In the northwest corner of Louisiana, a candidate for parish sheriff is demanding a recount after losing by a single vote in an election where more than 43,000 people voted.
The most salient part of the article:
When the recount takes place Monday only absentee ballots will be tallied again and checked for errors. But they only account for about 17% of the total vote in the runoff race. Absentee ballots are mailed in and are the only auditable paper trail under Louisiana’s current voting system.They can only recount absentee ballots?
That’s something that should really be fixed
Edit: Being able to audit the full process is important for preserving transparency in elections.
I thought the same thing. I went looking and found a whole trail of articles on it. Louisiana actually tried in years past, but internal state politics and bid rigging killed their efforts.
Louisiana is possibly the most corrupt state in the entire country, I don’t think they’d ever even come close to changing that
John Oliver talks about electronic voting machines and their impact, pre-2020.
The vote was for a sheriff, the Republican candidate lost by 1 vote and is asking for a recount.
However, the vote was performed using electronic voting machines, so a recount doesn’t do much other than reload the same result.
That’s fine. Let them watch them recrunch the numbers as many times as they want.
Only if they play old modem sounds for 5mins before showing the results
Unleash The Storm!
I’ll be shocked if it doesn’t come out different than before. Voting machines tend to find votes when you “look” hard enough. 😫
Eh, completely unpreventable things such as bit flips have caused weird things in an election before, so it’s not exactly unreasonable to call for a recount when the margin is so small.
Obviously it’s incredibly unlikely to change though, and is a perfect example of why individual votes do matter.
Some states require, or at least allow, a recount when the margin is a single-digit percentage, let alone 1 single vote.
This election clearly deserves a recount.
a perfect example of why individual votes do matter
LOL, could there be a better example?! Right with you.
I guess every individual vote usually matters.
In my area there’s usually only a reason for me to vote when something serious is on the ballot.
This last election seen republicans running completely unopposed in every position. My state usually ends up blue, but if it were up to my district we’d have Hitler cloned and raised on Natty Daddy and Busch Ice on a cattle farm with a Pentecostal Holiness church in his back yard. Donald Trump got 82% of the vote in 2016 and 83% in 2020.
Sheriff. Republican.
Why is the sheriff described by it’s political membership? Is everything political in the US?
Apparently, seeing as he lost to a Democrat.
Look up constitutional sheriff movement. I’m not sure if this guy is one of them, but a lot of Republicans seem to want to bring back feudalism, with sheriffs being the highest law in their lands. Little dictators who don’t have to follow the law etc. They’re terrifying, as a non-white person. That’s speaking from the prospective of someone whose skin is the only thing I need to be scared about (ok, maybe non religious takes a distant worry too).
People who aren’t cis males generally have even more to worry about, especially if you check multiple boxes (like say a non white trans woman).
They are elected and so can have oarty affiliation
select count(*) from votes group by candidate;
The headline is also dumb. Any election can be won by 1 vote. Doesn’t matter that 43000 people voted.
The more people you have voting, the less likely it is for the difference to be exactly 1. In an election with 3 voters winning by 1 isn’t notable; in an election with tens of thousands of votes, it’s pretty unusual.
I think it would also depend on the number of candidates, to a lesser extent, too.
I think the real tragedy is that 21,500 people voted for something and didn’t get it. This is my biggest problem with FPTP voting: The losers get fuck all.
Seems like the larger the sample size, the less likely it would be.
This is why voting is so damn important
Don’t let apathy towards voting take hold and if you see your friends being apathetic to the idea of voting convince them to vote
The latest batch of tankie propaganda is that it doesn’t matter if you vote because no election is ever decided by a single vote. Ignoring the hilarity of the people using collective action as an argument saying that, this is why it matters. Because local and even state elections often have ridiculously small margins
Tankies have been on that one for awhile now
They’ll straight up mock you for even suggesting that voting is effective at anything
I just say to them, “so don’t vote. Not my problem.” They don’t know what to do about that.
I too don’t know how to respond when someone tells me to do exactly what I had planned to do and was advocating for others to do?
We can’t have another 2016.
“you’re stupid if you think that will accomplish anything” and “they are the same party” is pretty old hat.
Haven’t seen the argument that individual votes don’t matter so individuals shouldn’t vote until recently. Is kind of a step up since it plays to the smug factor
Voting is the only thing that changes the rules. Protests, donations, volunteering, etc. are all meant to influence voting. Voting is the only thing that works.
No, money can’t buy everything. It can only influence. You are not going to bribe a Republican to raise taxes, or a (real, not fake) Democrat to vote for Trump.
Protests are definitely not just to influence voting, unless you also mean “influencing politicians to propose and vote for law changes”
…voting is very much not the only thing. Sure, it’s important, but there’s far far more to politics than just voting.
Tankie = nice useful idiot for effective pincer maneuver from the right.
While the right galvanizes their voters with “these very limited interventions is communism”
Tankies undermine the left’s enthusiasm: “Not left enough” to make a difference.
Oh yeah? Enjoy the current supreme Court.
Remember that Kevin Costner movie “swing vote” where he was courted by the two presidential candidates because he was somehow the deciding vote in an election? I don’t remember how they rigged it that way in the story, or what the outcome was, but the premise of one guy being a deciding vote always stuck with me because it can happen in every election; we just don’t know who that guy is because it’s everyone
If memory serves he was dissolutioned with voting and his daughter tried to convince him to vote. She eventually tried to cast his ballot herself (that she filled out) but ended up damaging the ballot trying to put it into a machine. She told him but he kept it secret throughout the movie.
So because his ballot was damaged they had him recast it so they could count it.
At one point in the movie one of the candidates literally tries to bribe him with a job offer.
And in the end I believe the movie ended with him sitting down in front of the presidential candidates and having them do a debate right there in front of him on national TV. They never said who he votes for. They just leave it there which I think was a more powerful ending than I’d they said who he voted for.
Edit: I remember enjoying that movie but never remembering the title, so thank you.
Surprisingly, this isn’t the first time this has happened in recent memory. I think in 2018 there was another race decided by a single vote, and it remained a 1 vote lead after multiple recounts.
Voting matters, and every vote counts.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
(AP) — In the northwest corner of Louisiana, a candidate for parish sheriff demanded a recount Wednesday after losing by a single vote in an election where more than 43,000 people cast ballots.
The tight race shines a spotlight on Louisiana’s recount process and its outdated voting machines, which do not produce an auditable paper trail that experts say is critical to ensuring election results are accurate.
“This extraordinarily narrow margin … absolutely requires a hand recount to protect the integrity of our democratic process, and to ensure we respect the will of the people,” John Nickelson, the Republican candidate who trailed by one vote in last week’s election for Caddo Parish Sheriff, posted on social media Wednesday.
Caddo Clerk of Court Mike Spence said he has seen close races during his 46-years of experience, but none with such a sizeable number of voters.
The current system, used by virtually every in-person voter in Georgia, prints a paper ballot with a human-readable summary and a QR code, a type of barcode, that is read by a scanner to count the votes.
Secretary of State-elect Nancy Landry, a Republican who takes office in January, said implementing a new voting system is a top priority.
The original article contains 720 words, the summary contains 203 words. Saved 72%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
Proof that your individual vote doesn’t matter. You have to bring your friends, family, coworkers, neighbors, etc with you when you vote.
This would already be a dumb, apathetic take… but you commented it on a story where someone… literally had their individual vote make all the difference. You do realize how incorrect and defeatist you sound, right!?
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…surely it means that someone’s individual vote did matter?
Of all the conclusions you could have come up with, that is the one you picked? Really? Are you a troll or something?
I get what you’re trying to go for, “get the vote out, get the people to the polls” but homie this is the worst possible way to go for it.
