Yesterday my city held a very rare election, and most people didn’t even know about until the last minute. I learned about it on Friday via this same subreddit, but the information posted only covered one of the two candidates in detail.
The brief description given for the other candidate, was also very oddly formatted and difficult to read.
It seemed odd to have such a rare and last minute election quietly scheduled the same day of the No Kings rally and Pride Festival, especially after the vote regarding the millage for the Orleans Parish Sheriff budget was criticized for being scheduled during Jazz fest.
Anyway, I got up early on Saturday a little before 6 am and found an article covering both candidates. I tried to post the article but as soon as I hit submit, the post was already removed.
Weird, I thought maybe somebody already posted the information and I must have missed it. I checked the subreddit and still didn’t see it. Odd, so I tried to just post it as a text post with the information and link included, but again, it was removed as soon as I hit submit.
… Very weird, I figured I must have been temporarily suspended from posting or something, but I was still able to comment as usual, and a few hours later, when I posted something about the protest, I had no issues.
I was planning to go vote along with several other people after the No King protest. But by the time the protest was over, people were learning voters were being turned away because the voting locations were saying they ran out of ballots.
I thought that might be disinformation, so I went anyway. Confirmed that yep, I couldn’t vote. The best they could offer was allowing me to add my name, phone number, and optionally who I would have voted for if I had been allowed to vote, to a list of names being collected on an unofficial sheet of spare printer paper.
New Orleans voters in rare conservation district election turned away in droves Saturday
Hundreds of New Orleans residents showed up to vote Saturday in the Crescent Soil and Water Conservation District election only to find all the available ballots had already been cast.
The race, between the incumbent, urban farmer Erica “Sage” Johnson of Orleans Parish, and Lloyd Landry IV, a commercial fishing captain from St. Charles Parish, will decide who represents the district covering Orleans, Jefferson and St. Charles parishes.
The district’s five-member board works with landowners to manage resources, including water, soil, forests and wildlife. There are 44 districts across the state and they fall under the jurisdiction of the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries.
The district said ahead of the election that only 300 ballots would be available at each of the eight polling places throughout the three parishes and urged voters to come early.
Still, many arriving at the three voting locations in New Orleans as early as 9 a.m. were surprised to find the available ballots there had already run out.
This is all suspicious as fuck, and it doesn’t help that the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries has officially partnered with ICE and other government agencies via an executive order (Operation Geaux) created by our governor.
5 state agencies enter into ICE partnerships under ‘Operation GEAUX’
The head of city council, who is also one of the top candidates for the upcoming mayoral election (if we’re allowed to vote by then) has called for a do-over.
Councilwoman Helena Moreno calls for redo Soil and Water Board election
I guess we’ll just have to wait and see what happens.
Here are what the official ballots looked like if anyone is interested.
A. They literally could have just given people a laptop, printer access, and a pair of scissors to make more.
B. Using these seems like it creates the risk of people just creating new votes to add on to the total tally. Especially odd given the very sheisty recount that somebody paid for using an alias, after the vote for the sheriff budget, where an official suddenly remembered some extra ballots he had forgotten about in another room.
Literally, that’s why hardly anyone in the city or even that subreddit knew about the election? Bc it’s was just being spammed sooooo hard?
Here’s a post reminding people to vote, that was allowed on that subreddit. This is where I ended up just copying and pasting the information that morning in a comment. Bc in that post, there was no helpful information included about the candidates people would be voting for.
https://www.reddit.com/r/NewOrleans/comments/1lafng3/comment/mxq3lhf/
Here is the only other post I had come across on that sub as of yesterday morning. It seems suspiciously skewed in favor of only one of the candidates:
https://www.reddit.com/r/NewOrleans/comments/1lahnax/a_rare_louisiana_election_is_happening_this/
In my opinion, making sure people in a local subreddit are aware of who/what they’re actually voting for/against or choosing to sit out and not even bother to vote for/against, is very important. When the only other posts available seem to conveniently ignore or suppress important information, I would say it’s a bit misleading to label attempts by a member of the community to simply spread factual information about both candidates “spam”