"Politics: the art of using euphemisms, lies, emotionalism and fear-mongering to dupe average people into accepting--or even demanding--their own enslavement." Larken Rose
My first-time voting was a simple affair. They gave you a ballot. Then you went to the voting
booth. Inside, you found a stamp pad and a block of wood with a rubber x on one end. To mark your ballot, you tapped the ink pad with the x and then stamped your x in the box for your selection. Pretty simple, right? Years later, they went to punch cards, and you made your choices using a slider to make your selections. When all selections were made, you pulled a large handle across the large voting device, and all the punches were made at once. Most of the tabs fell out, but sometimes there were some hanging chads. Look up the hanging chads in Florida elections for Bush and Gore. This method of voting was cast to the wayside after the Bush-Gore debacle.
Elections in 2020 were anything but normal. Many states were using the Dominion voting machines. While being easy to use if you were computer savvy, they had a spotty record for accuracy up to that election. Many voters did not trust them because of suspected election interference. I thought hackers could rewrite the code to swing the election in a specific way.
In rural Georgia, where I live, the elections ran smoothly, and most of all, voters got
their votes in by closing time. I was a poll watcher for several days, and all ran smoothly. However, the election counting down in some big cities suddenly closed at 10:00 PM. As I recall, Fox News informed us that the counting of ballots would be shut down. Ballot counting would continue promptly in the morning. My family was surprised to hear this. This sort of recess had never happened in all the years I could remember. Normally, ballot counting continued until they had the total count, even if they finished in the wee hours of the morning. As election night continued, we learned that there was a water main break in one building in the Atlanta area that forced a shutdown of ballot counting. We learned later this was a lie. There was no water main break flooding the counting room. Oh well, Donald Trump was way ahead, and it looked like he would be re-elected president.
When we turned on the news in the morning, Donald Trump's commanding lead had been surpassed by Joe Biden's commanding lead! What the Hell? How could this happen? What sort of shenanigans was going on? Were the voting machines tampered with? Did they stuff the ballot boxes? Did more Democrats show up than expected? John Ossoff had been elected, now Raphael Warnock was re-elected, and Joe Biden was elected. A disaster for Republicans!
A recount was ordered, the voting machines were proven correct, the videos of stuffing the ballot boxes were tossed out, and Brad Raffensperger, the Secretary of State for Georgia, was eventually re-elected and refused to look into fraud at the ballot boxes. No tampering was found after an audit of the voting machines. Georgia Republicans were upset, and some have decided to push for hand-counted ballots.
Carey Allagood, Registrar of Voters in Toombs County, Georgia, informed me she orders a hand count of ballots after the ballots are returned from the State to be certain they match the computer print-out. Allagood does this on her own. The State of Georgia does not require a hand count. Allagood does this to be thorough and professional. Toombs County is a small rural county that seldom requires a re-count.
Now we come to the question at hand. Do we want to go back to hand-counting ballots? Some groups in the State of Georgia want to go back to hand-counting ballots the way the French do and finish before the night is over. The Chatham County Republicans have such a group.
Here is a link to Voter Today, authored by Garland Favorito, who knows more about voter
fraud in Georgia than anyone else.1 Favorito states that the software in the voting machines cannot be updated with a patch. For those who are not computer proficient, a patch is used to update the software. A patch acts like a band-aid and fixes a specific bug, glitch, or anomaly in the computer. Brad Raffensperger says Dominion has an update for the voting machines, but he will not install the update until after the next election in 2024. An update is recommended by the software company when it has rewritten code in the software to make the program work properly. This is more like surgery with more protection from malware viruses and Trojan Horses. Using logic, Republicans know the voting machines can be updated in time for the next election. Can you see why the frustration is building?
I contacted my Georgia State Representative, Leesa Hagan, to find out if she had any
information about hand-counting paper ballots. Ms. Hagan referred me to this excellent article by Jessica Huseman about the feasibility of using paper ballots.2 Please read this well-researched and well-written article. Huseman lays out the case for tabulated counting that is very hard to refute. Here are some sample headings from her article:3
Hand-counting is not a straightforward task like advocates claim.
Imagine inviting an entire city to a party, and then as you get the RSVPs, you must keep them — by law — in order. And as you tally the RSVPs, you have to individually hand-tally 60 different food choices you've asked your guests to make. You have to do this repeatedly, 1,200 different times.
Just because other countries hand-count ballots doesn't mean it is feasible in the United States.
A popular argument from hand counters is that if France's hand counts its entire election in a single evening, why can't we? Well, because of a lot of really simple-to-understand reasons.
France — which is one-fifth the population of the U.S. — has simpler ballots because they count one race. The United States counts pages of races at once, mashing together local, state, and federal choices onto one ballot. As a result of our diffuse federal system, our ballots are the longest of any democracy.
There are some really good academic studies on errors made in hand counting.
The studies conclude these efforts are far more error-prone than counts using tabulators.
Ultimately, you don't have to rely on theories or even studies to see with your own eyes how bad of an idea this is.
In Nye County, Nev., for example, a local commissioner attempted to reject the
machine-counted ballots of his county's 20,000 voters before ultimately agreeing to do a "parallel" hand count. It was performed by 170 volunteers working irregular hours and — because of difficulty in recruitment — did not follow bipartisan volunteer pairings as required by law. After the first day, the clerk who'd advocated for the whole thing estimated volunteers miscounted one-fourth of ballots.
Please stop making elections worse by pretending hand counting is a good idea.
Let computers do the repetitive work on standard ballots, and humans do the work to adjudicate unclear ballots and write-in candidates so that every ballot truly does get counted accurately and with the best resources available.
This blog has relied heavily on Jessia Huseman's article. Before I looked into this subject, I was all for going back to paper ballots. I thought hand counting with supervision from all political parties would make for fair and legal elections. Jessica Huseman's work has got me thinking. Huseman's logic is hard to refute. Given the difficulty in getting together a team of counters and watchers over a period of days, is hand counting feasible? What do you think? Should we go back to hand-counting ballots?
1 Favorito, Garland, Why Patching Georgia's Voting System Will Not Secure Our Elections - pdf, Voter GA, VOTERGA.ORG, July 27, 2023
2 Huseman, Jessica, Activists for hand-counting ballots don't acknowledge drawbacks: More mistakes, time, and money, Votebeat, July 24, 2023, https://www.votebeat.org/2023/7/24/23803066/hand-counting-ballots-election-security-france-cyber-ninjas
3 Ibid
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