When Max Himsl opened his electronic ballot on Friday, he was dismayed to see a candidate missing from the list of options.
Voting absentee electronically while living abroad, Himsl saw that under the options for president, only Republican Donald Trump and Independent Robert F. Kennedy Jr. were listed. Missing was Democrat Kamala Harris.
“I’m upset my democratic process was interrupted,” he said.
Election officials were notified of the error shortly after the Electronic Absentee System that allows certain voters to cast their ballot electronically went live on Friday at 8 a.m., according to the Montana Secretary of State’s Office which reported that the error was isolated to the online system.
I expected them to diddle with the election, but to do it that obviously and crude?
If you think crude is a barrier, people were goaded to storm our central governing building. Everything is downhill from there in “is it possible?”
And to do it in a state where it literally doesn’t matter? Montana was going to go red regardless, so it’s just stupid to do it there.
Ok. Well first day problems just get it fixed and notify all online absentee voters of the issue.
There are genuine “first day errors”, and there are things so completely off, they should not have reached first day at all. I mean, the list of candidates is the key issue here, and nobody even f-ing had looked at it prior to the start?
First time around humans?
No, that’s why you can’t rule out malice and stupidity.
Cheaters gonna cheat.
“Error”
Somehow I feel like this isn’t going to be the only instance of ‘errors’ as election season gets under way.
So, clearly the Montana Secretary of State’s office doesn’t do any testing before making things live.
Trying to use the Principal of Charity, it was probably just that one or more counties pushed a version of the form out from after the Republican convention, but before the Democratic one.
I’m fairly confident that if it was done with malice, they’ll figure it out in short order and handle it accordingly. Despite what Republicans want to think, there are a good number of fraud protections built into the system…if there weren’t, it would be easier and more effective for Ryssia/China/Iran/whoever else to directly hack the system than to spend the time and money paying people to shitpost devisive political garbage for months leading up to the election.
In that case, Biden would still be on the ballot.
He wasn’t an official nominee yet. Just a presumptive one.
Not suspicious at all. Mistakes happen. 🤔
That’s a feature not a bug. -Montana probably
It’s a bit suspicious when you can guess what the error was before reading the story.
So are they going to delete all the votes prior to fix and require a revote in case people were duped about their options? Or are they okay with people voting without all the proper information and options?
