at least I won't die of dysentery
November 4, 2016 1:16 PM   Subscribe

 
Caveat emptor: requires Facebook/Google/NYT login.
posted by ragtag at 1:26 PM on November 4, 2016


I didn't have to login...
My Latina voter Shanita left her son to get sick with dysentery and her mom in an emergency to stay in line, only to fall to the curses of voter intimidation. RIP Shanita.
posted by msbutah at 1:30 PM on November 4, 2016 [7 favorites]


at least I won't die of dysentery
What are the first names of the four other members of your party?

1. Steve
2. Kellyanne
3. Steve
4. Steve
posted by leotrotsky at 1:31 PM on November 4, 2016 [14 favorites]


You bought 2,537 minutes of ad space. 
However you were only able to pay for 200 minutes with the help of Foundation funds. 
posted by leotrotsky at 1:36 PM on November 4, 2016 [1 favorite]


This must be hyperbole, no?

There are voters that need to bus across town to the polling place? You have to wait in a Disney-esque line to vote? You don't get to ride Splash Mountain at the end, you know?

This is crazy.
posted by Keith Talent at 1:39 PM on November 4, 2016


Just to be clear, I'm not suggesting that in a nation of 400 million people there are not going to be a *few* horror stories, but this can't be the norm, can it? The vast majority of people get the California developer dude experience, correct?
posted by Keith Talent at 1:41 PM on November 4, 2016 [1 favorite]


Keith Talent: John Oliver had a montage of voting-line footage on his show last week. see if you can notice a theme
posted by theodolite at 1:47 PM on November 4, 2016 [8 favorites]


This is really good, though. Shame that the only people who see it are the ones who don't need it.

Kind of like GOP Arcade.

FWIW, I waited ~30 minutes to vote early in a white wealthy republican suburb in a red state last week. The wealthier suburb nearby had 2.5 hour waits.
posted by leotrotsky at 1:47 PM on November 4, 2016 [2 favorites]


Here's some data from the 2012 elections. Average wait is 14, but it varries by state, political affiliation and race. The gutting of the voting rights act suggests that wait times will be longer this year.

(Was anyone else annoyed that the latina woman's challenges were related to her kids while the black man's problems were related to his job?)
posted by Maastrictian at 1:48 PM on November 4, 2016 [3 favorites]


The vast majority of people get the California developer dude experience, correct?

Maybe. But the question is why should anyone be anywhere near a horror story? Anyways, some actual stories are here and here.

Early voting does tend to be less well supported than day-of voting, but even on the day of, there are a lot of isolated communities in the US, where needing to go, say, 10 miles to vote wouldn't be totally crazy.
posted by sparklemotion at 1:50 PM on November 4, 2016


The problem is that plenty of people do get a pretty painless experience (I'm literally a California developer dude, and my real-life voting experience is as easy if not easier than that mode of this game), but the pain tends to be distributed, shall we say, strategically. The people waiting hours in line to vote and getting challenged for ID, they've been targeted for it, in some cases with the people responsibly explicitly saying they want to depress turnout and keep certain groups of people from voting.

The way our elections work, it doesn't matter a whole lot what the California developer dude's voting experience is, but the entire election hinges on things like whether enough members of the Las Vegas Culinary Union are able to vote.
posted by zachlipton at 2:11 PM on November 4, 2016 [17 favorites]


Why is it crazy to think that people need to bus across town to polling places? I'm in Columbus, OH and there is currently one location in the entire metropolitan area for early voting. It'd be a 15 minute bus ride for me to get there, and I live two miles away. If I live in Franklinton, which has a higher concentration of working-class white voters, it's about an hour bus ride. If I lived down around Reynoldsburg, which is where my department's janitor lives, it's closer to two hours.

There are more polling places on actual election day, but I wouldn't be surprised if people still have a 15-30 minute walk or bus ride to get to their polling place, which can eat up a lot more time depending on the part of town you live in and bus frequency, and where you need to get to. To say nothing of time waiting in line once you actually get to where you need to vote.
posted by ChuraChura at 2:17 PM on November 4, 2016 [4 favorites]


In 2012, I voted in Palm Beach County. Specifically, the poorer south end of PBC. I went to early voting at my polling place on the Saturday before the election, which was several miles away literally in a different city than where I was registered. It was technically bus-accessible, but that would have required multiple transfers to get there from where I was, where each bus in the route would have had 30 minutes or so between buses. As it was, I took the car with my partner. We waited in line for ten hours before casting our vote. Thankfully, people were going up and down the line with water, and we had thought ahead far enough to pack a lunch.

Is that a common story? Well, in a lot of parts of Florida (the poorer parts, the less-white parts), it certainly is. And it was even worse on election day than it was during early voting.
posted by tobascodagama at 2:19 PM on November 4, 2016 [18 favorites]


If it takes ten hours to vote, the people responsible for elections (or, the people who refused to adequately fund elections if that's the problem) in that area should be in jail. There's no excuse.
posted by zachlipton at 2:21 PM on November 4, 2016 [37 favorites]


Indeed.
posted by tobascodagama at 2:23 PM on November 4, 2016 [1 favorite]


Southern states have closed down at least 868 polling places for the 2016 election
But a new report from the Leadership Conference Education Fund, a civil rights organization, finds another potential effect: Counties previously monitored through the Voting Rights Act have closed down at least 868 polling places since the Supreme Court’s decision — a 16 percent reduction among the counties analyzed in the study. And out of 381 counties in the study, about 43 percent of them cut back on voting locations. (The report only looked at about half of the counties previously covered by the Voting Rights Act due to some limitations in the available data.)
Go fuck yourself John Roberts.
posted by zachlipton at 2:38 PM on November 4, 2016 [21 favorites]




So, my persona of Jimena the Latina nurse from Texas was successful.

You waited 102 minutes.
You became enraged 7 times.
I hate voting but I love my country!

It took two tries, the first time I failed because of "poll watchers" shouting insults at me and I couldn't escape because I was using the mouse to control her. I was more successful the second time by using the keyboard. I feel like that's a metaphor.

Also I feel super terrible because I ignored my children and my mother both times they called (the son actually had dysentery at school). And I got charged extra by the day care center to keep my daughter for longer.

Fuck voter suppression forever.
posted by numaner at 3:49 PM on November 4, 2016 [1 favorite]


This op/ed game is by GOP Arcade, a side project from some BuzzFeed folks. Here's a story about them.
posted by Nelson at 4:17 PM on November 4, 2016 [1 favorite]


Who is permitted in a polling booth?
Are those people vetted and trained?
Are they paid?
Who overseas them?
posted by Thella at 5:19 PM on November 4, 2016


The only people allowed in the booth are the voter and, if necessary, an interpreter to assist them.

The poll workers, i.e. the people who check registrations, hand out ballots, and answer questions, will generally be volunteers through the state's elections office. Sometimes, they're permanent employees. When I did my early voting in Massachusetts this year, it was at the town clerk's office, and the poll workers were all, as far as I could tell, employees there. State employees will be getting paid, but the temporary volunteers won't.

It's important to remember, though, that most things about voting will vary state-to-state. The only true constant is that each state has an elections office that handles all the procedural stuff like deciding who gets to work at the polls. (Anybody who claims to be a "poll watcher" but isn't from the DOJ or Federal Election Commission is almost certainly lying.)
posted by tobascodagama at 6:03 PM on November 4, 2016


Also, people with disabilities may have an assistant accompany them into the polling booth to help them cast their vote. Although I'm pretty sure the ADA addresses this, after a few minutes of searching I haven't found a Federal guideline that addresses it. It looks as though most states have some kind of guidance up. This is California's:
Voters who, for any reason, need or want assistance to vote have the right to receive help to mark a ballot. A voter can bring one or two people into the voting booth, or the voter may request assistance from a poll worker. Poll workers should be trained in what (and what not) to do if asked to assist. For example, it is a violation of state and federal law to disclose how a person votes. (§§ 2300(a)(6), 14224, 14282)
posted by Lexica at 7:27 PM on November 4, 2016 [1 favorite]


Congratulations! You have made it to Oregon!
Where your ballot arrives in the mail 2 weeks before the election, so you can fill it out at your leisure*, in the privacy of your own home, without anyone waving a sign in your face**.

*(There might sometimes be a car in front of you at the drive-through ballot drop though, so that's kind of annoying).
**Unless it's your angry Uncle from Facebook, but there's nothing anyone can do about that***
***Seriously, though, there are concerns about voters being intimidated at home, but that pales in comparison to the kind of things you see elsewhere.
posted by madajb at 9:21 PM on November 4, 2016 [8 favorites]


The way our elections work, it doesn't matter a whole lot what the California developer dude's voting experience is, but the entire election hinges on things like whether enough members of the Las Vegas Culinary Union are able to vote.

The good news is that members of the Las Vegas Culinary Union (and many many other people) seem to be voting tonight (that's Local 226's political director's twitter).
posted by zachlipton at 10:31 PM on November 4, 2016


The poll workers, i.e. the people who check registrations, hand out ballots, and answer questions, will generally be volunteers through the state's elections office. Sometimes, they're permanent employees. When I did my early voting in Massachusetts this year, it was at the town clerk's office, and the poll workers were all, as far as I could tell, employees there. State employees will be getting paid, but the temporary volunteers won't.

Thanks. This is what I wanted to know. 'Booth' in Australia means the room or secure space in which the whole voting process takes place, including the voting corrals.

We don't have volunteers inside the polling place in Oz. Probably 95% of the public face-to-face voting interaction, both pre-poll and on election day, is conducted by paid casuals. It's around $400 for election day 7am till all* votes counted and accounted for ~ 11pm-ish It's a long tiring day. I can't imagine anyone doing it just for the love of democracy.

So, who are the volunteers? Are they party-affiliated? Do they commit to legal obligations?

*our complex senate / upper house tickets are only counted to a certain condition; others continue the counting later.
posted by Thella at 1:11 AM on November 5, 2016


So, who are the volunteers? Are they party-affiliated? Do they commit to legal obligations?

In my experience, old people.
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 3:35 AM on November 5, 2016 [8 favorites]


My real-life experience as a thoroughly privileged person in California: no wait ever, never asked for ID, and my polling place is walking distance from my home.

Hearing that people wait hours to vote and get challenged to prove they have the right makes my blood boil, because it is so obviously immoral, uncivic and unpatriotic to do that to a voter.
posted by zippy at 4:12 AM on November 5, 2016 [11 favorites]


For years my parents volunteered to drive people to their polling places. I don't know if this happens anymore but I hear that driving people to the polls discourages outbreaks of dysentery.
posted by sciencegeek at 4:24 AM on November 5, 2016 [2 favorites]


There are voters that need to bus across town to the polling place?
I live in a very voter-friendly county in a pretty voter-friendly state, but yeah, in my old neighborhood, getting to the polling place without a car would have been a multi-hour ordeal. It wasn't that far as the crow flew, but there were a couple of stretches that didn't have sidewalks and weren't walkable. You'd have to take the bus to the downtown interchange and then wait for another bus, and the buses don't come very often here. (They come every half-hour during rush hour and every hour during other times.) Most people had a car, but if you didn't, or if you didn't have access to the car on voting day, you would have spent the whole day getting to and from the polling place.

My old neighborhood was working class and about evenly divided between white and Latino people, and it was pretty socially marginalized in a lot of ways. (It's also pretty great in a lot of ways, and residents are currently fighting like hell to save it from developers who want to turn the whole area into luxury condos, no joke.) The transportation issues didn't just affect voting: they also made it tough to get to the grocery store or the movies without a car. My car died when I lived there, and living without a car there was kind of catastrophic in ways that it's hard even to convey. I actually raised this issue with the guy who figures out where polling places go, who is basically a good guy and who really doesn't want to disenfranchise anyone. And there are all sorts of good reasons that they assigned my old neighborhood to a totally inaccessible polling place. But most people in my town can walk to their polling places, and it's not exactly a coincidence that the exceptions are people who are marginalized by class and in many instances race, even though there is nobody cackling evilly while they plot ways to prevent low-income people from voting.
posted by ArbitraryAndCapricious at 5:09 AM on November 5, 2016 [4 favorites]


Poll workers here in Kentucky are volunteers who earn about $100 for the day, which is great for retirees, but not worth taking a day off work. You're required to take a day of training, too, but only your first time. They keep asking me to do it, as I appear to have all the free time in the world because I work at home. The same poll workers are at my precinct every year for 20 years now. I'm sure they could use some younger volunteers.
posted by Miss Cellania at 5:10 AM on November 5, 2016 [2 favorites]


A decent number of poll workers here are high school students. They're allowed to hire 16 and 17-year-olds to work the polls even if they can't legally vote, and a number of schools will give students the day off for it. It's a good way to get bilingual poll workers too, which we desperately need. Plus, a single election staffer can go from school to school and recruit workers. It's a 15+ hour day, plus a training session, all for $150 or so, so there's a fair amount of civic duty involved in agreeing to do it.
posted by zachlipton at 1:13 PM on November 5, 2016 [1 favorite]


My mother and sister both volunteered as poll workers when they lived in California. They're both pretty civic-minded, and I guess it was sort of interesting?
posted by epersonae at 6:26 PM on November 5, 2016


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