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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.
Few legal documents have the anonymity requirements of ballots.
The problem is that voters need to trust all of the devices between the voter, the database, and the person who declares the winner. With software, that’s hard. How do you convince Jane Public that the iPad is reporting accurately across some Verizon network to the IBM Db2 instance which is telling the truth to the state election official? Even when it’s working perfectly, it’s opaque to most people.
The great thing about paper ballots is that representatives of all interested parties can watch the whole thing and audit the results. Representatives of each candidate are present at the ballot counting, and they forward the counts to the campaign HQ. It’s easy to watch and explain.
I’m not sure how an electronic system can provide that level of openness.
It shouldn’t be too hard to have two separate databases. One with personal identifying info attached and one without. It could even allow voters to look up their vote later if they wanted to confirm how it was cast. The database without identifying info could be made public so people could compare results on their own vote counting software.
There’s always a relevant xkcd:
How many people who are pissed with the results might claim an alternate cast vote later on just to bring the machines into question? It wouldn’t take many to do this to create a fair amount of distrust.
Opposed too now? People already claim the votes are counted wrong.
Perception. People trust a vote that is more transparent and completed by two independent people.
Personally I trust the electronic one entirely but I could see it a bug occurring that puts some future election results in question. Would you trust it if an AI wrote the program?