Nevada county junks voting machines, will hand count ballots; co. clerk quits in disgust

[GeorgiaModerate]

For months, conspiracy theories fueled on social media by those repeating lies about former President Donald Trump’s loss in 2020 inflamed public suspicions about whether election results could be trusted. In response, the commission put a remarkable item on its agenda: Ditch the county’s voting machines and instead count every vote on every ballot — more than 20,000 in a typical general election — entirely by hand.

Commissioners called a parade of witnesses, including three from out of state who insisted voting machines could be hacked and votes flipped without leaving a trace. They said no county could be certain their machines weren't accessible via the internet and open to tampering by nefarious actors.

https://www.rgj.com/story/news/2022/07/29/election-conspiracies-grip-nevada-community-sowing-distrust/10186194002/

[Skill and Chance]

A hand count is reasonable.  Machines that record votes electronically could plausibly be hacked at any time.  This isn't a bad idea, conspiracy theories aside.   

[Former President tack50]

Yeah, I am also of the opinion that hand counting votes is the way to go. Here we hand-count votes and we still get returns very fast!

The only issue if anything might be that the US for some reason vote on a ridiculous amount of offices, but you don't really need to count everything at once. Who cares if results for "county dogcatcher" take longer to come in

[President Punxsutawney Phil]

Hand-counting ballots is not a terrible concept. But logistically manpower is needed and it needs to be conducted fairly.
I could see why they go for this sort of thing. Nye County being what Nye County is...

[Benjamin Frank]

At first I thought it said NY County Commission and I'll bet I'm not the only one who initially thought that!

[President Punxsutawney Phil]

At first I thought it said NY County Commission and I'll bet I'm not the only one who initially thought that!

Hah. Could New York County (aka Manhattan) actually do this sort of thing, feasibly?

[Benjamin Frank]

At first I thought it said NY County Commission and I'll bet I'm not the only one who initially thought that!

Hah. Could New York County (aka Manhattan) actually do this sort of thing, feasibly?

Not sure. New York has enormous problems with vote counting.

[GeorgiaModerate]

At first I thought it said NY County Commission and I'll bet I'm not the only one who initially thought that!

Hah. Could New York County (aka Manhattan) actually do this sort of thing, feasibly?

Not sure. New York has enormous problems with vote counting.

As slow as they are, I figured they were already hand counting.

[GeorgiaModerate]

I changed the title to avoid the confusion, although it admittedly had a certain entertainment value.

[President Punxsutawney Phil]

At first I thought it said NY County Commission and I'll bet I'm not the only one who initially thought that!

Hah. Could New York County (aka Manhattan) actually do this sort of thing, feasibly?

Not sure. New York has enormous problems with vote counting.

Unfortunately I was not able to figure out precisely how votes were counted in New York City.
But given the number of votes involved, it would not surprise me if, given everything else about elections in New York, all-hand counting would make things even more broken.

[Hammy]

Yeah, I am also of the opinion that hand counting votes is the way to go. Here we hand-count votes and we still get returns very fast!

The US has been underfunding and understaffing elections for decades, so probably not a good comparison.

[politicallefty]

Yeah, I am also of the opinion that hand counting votes is the way to go. Here we hand-count votes and we still get returns very fast!

The US has been underfunding and understaffing elections for decades, so probably not a good comparison.

I think his other point is especially valid though. The average American has a ridiculously bloated ballot.

[Antonio the Sixth]

Every county should do that. If they don't have the staff to, the solution is to hire more people.

[Aurelius]

Every county should do that. If they don't have the staff to, the solution is to hire more people.

Agree.

And Nye is a fairly small county in terms of population - around 50k, I think. Article says there are typically around 20k votes cast. Shouldn't be too hard logistically. I initially assumed it was Clark County, which could indeed be a difficult task. But it would still probably be faster than CA or NY!

[GeorgiaModerate]

As pointed out above, US ballots tend to have many more races on the ballot than most European countries.

This is a sample ballot from the May 2022 Republican primary in DeKalb County, Georgia.

I count 31 distinct races here; there are more than that on the sample, but that's because it shows all the US House, State Senate, and State House districts in the county.  The ballot presented to an individual voter will have only the appropriate races for that voter.  There are also three referenda and 13 non-binding questions.  So the total is about 50 individual races that would need to be counted.  Let's say it takes a vote counter three seconds to read and record the result of one race.  That's pretty fast, but we'll assume that with practice it can be achieved.  You can draw your own conclusions about how accurate it will be at that rate.

At that rate, it will take one counter about 2.5 minutes to count one of these ballots, or about 24 per hour.  In eight hours, one counter will count just under 200 ballots.  That's assuming no breaks and that they can keep up the rate and accuracy for that length of time.  Also remember that counting Election Day votes doesn't start until the polls have closed.  At present, early votes in Georgia can be processed up to 14 days ahead of time and fed into the machines, but the tallies are not available until the polls have closed.  But early counting couldn't be used because the counters would have knowledge of what they've counted, which would not be good for election integrity.

In the November 2020 election, there were about 360,000 votes cast in DeKalb County.  Since one counter does 200 ballots in eight hours (using the very optimistic assumptions above) then it would take 1800 counters.  These would have to be trained, housed somewhere secure for the counting, and paid for their training and actual work.  Let's say the training takes eight hours, which is probably optimistic, so each worker gets paid for 16 hours (eight training plus eight counting).  In metro Atlanta you'd need to pay at least $15 an hour, or $240 per worker, so it would cost at least $432,000 in pay plus the cost of housing the operation.

And how accurate do you think those 1800 workers, most of them inexperienced and newly trained, would be in counting those ~50 races?  More accurate than (properly tested and calibrated) machines?  As an engineer, I can't decide whether to laugh or cringe at that idea.

Machines are the most accurate way to count large numbers of ballots (or anything, really).  This has been demonstrated time and time again.  Certainly the machines needs to be calibrated, tested, and verified afterward with random hand counts.  Such audits done after the 2020 Georgia election showed that the machines were indeed extremely accurate.

Bottom line: switching to hand counts would result in elections that are slower to count, less accurate, more expensive, and less trustworthy.

[Koharu]

So, all of you asking for things to be "hand-counted" and live in the US are signed up to be poll workers, right?

If not, get to it. We need more poll workers. Also, it would do you good to see how elections are actually run.

Most tabulators--the machines that count the ballots--are only connected to the internet long enough to submit the tallies. Most states have paper ballots that are scanned by the tabulator. They are scantrons, like what graded our tests if you took any sort of standardized test. The paper ballots are retained so there is always a paper trail to compare the tally of the tabulators to the actual ballots. There are regular audits to make sure the tabulators are scanning and reporting properly, as well as occasional hand recounts.

But, if you want speedy results, tabulators are always going to be necessary. Hand-counting takes a long time, and unfortunately people tend to make more mistakes than the machines do, because it's repetitive work. It's the kind of things that machines can actually do better than people.

Anyway. Want hand-counting? Go be a poll worker and see how things work.

[Pouring Rain and Blairing Music]

I think what helps a lot of countries (I’m thinking Canada, France, the UK, Australia for sure) is that there’s literally only one race on the ballot. It’s a lot easier to hand count that than it is an American ballot where there might be ten or more offices/questions.

[GeorgiaModerate]

I think what helps a lot of countries (I’m thinking Canada, France, the UK, Australia for sure) is that there’s literally only one race on the ballot. It’s a lot easier to hand count that than it is an American ballot where there might be ten or more offices/questions.

Bingo.  And ten would be quite small for a ballot in all the jurisdictions that I've lived in.  See the sample ballot I posted above with almost 50 races/questions on it.  I believe some states (California?) sometimes have even more.