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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.
UN observers are denied observation access.
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:
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?
Or even faster, visually split them into 5 stacks of 100. Assumes constant thickness, but then make them even by moving pages from the highest ones to the lowest ones until they are all identical. If you can't make them all identical, then you don't have 500.
Then split one of the 100s into 5 again the same way.
Then pick up one of the stacks of 20 and count it to confirm it is 20.
Or for an arbitrary number of sheets, do the same but then set aside any sheets that won't even up (because the stack isn't an even multiple of whatever number you divide it into). Then you just have to count the final stack, multiply that to compensate for the splitting (for that layer), add the set aside sheets (for that layer), then move on to the previous layer of splitting and repeat.
Or, count out 20 sheets, then measure their thickness, then measure the thickness of the entire stack, divide by the 20 thickness, multiply by 20, though this one will have some error due to the measurements not being exact (even if you use calipers, paper does compress a bit, which complicates exact measurements).
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.
I have done this and still miscounted. Pages stick together here and there. Some of my stacks of 10 were 11. Slowing down helped. Having a second person count helped more.
A whole lot of countries make it work:
https://web.archive.org/web/20221114152441/https%3A%2F%2Faceproject.org%2Fabout-en%2FCDTable%3Fquestion%3DVC005%26set_language%3Den
As another demonstration, Just about every bank i've been to dispenses bills by way of an automatic counting machine.
They didn’t do that in 2024 while being told by the criminals they stole it so what makes you think this will go any differently?