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The push to hand-count ballots is ramping up, albeit with spotty success, as the 2024 election nears, according to a review by the Guardian and Votebeat. If more localities decide to try hand-counting in the November election, results could be inaccurate, untrustworthy or delayed, fostering more distrust in elections. In places that opt not to hand-count, supporters of the practice could use this choice as a reason to question or refuse to sign off on certification.
Either way, it raises the risk of throwing the 2024 election into chaos.
“It just gives additional grounds for calling into question the results of elections when there are no valid grounds,” said Heather Sawyer, executive director at American Oversight. “There’s no good reason to do it. And there’s lots of room for mischief and problems.”
The push hasn’t gained much ground in the large swing counties where Trump claimed votes were stolen from him. It’s been more effective in small or rural counties that voted heavily for Trump, where conservative activists have lined up at public meetings to repeat the conspiracies of Cook, Lindell and others. There – in Missouri, Nevada, Pennsylvania, Texas and Wisconsin – local officials voted to give hand-counting ballots a try in either their midterm or presidential primary elections.
You can easily do both. Get a scanner to tally the results then pick like 1000 ballots (or some statistically significant number) to hand count. If the hand counted results are the same then you can be confident in the automatic count.
What’s the value in the automatic count?
I’ve only volunteered at urban polling stations. Each polling station has something like five or six polls. Each poll has something like two hundred possible voters (with half of them bothering to vote). We got them counted in an hour or two.
I don’t understand the push for electronic voting. Paper ballots are great in so many ways. The only drawbacks I’m aware of are the time to count (which is negligible) and the risk that voters will mark ballots so they can get paid (mitigated by discarding ballots that are marked with anything other than an x).
That isn’t urban then. No mention of mail in either?