I’m glad I vote on paper here, but it’s still read by a black box scanning machine so I have no idea what happens in there. But, I’d have no idea what happens anywhere after I turn in my ballot.
We’ll need to depend on the state election officials to hold the line, and call for a new election if the they find the machines are compromised.
If we didn’t insist on knowing the results as quickly as possible we could just use paper ballots and take a couple weeks to count them.
It’s quite possible to use paper ballots and still get the results quickly. Many countries do this.
Yes, I volunteer regularly in Germany. It works just fine and is fully paper based.
The “secret” to both quick and accurate counting is to use machine counting - not counting by humans.
Want to prove it to yourself? Here’s a simple test to perform:
- Purchase a 500 sheet ream of blank printer paper.
- Count the sheets in it.
Bet you won’t come up with 500. Count them again; again, I bet you won’t come up with 500 and I bet you won’t come up with the same number as the first time you counted them.
Dude you split the 500 pack into sheets of 10 and lay them crosswise over each other. You haven’t ever done this, have you?
So, placing them in stacks of 10 fixes it all?
Let’s see, Pennsylvania had ~5,000,000 votes cast in 2022 per ballotpedia.org for senator. That would mean ~500,000 stacks of 10.
You’re sure everyone of them has exactly 10 sheets; not 9 or 11 or 8 even? They never get knocked off the table, mixed up, etc?
And remember, all parties need to count all of the ballots independently from each other - can’t trust a party to count their own candidates ballots ;-). And I’m certain we want every party to come up with the exact same count for each candidate.
Looks like (from the same reference above), that there were 7 candidates running for senator in that election. Five of which received any votes (guess the 2 write-in candidates didn’t even vote for themselves 🤷). So that’s 5M x 7 counts = 35M ballots to count . . . by hand . . . for just one mid-sized state.
And also, there is almost always more than one race on a ballot (I usually see more like 10+ on mine). So, are you going to count them once (in stacks of 10) - tallying 10+ races per ballot? Or do you plan to count them 10+ times (once for each race)?
With all due respect, I can’t see that being in any way practical even given an army of very careful people with multiple months of time.
It can’t be done (at scale) perfectly
It most certainly can, and did so until the advent of electronic voting.
The trick is production line counting: multiple people (3 - 5) count every single vote, while each counter has a watcher, handing each ballot off to the next counter for verification in production line style, and others all watch the room and everything in it. All political parties are represented; all watchers and counters are observed and switched up; everyone in the room has both the right and the responsibility to speak up about any anomaly, and they do.
Even when electronic counting gets fucked up, like in Palm Beach County in 2000, manual counting was still used. Remember butterfly ballots and hanging chads? The counting rooms in Palm Beach County worked every ballot in exactly this way, and at the time, night after night, the evening news was full of videos of watching them do it.
I don’t know what you’re thinking, but it is absolutely possible and even common to manually count ballots rapidly in such a way that not a single vote gets missed. We did it for over two hundred years in the US, and that’s how it was in the 90s before electronic counting became a thing.
All you’re really telling the rest of us is that you don’t know the history or the mechanics of voting.
Capitals below are for emphsis, not yelling.
Please site (i.e. reference) where 100,000+ votes were manually counted MULTIPLE TIMES for MULTIPLE RACES ON THE SAME BALLOTS, and the results for ALL canditates were EXACTLY the same for each count.
Also: I’m NOT SAYING that either machine and/or manually counting is not “exact enought” - I FULLY believe it is and has been for decades/centuries.
