Yesterday my city held a very rare election that most people didn’t know about until the last minute. I learned about it on Friday via this same subreddit, but the information posted only covered one of the two candidates in detail.
It seemed odd to have such a rare and last minute election quietly scheduled the same day of the No Kings rally and Pride Festival, especially after the vote for the Orleans Parish Sheriff budget was criticized for being scheduled during Jazz fest.
Anyway, I got up early on Saturday a little before 6 am and found an article covering both candidates. I tried to post the article but as soon as I hit submit, the post was already removed.
Weird, I thought maybe somebody already posted the information and I must have missed it. I checked the subreddit and still didn’t see it. Odd, so I tried to just post it as a text post with the information and link included, but again, it was removed as soon as I hit submit.
… Very weird, I figured I must have been temporarily suspended from posting or something, but I was still able to comment as usual, and a few hours later, when I posted something about the protest, I had no issues.
I was planning to go vote along with several other people after the No King protest. But by the time the protest was over, people were learning voters were being turned away because the voting locations were saying they ran out of ballots.
I thought that might be disinformation, so I went anyway. Confirmed that yep, I couldn’t vote. The best they could offer was allowing me to add my name, phone number, and optionally who I would have voted for if I had been allowed to vote, to a list of names being collected on an unofficial sheet of spare printer paper.
New Orleans voters in rare conservation district election turned away in droves Saturday
Hundreds of New Orleans residents showed up to vote Saturday in the Crescent Soil and Water Conservation District election only to find all the available ballots had already been cast.
The race, between the incumbent, urban farmer Erica “Sage” Johnson of Orleans Parish, and Lloyd Landry IV, a commercial fishing captain from St. Charles Parish, will decide who represents the district covering Orleans, Jefferson and St. Charles parishes.
The district’s five-member board works with landowners to manage resources, including water, soil, forests and wildlife. There are 44 districts across the state and they fall under the jurisdiction of the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries.
The district said ahead of the election that only 300 ballots would be available at each of the eight polling places throughout the three parishes and urged voters to come early.
Still, many arriving at the three voting locations in New Orleans as early as 9 a.m. were surprised to find the available ballots there had already run out.
This is all suspicious as fuck, and it doesn’t help that the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries has officially partnered with ICE and other government agencies via an executive order (Operation Geaux) created by our governor.
5 state agencies enter into ICE partnerships under ‘Operation GEAUX’
The head of city council, who is also one of the top candidates for the upcoming mayoral election (if we’re allowed to vote by then) has called for a do-over.
Councilwoman Helena Moreno calls for redo Soil and Water Board election
I guess we’ll just have to wait and see what happens.
Your post got removed for being a repost. It’s currently on the front page of that sub.
Edit: actually, posts announcing the election are no longer on the first page, since they are 2 days old. Multiple posts about the ballots running out and what to do are on the front page.
There can never be enough posts about getting out to vote, especially now with and especially with how low voter turnout has been.
My text post (not a link post) discussing the candidates was also automatically removed after the link post was removed first.
Would you mind sending me the link for the article post you’re referring to though? Bc like I said when it first failed, I figured it had already been posted, but when I searched for it, I couldn’t find it. I would really appreciate it though if I did just miss it and you could send it to me. Maybe it’s bc I’m on mobile browser, but sorted by top, I’m still not seeing it?
The only posts I came across at all on the subreddit discussing the election, only provided information about one of the 2 candidates. A lot of info about Landry and almost nothing about who the incumbent was or how she was also qualified for the position.
Still doesn’t explain why a text post would be removed too
Yeah, the automod removed your second post. And no, I’m not going to scroll back through the subreddit when you are capable of that.
When there’s already a top post reminding people to vote, mods should remove other posts saying the same thing. That’s called spam.
Bruh you’re full of shit
Why would automod remove a link post discussing candidates?
Because the mod deleted your first post and you were spamming.
For the record, I was pretty close to deleting this post for spam. Insulting people isn’t convincing me to leave it up
Ok dude, if you want to delete it that’s fine. I won’t bother posting here anymore bc this feels very much like the kind of gaslighting I moved from Reddit to Lemmy to get away from.
Same powermods that made reddit a fascist hellhole are working here now, just keep that in mind
If I’m reading a context of this thread correctly that Jeff guy is a mod on read it also? Cuz he’s defending it for no reason I can see otherwise. And I’m familiar enough with him on Lemmy to recognize the name in an extremely unfavorable light.
You made a misleading post. I corrected the record with a simple explanation. Sorry that spam isn’t allowed on Reddit or Lemmy. When 50 people post the same thing, 49 are going to get removed every single time.
Literally, that’s why hardly anyone in the city or even that subreddit knew about the election? Bc it’s was just being spammed sooooo hard?
Here’s a post reminding people to vote, that was allowed on that subreddit. This is where I ended up just copying and pasting the information that morning in a comment. Bc in that post, there was no helpful information included about the candidates people would be voting for.
https://www.reddit.com/r/NewOrleans/comments/1lafng3/comment/mxq3lhf/
Here is the only other post I had come across on that sub as of yesterday morning. It seems suspiciously skewed in favor of only one of the candidates:
https://www.reddit.com/r/NewOrleans/comments/1lahnax/a_rare_louisiana_election_is_happening_this/
In my opinion, making sure people in a local subreddit are aware of who/what they’re actually voting for/against or choosing to sit out and not even bother to vote for/against, is very important. When the only other posts available seem to conveniently ignore or suppress important information, I would say it’s a bit misleading to label attempts by a member of the community to simply spread factual information about both candidates “spam”
Are there any rules about the legitimacy of the results when not enough people vote? 300x8 ballots is not nearly enough for a city like NoLA.
It wasn’t even just New Orleans. The district covers three parishes (Orleans, Jefferson, and Saint Charles). Only 3 of the 5 voting locations were actually in New Orleans (so 900 ballots for the entire city).
What the fuck? Even if a single voter couldn’t vote in an election, that election no longer determine people’s opinion. Outright denying voters present is absolutely unacceptable
Why are you still using Reddit? Haven’t Reddit admins proven over and over that they are willing to manipulate content on their platform to influence their users? Haven’t they shown you that their platform is worth abandoning??
If nothing else, this experience should demonstrate that it is time to switch to Lemmy full time.
Bc there are still too many people depending on it to help keep them informed, so until Lemmy grows and more people move here, it’s not as useful for communicating very important information to local communities.
How useful of a platform is it if only selected information is allowed to be shared? From my perspective, it is only useful for Reddit admins want it to be useful for.
In your particular case, it was NOT useful for communicating very important information to your local community, unless I am misunderstanding your post here.
So by you and others continuing to use Reddit instead of committing to another platform, the suppression of information is facilitated/implicitly supported.
Well I guess we can agree to disagree
Also can’t find community pictures posted like the ones here:
https://www.reddit.com/r/NewOrleans/comments/1lc35n3/a_few_faces_of_pride_2025/
5th one is the best.
