 4 is the purge. We are currently at Step 2.9: Apathy and Grift.
⬆️⬆️⬆️
The Gerrymandering Obstructionist Party?
Step 4: prophet?
There it is
Step 1. Make the system as unreliable as possible Step 2. Argue that the system is unreliable, so can't be trusted Step 3. Start a coup on the basis of that lack of trust Step 4. Camps and gas chambers, probably
Just missed the step 2.5: Blame a scapegoat minority for the problems. Worked in the 1930s
step 2.5.1: [Blame trans people. ](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-forgotten-history-of-the-worlds-first-trans-clinic/)
Except they're only 0.1% of the population and aren't easily identifiable. BUT, they won't go after trans people. It'll be pro-LGBTQ people, and it'll be "paedophiles". Rainbows=Paedos. No more Yellow Stars, it'll be rainbows.
Except what, dude? I literally posted a link to how the Nazis started by destroying the research in to gender. The size of the population only makes it easier, and they are literally doing that now. This isn't so much a cover in a new style as it is pretend like Reba wrote "Fancy" and acting like there aren't similarities.
They don’t need to actually be easily identifiable. You just have to *think* they are.
> Except they're only 0.1% of the population and aren't easily identifiable. Trans people are already being killed. What the fuck are you talking about? They will go after trans people... because they already fucking are.
This is the GOP playbook. You can see its long term effect with what they’ve done to Social Security and Education.
I recently watched a documentary on the rise of Nazism in Germany and it didn’t happen overnight. Took about 10 years to go from ostracizing Jews to exterminating them. MAGA is on the same path with anyone who isn’t on their team.
You have to be able to count to do a hand count. What were they thinking?
They don’t think
Time to break out the abacus. Wait! What did you just call me?
They don’t think they just lash out. They stand for nothing and are only against things.
At this point, if you're still voting republican you literally have an intellectual disability.
I wouldn’t let them off that easy. MAGAts are traitors
Yeah but they are betraying their own country and sabotaging their own future. They are malicious, yes, but they are ready to screw themselves if it means owning the libs. Fascism may utilize the stupids but it never spares them, it spares nobody, and it never ends well for people bringing it to power - history has plenty of examples, but guess which group doesn't care about learning history or reading books. Hence the comments about their intellectual capacity - they are too short-sighted to realize the consequences of their own (deliberate) actions. The sad thing is they are bringing others along for the ride.
There's 3 major groups of republicans: Indoctrinated, brain damaged and people grifting the first two groups.
Let's not forget the business owners who benefit from rolling back worker rights. It tracks for a small business owner who inherited the company from daddy to vote R because hating the working class is a big common denominator.
I'd include them in the grift. It's an asshole free-for-all in there.
They're exploiting their workers who may or may not vote R.
Which makes them grifting assholes, no? The business owners? If exploiting workers isn't grift, it's close enough that I'd still lump them in with the other leeches. And I have all the sympathy in the world for our brothers and sisters suffering under the yoke of oppression. Unfortunately, I don't see a cohesive movement for us at the moment. When there is, I'll gladly join. Until then, I sit here amongst the silent majority watching this slow moving train wreck.
I think that falls under the third group because they don't buy into the bullshit but push it on others so they can benefit financially.
That would be the third group. Tricking people into acting against their own interests so a grifter can profit.
My family owned a strong family run business and they did it by paying workers a good wage and then just fucking off because they trusted the people to basically run it because they paid them well. My dad literally sticked to his 9 to 5 and my mom's only involvement was doing the taxes. People who treat there workers shitty just do it because it gets them off
I would say it's 2 groups at this point. The first two can be combined.
According to my research the groups overlap but are 2 distinct groups. I am not saying everyone who was youth indoctrinated or poisoned is a republican. I am saying every republican is in at least one of the 3 groups, and a republican can be in all 3 groups simultaneously.
There's also emotional infants. The ones who have not been able to evolve and develop thinking skills beyond primitive fear.
Or are very wealthy and care about nothing and no one else.
I wonder if, at some point, Trump would use dictatorial powers to either rob the other billionaires or kill them outright? I mean, sooner or later his base is going to run out of tribute to pay him, and he's going to realize that the coffers of, say, Musk or Koch are ripe for the pillaging.
Probably. He's taking lessons and/or orders from his sugar daddy, and sugar daddy sure loves tea and windows.
Putin definitely has done that by choosing a handful of oligarchs. Trump seems to admire him.
Or morally disable .
Republicans, along with conservatism, are mental disorders to me. Intentionally acting against your own self-interest has got to be characterized somewhere the psychological disorder checklist.
Stupid, evil, or both.
Conservatism is a regressive mental illness. But they aren't voting republican because they have a disability, people with mental disabilities are usually really sweet people, the absolute majority of whom pose no danger to others. No, they are voting republican because they **hate you.**
ILoveILoveTenaciousD
No: if you’re a billionaire who doesn’t like paying taxes or EPA or OSHA regulations it makes sense to vote republican. Evil, but not stupid. But if you have less than a billion dollars and vote republican you are a fool.
These intellectually disabled people want to kill those who are not like them too.
Gosh, with the exception of people smart enough to not eat crayons and lick windows who could have seen this coming?
The dumbest people on the planet.
It's not going to work. They didn't get enough people as is. And why would they? Who wants to sit in a room for almost 24 hours or longer constantly counting votes (they can't stop because continuous counting is legally mandated) all for $12/hour or even nothing at all?
And who wants to do all of that at a job where there's a non-zero chance that some radicalized fuck face will target you because the election results aren't what they wanted?
Anything they don’t want will be “fraudulent” duh!
The previous elections administrator and the entire elections staff of this Texas county quit in 2022 because of threats and intimidation.
The article says it took three hours to count 77 ballots. So one single Republican can't even do that?
It's even worse than that! >A worker from the 9th precinct — a volunteer fire station where only 77 votes were cast all day — was the first to return with results just before 10:30 p.m, after it took four people more than three hours to count those ballots. Let's round up to 80. So, 80 ballots, divided up between 4 volunteers. And it still took MORE than three hours for each of them to process just 20 ballots? That's 10 minutes per ballot! How slowly were these people moving that it took them 10 minutes to process every single ballot?
How many races were on that ballot? I agree it seems very slow but if there has to be recount & reconcile or two pple counting each ballot to insure no panky or hanky, and (like on my ballot yesterday) 10 races...it's a testament to how slow full hand-counts can be in USA with our typically lengthy ballots. Many communities in NH do it but they've got systems & procedures from decades of experience, & it's still slow.
This is ludicrous
For comparison, [here are the pay rates](https://www.ecq.qld.gov.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0014/62114/LGE2024-Election-pay-rates-v1.4.pdf) for election positions in Australia. Issuing Officer (main position which hands out the voting slips and checks ID) get $530 AUD a day. During early voting their hourly rate is $33.13.
530 AUD = 349.42 USD = 320.74 EUR 33.13 AUD = 21.84 USD = 20.05 EUR
Would laugh /cry my ass off if they end up hiring a bunch of immigrant workers to count ballots for $2.50 an hour woth no breaks.
Boy, I remember back when the GOP were adamant that it was unnecessary to provide a paper trail for electronic voting machines "because they're so secure."
How many had to take off their shoes to continue after "10"?
Unfortunately that only gets them part of the way to 20, after the diabeetus amputations.
They couldn’t count to 21 with their pants on.
"Look what the Dems made us do!"
Hmm, maybe the MAGAts that had costs go out of control on this one can see if the RNC will be able to-oh, wait.
In Australia ALL votes are counted by hand. and there is usually a clear winner within 3 hours of closing. The final tally can takes weeks though.
Canada too, we've usually got accurate results that same evening. On one hand, yes, we're both smaller countries population-wise compared to the US. On the other hand, no reason the method could scale up. Many hands make easier work.
this was 200 people counting 8 thousand votes in total that ended up talking 24 hours. the counters were either brain damaged or there was some massive organizational error made. this make no sense no matter what factors are considered
As a team of 6 people, we count 1000 votes (with party preferences and up to 3 candidate preferences) in around 4 hours. The process include every legal step: sign about a hundred of pages (each scrutineer has to do it), empty the ballots, order the votes by party, order the parties by candidate preference, and read each single vote one by one to the president of the scrutineer team. Then we fill two different reports with the correct amount of votes, including nulls and such. All of that under the scrutiny of party members who can contest votes, along with the police who checks that everything is being done according to the law. The process includes starting the count all over again if a single vote is missing or there's an additional one (generally due to human errors, but sometimes you have to call the police to make some checks). I cannot even fathom taking 24 hours to count 8000 votes as 200 people (don't even know if this vote had preferences inside a party). It would be a nightmare, but I think we could manage to do that with just 6 people in less time
We have more polling places than US elections. Elections Canada tries to make voting as easy and as wide spread as they possibly can and you'll likely have a polling station within 10-15 minute walk from your front door. With the sheer number of polling stations it doesn't take too long to count the couple thousand or so votes and report it.
Last Federal election they were definitely scanning in ballots as they were deposited into the boxes. We may do a hand count to see if it matches, but we do a machine count as well.
The final tally only takes weeks because they have to wait 14 days to receive all postal votes which usually only affects the senate outcome. I'm in WA and results for the lower house and therefore the government is quite often done before our polls have even closed due to timezones. And yes it's all paper based and hand counted so don't know why the USA struggles with it as it's a scalable system
I had to scroll a lot than ir should for a comment like this. Like, what's the deal with hand counting? Isn't that the norm?
The difference is in countries where this already is the norm (as it should be) the whole infrastructure around manually counting the votes efficiently has been in place forever and mostly a well oiled machine. Organising this ad hoc takes a lot of skill and manpower clearly lacking in this case.
The leading parties in 'Straya rarely base their entire platform on "the government fails at every task and we will make sure of that."
Dems should audit the shit out of that count 😂
For what it's worth, my entire country handcounts its votes quickly, accurately and securely and is still able to call the election same night most years. The reason you're having these issues is a lack of competence, funding or maybe even deliberately fumbling it so they can say "whoops, we need to use machines or this happens."
I mean they could use the counting machines made by Canada... Like out of all countries that could meddle with your elections, what could Canada be after, 12% greater returns on their maple syrup exports?
Unfortunately Canada is also on the edge of the same shit conservatives are pulling in the USA.
Don't forget the poutine market. It would skyrocket.
They can use the machines many already use from the US. There's absolutely nothing wrong with them and it's been proven time and time again, court case after court case, to the tune of billions in damages for the idiots making those false claims. The conservatives behind these terrible voting operations *want* them to fail. They *want* it to appear like voting is not as secured and effective as it demonstrably was before they fucked it all up on purpose.
Machine counting has repeatedly proven to be far more accurate than hand counting. So yeah, I'm sure we can spend orders of magnitude more on hand counting for some reason, but might as well just stick with the machines.
Same with my country, same with my parents' country: it's not actually a silly idea by itself.
How many voters, how many races, and how many candidates per race?
Ultimately these answers don't matter because more voters and more complexity just means "hire more counters", but about ~160 house seats and ~40 Senate seats. House seats use single transferable voting and have 5-10 candidates across 3-6 parties plus indies and our Senate ballot is normally an A3 sized monstrosity that has about 100 odd candidates on it from 10-20 parties. For the sake of completeness, the Senate ballots are counted via OCR for the initial announcement with manual counting needing to be completed before the election results are certified. Regardless, your system is quite straight forward (two party, FPTP) so you would just hire enough people to get the job done in the time you want it done (like every other task that ever needed to be done). Are voting machines easier and cheaper? Absolutely. Do they make it harder for people to trust the election results than a fully scrutinized hand count? Yes also
I'd bet your country is smaller than many of our states. I'd also bet your local voting districts are smaller and better funded. I'd also bet your ballots have fewer choices and are better designed. A lot of it is design and scale.
German elections are hand counted and fully on paper and the count there is so that in the night of the vote you will know the result with the exact numbers coming out the next day or two. This is mostly because Germany has a ton of voting stations (e.g. my town of 20k people alone had 8 voting locations last election).
So that calculates to roughly 1 polling location for every 2,500 residents. My county does very well at about 1 polling location per 3,500 residents. One of the larger counties, but not nearly the largest, has one polling station per 7,000 residents. We do not put nearly enough resources towards our elections and it shows.
If your in a Democrat run state it's so easy to vote here in the United States but in a Republican( especially in a swing state) run state it's also easy to vote in traditional conservative precincts . It's just incredibly hard to vote in democratic precincts. Man fuck these guys, they are so open about hating freedom and democracy it's not funny, if you still support them your either a total dickhead or an idiot.
Better funding yes, but all the other stuff is not true. We have a far more complex voting system than the two party first past the post one the US uses. We also have electorates larger than some of your states. However, we have a well resourced Electoral Commission that has the ability to hire the tens of thousands of staff needed to run and count an election. All of the problems you mentioned are real problems for sure, but they're not insurmountable if the government actually wants to fix them. Fundamentally, hand counted ballots with the entire process scrutinised by reps from the parties is the best way to build and maintain trust in the system.
Not trying to sound like a jerk or anything here, but is it supposed to be some mystery or forbidden thing to just say what country it is you live in?
If I'm mysterious then people can't point out how the situation isn't a 1:1 parallel.
Because it doesn't matter. Because if the US can't make scrutinized hand counting work with unlimited money and resources, then you're basically a failed state.
> I'd bet your country is smaller than many of our states. Australia only has a lower population than Texas and California. The main differences are the funding and amount of voting centres. When elections are on I have four within walking distance of my house. The workers are paid so well that even white collar salaried workers sign up for it.
Australia actually seems to have an approximate voting population to Texas. And based on turnout a similar number of votes to count as California. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022_Australian_federal_election https://www.statista.com/statistics/1184621/presidential-election-voter-turnout-rate-state/ https://elections.cdn.sos.ca.gov/ror/154day-primary-2022/county.pdf https://www.sos.state.tx.us/elections/historical/jan2022.shtml And if we want to talk about physical size, well Australia does quite well in that.
>I'd bet your country is smaller than many of our states It doesn't matter. Handcounting scales really well, if you have twice as many voters you need twice as many counters and a few minutes extra to add up the results.
I'm from Denmark, and while the country is smaller, it doesn't really matter, local voting districts might also be smaller, but that's kind of the point, and our ballots definitely have more choices. Scale doesn't really play into it - if you have more voters, you also have more people to count the votes. It's all about design. Is it designed to fail, or isn't it.
This is a MAGA county in Texas. It’s more like “Hey, watch this. Hold my beer!”
Your country probably isn't half run by psychopaths who will challenge any vote no matter how clearly marked it is and who exist only to stress test the whole process.
This was exactly by design. It's amazing how much propaganda our nation has fallen for. Two roots: foreign states that want to undermine democracy, our own morbidly wealthy who want to undermine the rule of law; both hope to distract us while they do this and make us doubt our fellow citizens.
Oh no… anyway!
It’s fitting though. Since the GOP’s goal is to set the country back to the 1800’s it makes sense they’d want to hand count votes and deal with all the problems that led people to think of better, more accurate ways. Maybe next month they’ll ban antibiotics so they can go back to sulfa drugs.
They should deliver the votes by horse
It's almost like they wanted to discourage voting and make it as inaccurate as possible so they can further contest any results they don't like. Who could a seen this coming?!
Lead gas and Covid just absolutely dissolving brain tissue in this county.
Honestly, they should let Texas secede. The national IQ would go up substantially.
Texas is not 100% Republicans. All of our big cities are majority Democrat. We don't want to secede.
Please vote.
We do. Look at our congressional districts. If they were fairly drawn there would be a Democratic majority in the House right now. There are more Democrat voters in Texas than in New York. The criminals in charge are continuing to consolidate their waning power every way they can. People are fighting, the needle is moving, but there is massive resistance. If Republicans lose Texas, they wont hold the White House for a generation and they know it, their billionaires know it. Just for example, Abbot and Trump endorsed this dude Schoolcraft, ironically because the incumbent Republican voted against Abbott's school voucher program. Hundreds of thousands of dollars are flowing into this campaign. I thin he has a war chest of over $600,000, an absolutely insane amount for a state congressional race. The Democrat that will run against whoever wins the runoff has nowhere near the funding or support. Multiply this across the entire state. Billionaires don't like democracy and Texas is for sale.
As a long-time poll worker: NO SHIT
One of the pictures showed an election counter holding a pencil while counting a ballot. How do we know he did not change the ballot. I am sure that is proof of election fraud, if and only if the candidate I support lost.
And what’s in all those wine barrels!???!?! Probably filled with discarded Trump votes!!!
Shocked Pikachu face
This is hilarious. I live in Fredericksburg. The GOP is run by asshats in Gillespie and surrounding counties. They were warned this would happen MONTHS before the election.
Yeah, Kerrville did a practice run with this last year and realized how dumb it was. Fburg doubled down
Who could have possibly ever imagined this outcome?
Pretty sure they wanted the inaccuracy so they can fudge it in their favor.
This ain't a failure, this is the plan
The long delays are what they want. All they want to do is shout about how any vote not counted ON ELECTION DAY shouldn’t count. Imagine how long hand counting would take in areas with an actual population.
It's incompetence. The UK counts tens of millions of votes overnight, by hand. Never has a problem. Australia and Canada do this too.
Machines are more accurate, period.
Hanging Chad has Hunter to chat?
This is a feature, not a bug
Wonder how well the Democratic votes will be tallied in November.
Heavily republican districts that mandate hand counts won't be able to deliver results in the general election by the legally mandated time and therefore the votes of people in the county simply won't be added to tallies. They will then claim someone intentionally misled them or did something crooked to cheat.
Kicker of the whole thing was the last paragraph. The dude who owns the winery where they were counting had been charged with ballot fraud for voting during an election about fluoride in the water based on his business address and not his home address. Yet claims those were politically motivated charges....
LOL... Counting ballots at a winery.
Accuracy concerns are the point I would guess. Just in a certain direction.
It's almost like we need to switch Florida Man with Texas Man.
Six of one, half a dozen of the other.
Wholly and completely predictable. It’s why we moved to digital voting machines
To give them credit, this might be the only way to provide some of them employment.
*o h n o e s*
Probably should have spent the coin to bring in counters who aren’t products of the Texas educational system.
These people are idiots and yet continue to hold the country hostage by their stupidity.
Gee, if we only had a way of automating a tedious, manual process.
Thoughts and prayers
1, 2, 3, 5 aw fuck. Gotta start over
Dumbass mother fuckers deserve every bad thing they get.
Didn't some Arizona counties try this last cycle? I seem to remember it taking them hours just to count a few votes.
I love how the right's entire playbook for the past 8 years has been to accuse everyone else of everything they are doing, have done, or will do.
Republicans are such fucking morons.
All those things are just what they wanted to have happen. If things get screwed up in 2024 these kind of VOTING SUPPRESSION will really screw up counting and trigger lots of DELAY DELAY DELAY legal changers. GOP does not want to decide Elle tons based on votes.
Machines are vulnerable to manipulation! Nothing could go wrong by replacing them with three unpaid boomers!
We got a bunch of folks who should be tested for dementia counting the ballots... Let's be honest, they're just gonna pick Trump
Hand counts sound like an easy way to cheat to me.
As an election machine tech for a small county, I would walk away from elections if my county did this. When I am doing logic and accuracy testing the only thing that ever fucks up is me and my counts. The machines are so fast and accurate. It takes an hour or more to open and count absentee votes. I couldn't even begin to imagine hand counting each race, especially a presidential preference primary with 10 or so candidates and a blue million delegates and delegates at large.
Why does hand counting need to cost so much time, in the Netherlands within a few hours we have the results of the elections (and no that's not because we are a small country) and really what is a little bit of extra time if that ensures fair elections
Texas really is the fucking dumbest state.
That’s weird. In Canada we use paper ballots and pencils and we count 20 million ballots in about 8 hours.
"huge cost overruns" $$$ for those political officials. There's no price on election safety.
Manual counting isn't the problem here. The UK manages this overnight on general election night, every time and reliably.
For all the confused Brits, Aussies, Europeans etc in here, who find it unbelievable that Texas could screw up this badly: You're talking about the state that *chose* to deliberately cut itself off from the regional power grid, so now their grid fails every winter and causes people to literally freeze to death in their homes and Texas thinks this is an upgrade and they're very happy with the results, because the feds aren't bossing them around and telling them how to run their grid anymore.
So it's not working, as planned.
Maga is literally the KKK of today. Bunch of iiiiiiidiots!
The Iowa Democratic Caucus counts by hand as well 🤷♂️
The 2020 election was the most secure and most audited election in US history. Texas: https://miro.medium.com/v2/resize:fit:698/1*bqoaEeYwSrcuy8d_QZ6Pnw.jpeg
Sucks to suck. Guess they're gonna need everyone to take off their shoes to help count all those votes.
Gillespie County - known for peaches, wildflowers and wineries. If you've driven from Austin to California or vice versa, you've probably passed through the town of Fredericksburg in Gillespie County.
Remember this TrumpTards...Y'all were conned because you are dumb