Freethought Radio – November 6, 2025

https://fed.brid.gy/r/https://ffrf.org/news/freethought-radio/freethought-radio-november-6-2025/

🇺🇸 Poll Worker Reflection 🇺🇸

🗳️One of the best parts of being a #pollworker is witnessing new voters cast their ballots: from a newly naturalized citizen to a daughter guiding her mother through her first #vote. Each story is a reminder— #democracy lives in these moments.

👏🏽Everyone cheered. Everyone wore their “I Voted” sticker with pride.

🇺🇸I’m grateful to all who made it possible—fellow civil servants, law enforcement, and volunteers—who ensured the process was safe, accessible, and welcoming.

#Boston #pollWorker story…
When we were processing early voting ballots sent to us from City Hall to count, the Poll Pad said one of the early voters was inactive and needed to complete an affirmation of continuous residency. This, of course, was impossible, since the voter wasn't there, just their ballot was.
1/2
#BostonMA

Interesting #pollWorker story from today…
Unfortunately one of our voters forgot her wallet. She lives only 5 minutes away from the polling place, so after waiting a few minutes to see if she would come back for it, I walked over to her house to try to return it. Unfortunately there was no answer when I rang the bell, so I left a note. She didn't return before the polls closed, so we had to send it with our paperwork to the elections department for them to figure out what to do about.

Election day 2025: Live updates, coverage and results

Bomb threats have disrupted voting in some parts of New Jersey, temporarily shutting down a string of polling…
#NewsBeep #News #Headlines #ballot #Bombthreat #center #electionday #high-profilerace #Lawenforcement #NewJersey #pollworker #pollinglocation #Security #state #threat #topelectionofficial #UnitedStates #Us #USA #voter #Voting
https://www.newsbeep.com/229094/

🇺🇸 Election Day Poll Worker

🗽For the fifth time, I’m volunteering as a poll worker—standing alongside dedicated civil servants from all walks of life in our community. Together, we ensure the voting process is safe, accessible, and welcoming for everyone.

🗳️The polls open soon. Get out and vote today!

#ElectionDay #vote #pollworker #democracy #community #Election2025 #Volunteer #maldenma #northshorema #boston

South Carolina Resident Sues Over “So Help Me God” Requirement for Poll Workers

https://fed.brid.gy/r/https://ffrf.org/legal/ongoing-lawsuits/south-carolina-resident-sues-over-so-help-me-god-requirement-for-poll-workers/

🗳️Tonight I joined fellow public servants from our community for poll worker training. This will be my fifth time serving, and it was inspiring to see so many stepping up to make voting safe and accessible for all.

🇺🇸Grateful to be part of the team that helps #democracy run.

#vote #patriotism #volunteer #pollworker #Election2025 #maldenma #northshorema

#Boston folks, the Election Department needs more poll-workers! Please see https://boston.gov/pollworkers for more details.
Help preserve our democracy!
I've been working the polls for several years. Feel free to ask me any questions you have about serving.
#BostonMA #pollWorker

#HispanicHeritageMonth #Patriotism

This November, for the fifth time, I’m stepping up as a poll🗳️ worker because there’s a nationwide shortage, and our democracy needs us all.

As a first-generation 🇺🇸🇩🇴Dominican American, I’m deeply grateful for what this country’s offered my family and I believe that volunteerism is patriotism.

📣 ¡Pa’lante! Let’s do this together.

#PollWorker #community #Volunteerism #Democracy #Latinos #Immigrants #ElectionDay #freedom #vote #Palante

Ok, that's all the interesting stuff I can remember for now. Hope you've enjoyed this glimpse into #pollWorker life.
Remember to vote in every election!
/fin

Observations from working the polls at yesterday's preliminary municipal election in #Boston:
❌ Less than 20% of registered voters turned out for yesterday's election. This sucks. With everything that is going on in this country, how do people not understand how important it is to vote? I mean, if more people had voted than Donald Trump would not have won either in 2016 or 2024.
#BostonMA #elections #pollWorker
🧵

For those who are curious, here are the poll-worker training manual and quick reference guides distributed to #Boston poll-workers for the preliminary municipal election taking place tomorrow. I've elided the private election department phone numbers meant to be used only by poll-workers, but these are otherwise unchanged.
#voting #elections #BostonMA #pollWorker
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1BHeljbM7eoG5p-sy5luW36AWZgYwNgZY?usp=sharing

I'm doing my online #pollWorker training tonight.
It is always amusing to observe how many of the people attending these trainings find the technology (Google Meet, plus "please type your name in the chat so we can record your attendance") challenging.
Tonight, however, it is somewhat worrisome. If they can't handle Google Meet, are they going to be able to handle the new electronic poll-books?
#PollPad

I attended #Boston #PollWorker training today, and after hearing what they have to say about the new electronic poll books, I am much less worried that they could prevent people from voting or allow people to vote who shouldn't. I do, however, have some remaining concerns. See my new write-up at https://blog.kamens.us/2025/07/21/city-of-boston-electronic-poll-books-they-do-know-what-theyre-doing/ .
#BostonMA #elections #voting

#Boston Election Department switching over fully to electronic poll-books; I hope they know what they’re doing!

Using electronic poll-books at 275 precincts on election day is a much heavier lift than using them at ten early-voting locations. I hope they've covered all their bases!

https://blog.kamens.us/2025/07/07/boston-election-department-switching-over-fully-to-electronic-poll-books-i-hope-they-know-what-theyre-doing/
#BostonMA #elections #voting #pollWorker

Boston Election Department switching over fully to electronic poll-books; I hope they know what they’re doing!

[See my update here.]

Today, the Boston (Massachusetts) Election Department emailed to poll-workers (of which I am one) an update about the upcoming municipal elections in September and November: we are going to be using electronic poll-books not just for early voting as we have in the past, but also on election day at every precinct.

The “poll-book” is the book that lists every voter in the precinct. Identical books are kept at the check-in and check-out tables, and every voter has to be marked off in both books on election day, at check-in before they are given their ballot and at check-out before they put their ballot into the tabulator.

Up until this year, on election day the poll-books at precincts have been literally printed paper books, while at early voting locations, iPads running custom software were used instead. These iPads have cellular modems in them and talk to a central database maintained by the Election Department (more likely a contractor on its behalf). Using electronic books for early voting is necessary to allow any voter to vote at any early-voting location while still preventing people from voting twice.

I’ve sometimes staffed early-voting locations, and I’ve enjoyed using the electronic poll-books. They are faster than the paper books, and they eliminate some of the drudgery of checking people in and out. I can assure all you voters out there that yes, voting will be easier and faster for you after the switch to electronic books, if they work properly.

That “if” is where things start to get a dicey. There are two really big differences between early voting and election day, and as a poll-worker, I am concerned that the Election Department may not have adequately anticipated and planned for them.

Early voting can fail; voting on election day can’t

If there is a tech issue with the electronic poll-books which prevents them from working properly during early voting, voters can be told to try again at a later early voting day or on election day itself. No early voting day is any voter’s last chance to vote in an election.

In contrast, obviously, if the electronic books stop working on election day, there is no do-over. The Election Department has until 8pm on election day to figure out what’s wrong, fix it, and allow everyone to vote, and the longer it takes for them to fix the problem, the more likely it is that people will be disenfranchised.

Switching back to paper poll-books held in reserve if the electronic books fail mid-day on election day is not an option, because no one who voted before the electronic books failed has been marked off in the paper books, which means it’s impossible to prevent people from double-voting.

There is, at least theoretically, one other option, which is to switch to issuing provisional ballots for every single voter, which can then be verified by the Election Department after election day. I say “theoretically” because issuing provisional ballots take much longer per voter than just checking people in and out in the poll-books, and they have to be counted downtown after the polls close rather than at the precincts. While I wouldn’t say all that is impossible, I’m not at all convinced it’s feasible, at least not if there is a widespread failure of the electronic poll-books, vs. a failure localized to a small number of precincts during a low-turnout election.

There are way more precincts than early voting locations

The most early voting locations the City of Boston typically opens on the same day has been around ten. In contrast, there are 275 precincts, so when we switch to electronic poll-books on election day, there will be 2,740% more poll-books being actively used than during the busiest early-voting day.

Now, I don’t know… Maybe the vendor that the City of Boston contracts with to provide the electronic poll-books and the centralized back-end infrastructure that they interact with has done robust capacity planning and ensured that there is sufficient capacity and redundancy built into the system to withstand 2,740% more traffic than it has ever had to withstand in the past.

Or maybe they haven’t.

Speaking as someone who has been working in tech for nearly 40 years, the latter seems to happen a lot more frequently than the former, especially when it comes to government contractors.

Only time will tell

Some time in the next month or so I will be attending mandatory training on how we will be conducting elections with the electronic poll-books. I intend to ask then for details about both what we will do if the poll-books fail, and what has been done to ensure that the system can handle the increased load of every precinct being online at once, if that information isn’t included in the training. Watch this blog to find out what I’ve learned.

If there are actual problems on election day (in either September or November) I’ll also be writing about that.

[See my update here.]

#Boston #elections #pollWorker #voting

“She Won” election conspiracy theories defy belief and do not help

Over the past two weeks, I’ve seen a few friends share a post alleging a sweeping conspiracy to steal the presidential election–not the 2020 election, as Donald Trump and his cult followers have been alleging without proof ever since, but the 2024 contest. These friends have not vouched for the theory put forth in that post and a series of others posted at a newsletter site; at most, they’ve said things along the lines of “these raise interesting questions.”

So I read those “This Will Hold” posts and a separate report posted by a group called the Common Coalition. To summarize thousands of words of copy: They allege that surprising results in swing states and even individual counties–notably, voters choosing Democrats downballot and then picking Trump or not voting for any presidential candidate–are too statistically unlikely to be the result of voters making their own choices and instead are the result of an elaborate plot involving compromised Tripp Lite uninterruptible power supplies that were remotely reprogrammed on Elon Musk’s orders via SpaceX’s Starlink satellites to change vote totals on Dominion and ES&S voting systems.

No, really. Speaking as a tech journalist who has written a fair amount about SpaceX and as a poll worker who has put in 15-plus hour days helping people to vote in nine elections: I’m sorry, but I can only regard them as engagingly-written claptrap. 

Here’s why I think that:

• If so many UPSes were shipped with hidden cellular modems and antennas to election offices in counties, cities and states run by Democratic administrations, how have none of them surfaced? (Bear in mind, election offices don’t have huge budgets to buy high-end hardware. I have never seen anything but generic power strips in my own polling places.)
• At the end of 2024 and still today, Starlink’s only widely-available service to phones is text messaging. SpaceX has done limited tests of data, but Elon Musk was willing to roll the dice on that working clandestinely in dozens or hundreds of devices across the U.S.? 
• Trump or Musk tweeting out absurd claims or preditions is no kind of proof or confession, because they both shitpost all the time while rarely intersecting with reality.
• No part of this extensive conspiracy inside SpaceX has leaked at any point, even as SpaceX employees have come forward to accuse Musk of sexual harassment and indifference to workplace safety at considerable risk to themselves. 
• This Will Hold’s posts don’t mention the “risk-limiting audits” that a growing number of states conduct to check for exactly this kind of post-election ballot tampering. Nevada’s, for example, found “no variations” from the reported results. Ignoring risk-limiting audits in a theory of election fraud is an enormous tell, because election-integrity experts will tell you they’re as essential as hand-marked paper ballots scanned by machines (which is why every state should adopt them). See, for example, the National Academies’ 2018 report Securing the Vote: Protecting American Democracy.
• If people really had cast votes for Harris that somehow vanished, why have we not seen that variance in post-election polling and surveys of voters? See, for example, the data-science firm Catalist’s “What Happened in 2024” analysis and the Pew Research Center’s just-published report on 2024 turnout.
• Many voters really did leave the presidential part of their ballot blank. In Virginia (where the first warnings of a Kamala Harris loss were returns from Loudoun County showing her underperforming Biden’s 2020 numbers), the former vice president got 2,335,395 votes while Sen. Tim Kaine (D) got 2,417,115 votes. In my state and, it seems, others, her problem was Trump getting more turnout from 2020 voters and from new voters than she did.
• Musk spending $250 million and change to persuade those people to vote probably did shape the outcome. So did Trump lying about his opponent and a great many other things while presenting himself as an icon of never-surrender success, with Fox News amplifying all that. But the die may have been cast when Joe Biden decided to run for reelection despite evident trouble selling his message and then not dropping out until July of 2024—leaving Harris to answer the hardest call to the bullpen in American presidential-election history. 

The unfortunate and ugly reality is that American voters showed awful judgment last November, and we are now all paying the price for that. There’s just a meanness in this world, as Springsteen sings, and our country is not and has never been exempt from it. Conspiracy theories might help people think otherwise, but this kind of self-delusional behavior will not help write a different script for 2026 and 2028.

#2024Election #CommonCoalition #conspiracyTheories #DonaldTrump #electionIntegrity #electionOfficer #ElonMusk #grift #grifters #KamalaHarris #pollWorker #SpaceX #Starlink #ThisWillHold #TrippLite #turnout

So, Lirazel, how did the elections go?

Very smoothly. All our translators (Mandarin, Cantonese, and Haitian Creole) had work to do, and yours truly helped a blind gentleman vote. We figured out a better way to process write-ins. 700+ ballots in 11 hours is a pretty good pace!

I had to reprove the bake sake ladies for loud political talk within 150 feet of a polling place, but otherwise, all was peace.

Not happy with the outcome, but that's different.

#pollworker

@jik @taur10 (þ = thorn = th)
OOF.

I worked þe election yesterday. Workers get to polling locations @ 05AMCST (for set up), polls opened @ 6, and closed 7PM, þen breaking þe equipment down, back into þe transport cages, þen location managers took þe Ballot Boxes to þe designated drop-off location for þe Board of Elections.
Didn't really look at any results when I got home.
#PollWorker #voting #2024Election 1/?