I just read the Anderson v. Raffensperger lawsuit and I’m torn between screaming, laughing, and going up to Georgia and going full election valkyrie on some people.

I can tell you why things keep going to hell in Fulton, DeKalb,Cobb, and Gwinnett. It’s not rocket science, and it doesn’t need more policy wonks. It needs people who are on the ground and know what to do when the s*** hits the fan.

There are just not that many voters in the GA counties I just mentioned to justify the wait times. My rural county in FL has the same number of voters as Cobb or Gwinnett. Fulton has about as many voters as Hillsborough County FL.

Florida does not have the issues with lines that Georgia does in almost every election. Since 2008, FL cut wait times by more than 80% , and that’s with two fewer weeks of Early Voting than GA offers. Reduction in wait times is 100% possible.

The higher the number of moving parts involved to cast a ballot, the more opportunities there are for disaster. GA’s system has lot of moving parts that might work if there was a concentrated commitment to pollworker training and polling place readiness.

If a third of pollworkers can’t get the pollbook and tabulation equipment up and running at least half an hour before the polling place opens, that should be sending up neon red flags that either the equipment has issues, or the training does.

Election departments owe it to their pollworkers to provide quality training. It’s hard. I learned that when I wound up teaching the electronic pollbook classes this year. You don’t want to scare them, but try to prepare them for the inevitable.

There absolutely needs to be a clearly worded troubleshooting guide provided to each worker who runs the equipment, and hands on practice. And more than one tech support person per county.

And if pollworkers aren’t being supplied with power cords, surge protectors, adequate paper stock, and properly assembled equipment in their polling places, they just got set up to fail. Nothing makes this okay.

Logic and Accuracy testing are clearly not enough, if a polling place has 10 ballot marking devices and fewer than half work. Is there any post election debriefing where technical issues are grouped by frequency and severity? If not, why not?

The vendor for Georgia lists the “ideal” machine to voter ratio, which seems a tad lower than practical-until you look at the purchasing order/sales contract that was executed and realize that GA didn’t even follow the vendor recommendations.

It was a classic case of penny wise and pound foolish. Ballot marking devices were deployed to polling places without ballot stock or AC power supplies. No extension cords. These were brand new devices that had been successfully deployed in other states.

While voting equipment is designed to be pretty durable, there are plenty of ways to shorten its functional lifespan and cause internal damage. And any part of the system that’s COTS is as glitchy and easy to break as any other consumer electronic.

While I absolutely understand why polling places need to be consolidated, 6500 voters assigned to an Election Day polling place with fewer than 10 or 15 working ballot marking devices and only one ballot scanner was suicide.

High volume vote centers (2k expected voters or more) should have a ballot marking device for every 50-100 voters, and scanners for every 500 voters. Or screw the BMDs and switch to optical scan paper ballots. No glitches and faster processing.

There will never be the right machine to voter ratio at the right time. There’s either too many or not enough, and elex officials have finite resources available. It’s financially smart to use as few costly resources as possible.