A brief explainer on ballot styles and why they make injecting manufactured (aka bamboo) ballots into the system next to impossible.
A thread using maps of @maricopacounty
*all numbers are estimates using GIS union algorithm.
Ballot styles are what we refer to the different versions of the ballot. Every ballot has multiple races on it with different contests for different areas.
Maricopa would have 1 ballot style without cds, lds, cities, schools, etc...
At this point printing bamboo ballots would be pretty simple. Since everyone gets one ballot you can just load up on one style. Let's add congress.
There are now 8 ballot styles
Still not bad, pretty easy to hide bamboo ballots amongst only 8 ballot styles and make everything look on the up and up. Let's add legislative districts. Total is now 46
We're now starting to run into problems. While 46 is a manageable number of ballot styles the area and populations are really starting to vary. If we inject 15k bamboo ballots in a tiny area of Scottsdale it will be obvious.
Adding precincts. Total 772
Just got real...We now need to inject 772 different bamboo styles keeping population and voting behaviors into consideration. Luck! We can pull most of this off azsos so lets start coding.
Adding school districts, total now 1,017
We are nearing fantasy realm. From here on out a bamboo roadmap needs to come from a parsed and reconstructed county results file. Any registration denominators either need to be estimated with either math or geocoding.
City/Town boundaries: estimate now 1,314
The numbers just go up from here. I have not added JP, Constable, Special Taxing, MCBOS, etc...
Maricopa county had 10,920 different ballot styles.
Fraudulent ballots would have to consider population and voting behavior among frequently changing, small geographic spaces.
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