Election denier Leah Anderson used her new position as Minnehaha County auditor to turn a county commission meeting into an election-conspiracy rally yesterday.
Anderson placed on the commissioners’ agenda a contract with Election Systems & Software of Omaha to print ballots for all county elections through 2026 and design and code all electronic ballots and related voice files. Inflation has hit ballot printing: ES&S is charging two cents more to print each ballot (now 26¢ each) and a penny more to fold or score each ballot (now 3¢ per fold) than it did in 2020. Printing color bars on each ballot will be cheaper, down to 2¢ per sheet from 3¢ in 2020, but the design services have all gone up, as has the number of registered voters in Minnehaha County, so the contract will likely cost the county more than the $123,678.64 that Anderson said those same services did in the 2022 election cycle.
The contract has nothing to do with counting ballots, but Anderson used the agenda item as an opening to invite her election-rigging friends from the right-wing SD Canvassing Group to huff and puff that counting ballots manually would produce more accurate results than using ballot tabulating machines:
…Many of her supporters who favored hand counting, however, added negative comments about ESS and asked the commissioners to reject the company’s contract.
Allen Wente of Sioux Falls said the county should “get rid of the company” as they have been unable to provide information about the accuracy of the voting machines.
“They aren’t giving us the ability to audit them,” he said.
Resident Gary Meyer said there are serious questions about the company’s “secrecy, tactics and connections,” while his wife, Cindy, called them “corrupt.”
Former businessman Randy Amundson said the county needs to do three things. They are to make sure the tabulation is honest, open to any interest group the checking and accuracy of ballots and to have experts available with knowledge about how the system and machines work.
Darla Shelberg of neighboring McCook County told the board that she was willing to help count ballots in the next election, instead of using the machines, and that she would stay all night or as long as it would take [staff, “Minnehaha County Auditor Suggests Hand Counting Some Ballots,” Sioux Falls Live, 2023.09.26].
First, Leah’s election kooks ought to love Election Systems & Software. Their Omaha HQ is on John Galt Boulevard, which real estate developer Ron Abboud named for the protagonist of Ayn Rand’s turgid Atlas Shrugged, a wealthy iconoclast who led a conspiracy of elites to withdraw to an implausible hidden enclave in the Rockies and let the government and economy collapse. Anyone who puts John Galt on their contracts and letterhead ought to be Leah’s and SD Canvassing’s heroes!
Second, the claim that humans count ballots more accurately than machines is false. Research and practice show that manual counts produce less accurate results than machine counts. We proved that again in Tripp County last year. But facts never stand in the way of conspiracy theorists pushing their preferred fantasies.
The commissioners dropped bombs on both the false claims and the auditor’s deviation from the agenda:
Commissioner Joe Kippley was the most vocal in response to all of the comments about hand counting of ballots, disparagement of the company and how the group was “smuggled in” to raise other issues rather than what he thought was routine county business of renewing the contract with ESS to simply work on ballot preparation.
…“I don’t like the way this was set up and brought before us,” he said about the comments by residents about the company and hand counting of ballots.
…“I don’t have a lot of patience with this nonsense around the election fraud stuff,” he said [SFL, 2023.09.26].
Commissioner Kippley is absolutely right that Anderson violated the agenda and wasted the commission’s time with nonsense. Alas, Kippley couldn’t resist some false both-sidesism:
“…I’m old enough that I came of age in the 2000 election. There was a sore loser in that election too. Every election in our free society has a losing side and that losing side needs to learn how to lose” [Kippley, quoted in Eric Mayer, “Requests for Hand Counting Ballots in Minnehaha County,” KELO-TV, 2023.09.26].
Back that truck up, Joe. If you really remember the 2000 election, you’ll remember that Al Gore did indeed question the ballot count in Florida, but when the United States Supreme Court shut that recount down and effectively declared George W. Bush the winner, Gore conceded. Gore himself gaveled down attempts to challenge Florida’s electors and certified the Electoral College vote for Bush on January 7, 2001. Gore did not file bogus lawsuits in multiple states. Gore did not call on followers to storm the Capitol and wage war against the Constitution. Gore did not tell Big Lies about the 2000 election to stoke an ongoing campaign to hijack election offices with incompetent enemies of democracy like Leah Anderson and Monae Johnson.
Al Gore manned up and admitted he lost pretty quickly. Donald Trump continues to deny his factual loss, and Leah Anderson to this day peddles that denial in word and deed.
Leah Anderson can’t stick to the facts. She can’t stick to a simple agenda. She is demonstrating at every turn that she cannot be trusted to run a free and fair election.
The great pumpkin is going to win this state no matter what, why are they making such a big deal about it? I wish my vote counted, but it doesn’t.
Gore did call on followers to storm the Capitol and wage war against the Constitution. Seriously?
How to rig hand counters? Brainwash magats. Simple and easily done.
Keep up the good work, Master.
Watching the SDGOP disintegrating is virtually rapturous so even the War Toilet has become a war zone.
Hand counted ballots have been shown, time and again, to be less accurate than technological alternatives. These lunatics are demanding change from a more accurate system based on no evidence. Enough with these people.
Electronic counting with supplemental hand/manual/whatever counting for discrepancies is the way to go.
Sorry to see South Dakota, and especially Sioux Falls, fall into the MAGA pit since I left.
The idea that there was any problem with the ruby-red vote in the 2020 election in South Dakota is complete nonsense. If that election, where Donald Trump, John Thune, etc., all WON, was rigged, there is no meaning to that word. There is no argument against mail-in ballots, or voting machines, or anything. This is not a state that the former President lost. So what the hell are they talking about? This is straight-up cult BS.
Labeling yourself a “victim” is addictive.
Well, the 2000 election in Florida was a cluster**** in many ways. The Supreme Court did cut off the Florida recount (a hand count, by the way), rather the chance it that the remaining uncounted votes would slide the election over to Gore. Not all votes were recounted, which was a horrible miscarriage of justice that gave Bush the electoral votes even though he may not have won the state. Gore’s decision to accept the decision of the court was the right one. I suppose he could have thrown a temper tantrum, encouraged violence and engaged in an attempted coup, but, unlike Republicans, he and Democrats believed in the rule of law. I would like to think that Bush would have done the same had the decision gone the other way.
Anyone who has hand-counted ballots knows it is a mind-numbing exercise, especially when there are many races on the ballot. It takes forever, and it is far more costly. Worse, it’s far more inaccurate than a machine counted vote.
The MAGAs think elections are stolen when their candidates don’t win in the Republican primaries. They are now at the point of thinking Thune, Rounds, and Johnson stole their elections.
Scott that is funny but likely true!
Leah should be aware that she will be held accountable for her politically stilted disinformation implementing policy.
“These officials set in motion a cruel program of ripping apart migrant families. It is only right that they provide testimony under oath in this case,” argued Victoria Petty, staff attorney at the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights of the San Francisco Bay Area. “Thousands of parents and children will endure the lasting harm of this barbaric treatment for the rest of their lives….holding the United States government accountable for its officials’ misconduct that deeply traumatized asylum-seeking families….”
MAGA officials claimed that they instituted the separation policy as a means of prosecuting parents who crossed the border illegally; however, Trump’s administration neglected to organize a process for reuniting families that were broken up and instead deported hundreds of parents while leaving the children behind.
Jeff Sessions and Kirstjen Neilson, “the duo alone had been responsible for structuring the policy as such, a fact which the judge said left her disappointed. Records show that Sessions and Nielsen approved the documents that catalyzed the separations”. https://www.salon.com/2023/09/27/orders-top-administration-officials-answer-for-family-seperation-policy/