Thursday, Przekota's lead shriveled to just 162 votes. On Friday, with more suburban votes counted, but no new City votes yet posted, Przekota's margin was down to 86 votes. By Saturday, she was only four votes ahead.
The latest online numbers, after more City votes were counted Sunday, put Cosgrove in the lead, 13,126 to 12,957 -- only a 169 vote margin, to be sure, but the trend is clear.
Since I last updated this race on Saturday, Cosgrove has picked up 406 votes, Przekota only 233.
Some, if not most, of these newly-added votes come from the batch of roughly 10,000 ballots that were delivered by USPS on the evening of March 18, but somehow overlooked. The link in that sentence should take you to the first in this series of four Tweets (even if we are supposed to call the site 'X', I think we still best describe individual posts thereon as 'Tweets'):
I know that many FWIW readers -- the brightest ones, perhaps -- have sworn off X, or Twitter, or whatever you may wish to call it. I have spent far too many unhappy hours this weekend, struggling in the Twitter muck, trying to follow and make sense of the aftermath of the St. Joseph's Day Primary: There is good, accurate news to be had in the swirling flotsam and jetsam on that site, albeit often covered in a paranoid toxic ooze. It's depressing, even soul-crushing. But there are occasional voices of reason that may be heard, faintly, when not drowned out by the screams of outrage, real or feigned, crazed or calculated, often grossly disproportionate to any possible provocation.
So kind of like discovery motion practice.
And on an infinite variety of topics.
But I will continue to endure it as best I can, for as long as I can, because there are almost certainly more updates to come.
The election was a week ago tomorrow.
I saw the toxic comments in other posts and it clearly is representative of concerns about voting results in other obvious examples, like the Presidential Election.
ReplyDeleteThe integrity of elections is probably one of the highest concerns for any democracy. However, the primary concern here is return on election night vs official count later. Historically, this never really an issue unless it is a tight race. When it's a tight race, the intricacies, bureaucratic issues, amounts allocated to holding elections, and suspicions of government and opposition candidates comes into heavy play.
Primarily, for quick returns electronic voting would seem to expedite the process of results. Concerns about integrity are mainly about hacking and verification. Regarding verification, tax returns are filed electronically, etc. Electronically voting is divided into e-voting (electronically voting in front of govt official) and i-voting (voting remotely on your own device, computer, phone, etc.). Despite worries, i-voting ... voting on your phone, appeared to only have once issue in New South Wales 2021 i-Vote election because of network and/or app/server issues. NOTE: not due to corruption or any other issues.
Regarding hacking or verification: this is has never apparently been an issue in a remote filing/voting situation, for example, taxes or even i-voting.
Hacking, however, has been apparently an issue in the current voting systems, such as e-voting, where you have to use the govt device at the polling station in front of a government worker, or perhaps an intrusion to look at vote totals before they are transmitted to a central office.
That being said, i-voting (voting from your own device) actually provides greater security of an audit trail -as anyone would know from cases involving electronic/phone/server activities.
In summary: I believe i-voting (personal device voting remotely in your own convenience) would solve the issues you raised provided (1) there would be enough funding to implement it; (2) govt would have access to audit trails (i.e., a private company contracted to run the i-voting apps shares real time access with the govt to copy, without write access, the hashes and server repository caches); (3) companies/govt running the apps have enough server capacity for the actual election.
Capacity estimate: of the top 10 election turnout worldwide (primaries, general, federal, state, local & every country) predicted voters vs actual voters, none exceed higher than 10% except one: Myanmar General Election of 2010 (no more than 50% predicted; 77.3% actual turnout).
So, basically if the government/company could guarantee at least 10%+ server capacity higher than highest expected/historical turnout, with government approval and funding to guarantee this capacity i-voting would appear to be more secure than current methods and much faster.