Republican efforts to hand count ballots in a seemingly low-profile Texas county primary election has led to a number of errors.
Gillespie County Republicans, led by Chairman Bruce Campbell, decided months ago to hand-count more than 8,000 ballots for the county GOP primary on March 5. Campbell then declared the results completely accurate and certified before, less than an hour after that certification, reversing course and saying discrepancies were found.
“It’s my mistake for not catching that,” Cambell said on Thursday while sitting inside the county election administration office. “I can’t believe I did that.”
The kerfuffle over ballot counting comes after a November rematch between President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump was solidified in primaries last week.
The Republican push for hand-counted ballots has continued to emerge as the party criticizes a number of electronic voting systems, linking them to claims that the 2020 election was stolen via widespread voter fraud.
One of the major proponents of paper ballots is Trump supporter and My Pillow CEO Mike Lindell, who has been an outspoken critic of electronic voting machines. He has said he wants U.S. elections to be held using paper ballots.
Broken clock syndrome. You don’t have to be a MAGAt to think that paper ballots are more secure than digital ones.
It isn’t the paper ballots that are the problem, it’s the hand counting. Many states use paper ballots which are then counted by electronic tallying machines. This method gives results quickly and has the paper ballots to be counted manually if there are discrepancies. Hand counting is slower, less accurate, and just as vulnerable to malicious actors.
HI! My name is Chad, and I’ll be hanging over here, just to confuse you
These types of ballots don’t have chads. They have circles you fill out with a pencil or black marker, very similar to standardized tests like SAT’s. After you fill it out you feed it into an optical scanner that tallies the votes.
At the end of the election officials simply add up the results from each optical scanner. And if there’s a legitimate concern about the counts, or simply a desire to audit a machine then you just pull the ballots from one or more machines, count the results, and compare those with what the scanner counted.
So you have an easily audited paper trail and the ability to audit small sets of ballots/machines rather than hand counting everything.
I was making a joke, kinda like the following,: I’m still pissed that Chad overthrew the election
Brooks Brothers riot and the SC otherthrew that election. I remember when that happened and I only years later learning about the riots. For some reason, I just remember people making Chad jokes.
That was my first presidential election as a voting age adult. I was 20 that year. Before the DC sniper was caught, while they were doing their thing, I had surmised that they were taking potshots at The SCOTUS for overturning the legitimate election, and forcing Dubbaya on us.
Well yeah, anyone who’s had a job dealing with any amount of counting knows that machine counts are inaccurate but nothing compares to the inaccuracy of hand counting details
There was a video showing ballot stuffing in Russia’s election.
This Republican move seems to be an effort to emulate that election.
Source?
From the previous Russian election: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F9E1zI-vBEQ
Wild man.
Apparently the results from that poling station were annulled and the members of that local election commission were fired. Not sure this is proof of any widespread voter fraud in Russia.
The video in the social media posts is CCTV footage taken in Lyubertsy in the Moscow Region of Russia in March 2018 during the Russian presidential election. After the video circulated online, election results from that polling station were annulled and the chairman of the local election commission and a member of the election commission were fired, according to the Washington Post.
https://www.reuters.com/article/idUSKBN27Q21J/
edit: also getting down voted for asking for a source is hilarious 🤣
Shilling for Russia and pretending their elections are transplant with fraud and completely rigged is why you’re getting downvoted
Nah, you’re getting downvoted because you think there’s no voter fraud in russia.
Ignorance is bliss, I suppose.
How about the continued election tallies claiming 80%-90% voted for Putin? That seems like a major red flag
A big red flag with a gold hammer crossed with a gold sickle
Were they fired for stuffing the ballot boxes, or fired for getting caught?
Not sure this is proof of any widespread voter fraud in Russia.
Even if it isn’t, Putin “winning” 88% of the vote after eliminating all rivals one way or the other certainly doesn’t indicate a free and fair election.
It’s disturbing how little actual information is in the linked article. I’m sure something truly concerning happened, but “more than 8,000 ballots” is literally the only metric provided and then the author just uses the article as an excuse to talk about Mike Lindell and Trump’s indictments.
Keep in mind there are roughly 15 to 30 questions on each ballot. If they’re manually verifying each answer on each ballot, then it’s really easy to make mistakes.
Assuming accuracy of your numbers, you’ve literally increased the article’s concrete data by 100%
Have you looked at your ballot? You’re usually not just voting on just the primary candidate. There are also elections for senators, congressmen, judges, and town and state amendments usually included. 15 to 30 questions isn’t unreasonable. However for a town of 8,000, not sure how many town specific questions there are.
Yeah, I had 12 people on my ballot and live in a city with over 2 million. I assumed you were using assumptions, but even if you called it an estimation, I’d still give you partial credit for trying harder than the article to be informative.
As I read your comment I’m thinking, oh, this sounds like a Newsweek article.
Checks source… LMAO.Context: my comment here https://lemmy.ml/comment/9458613
Humans are error-prone; of course hand counting will lead to errors. Such a non-issue to try to fix. Dumb.
Because they’re not trying to fix an issue, it’s an excuse to meddle with the election and make things worse so they can sell their “democracy is broken, vote for a strong man” schtick
That’s why typically there are other election employees and observers present. Canada’s federal elections are tallied by hand count, and results are always (as far as I’m aware) certified the same day. Canada’s population is about 40 million people, so not quite the US’s 330+ million, but a lot more than this town’s 8000.
Spain also hand counts. At each poll station there are three citizens recruited at random (sort of like jury duty) who run each ballot box. They check voter’s credentials and cross off names from the list. The process is overseen by each parties appointed “overseers”. The whole counting process must be validated by all. I prefer this method. Machines can be tampered with.
Why not machine certify and hand-count verify? Could have both systems for quick results on the day and verified accurate results in the longer term. Have the voting machine print out your results and you can self verify and put them in a secret ballot box to be hand-counted later.
Why not machine certify and hand-count verify?
Because the manual system works well and costs little.
Could have both systems for quick results on the day and verified accurate results in the longer term.
Canada already has hand-counted and verified results the same day the election occurs, in a country with a population roughly equivalent to the state of California. Adding machine counting would only add complexity and cost while producing no additional benefits.
Have the voting machine
Canada doesn’t have voting machines, nor do we want them. Our ballot system is a piece of paper and a pencil. That’s it. That’s our whole voting “machine.”
The real genius is in how the vote counting process works. Every candidate is allowed to provide a representative, often called a scrutineer, to oversee the counting process at each polling station. Scrutineers are allowed to challenge a ballot if they feel it has been attributed to the wrong candidate or should have been considered a spoiled ballot. The doors to the polling station are locked while ballots are being counted, and no one is allowed to go home until the count is complete. Basic self-interest ensures that counts are done in a timely fashion, while also ensuring that every candidate can have a representative that was part of the counting process.
Under the Canadian system, for all practical purposes it would be impossible to perpetrate election fraud. A candidate would need to somehow induce Elections Canada employees and/or volunteers at multiple polling stations to miscount ballots. They would also need to convince multiple scrutineers to turn a blind eye, scrutineers who were nominated by their opponents. Each riding typically has 4+ candidates (at minimum Liberal, Conservative, New Democrat, and Green party candidates, plus often some independent or fringe party candidates), and every single one of those candidates is allowed to provide a scrutineer at each polling station. There will be many polling stations across a single riding, so that’s potentially dozens or hundreds of people that would need to be coerced or convinced to contribute to the election fraud. And that’s just for one single riding.
It only “costs little” because you have a ton of people willing to do it. What if there’s something that prevents people from volunteering? Say, snow? Or maybe a worldwide pandemic? Or massive wildfires?
These are all obvious possibilities. There’s really no reason to not machine count with a matching hand count. Extra cost? This is your entire country’s election. It’s not the time to pinch pennies.
It only “costs little” because you have a ton of people willing to do it.
First off you say that like it’s a bad thing. For the record, it is not. Second, many of the people counting votes are paid, i.e. Elections Canada employees. Scrutineers could be volunteers or paid employees of the party/candidate they represent.
What if there’s something that prevents people from volunteering?
That would equally inhibit people from voting. Besides which, elections can and have been postponed in cases of severe weather, and wildfires have been considered in cases where they’ve been occurring around an election. No politician or Elections Canada supervisor is going to send voters, employees and volunteers out to die for an election.
Or maybe a worldwide pandemic?
We had one, it went fine. Anyone who didn’t like the thought of voting in public had the option of voting by mail, something that every Canadian has been allowed to do since 1993.
There’s really no reason to not machine count with a matching hand count.
Yes there fucking is. Machines add completely unnecessary complexity to a simple system that works.
I don’t know who’s downvoting you or why, but this is just nth on the list of reasons I wish I’d been born north of the border. We (US) should never have left paper ballots.
Your system works, and why wouldn’t it? It was the gold standard for decades, even here, until we fucked with it. And it wasn’t just the unnecessary switch to unsecured electronic voting, either: anyone remember “butterfly” ballots and hanging chads in Florida?
If we still had paper ballots, much of the current accusatory atmosphere regarding the 2020 election would simply not be possible: maybe the count would have been contested or repeated in certain areas, but in the end they’d have had to find some other conspiracy.
The doors to the polling station are locked while ballots are being counted, and no one is allowed to go home until the count is complete. Basic self-interest ensures that counts are done in a timely fashion, while also ensuring that every candidate can have a representative that was part of the counting process.
Right, but do you have a political cult who would willingly stall the process so it would not be completed in a reasonable time just so that they can claim the process is flawed and skewed against them when they lose?
I still don’t see any reason you can’t do this and have a machine count to compare. Redundancies are never a bad idea, and basically every study which has ever been done on the topic shows that hand counts are generally more error prone than hand audited machine counts.
Humans can more easily be tampered with (or just be dumb).
It’s dumb because this is a solved problem. Where I am we have bubble ballots where you mark the box, and the machine scans it and drops it into a box. Hand audits of this technology routinely show discrepancies of literally zero over millions of votes.
This is the part which drives me crazy. The concern trolling over vote counting is so transparent, and all because the worlds stupidest orange clown has managed to inject that stupid into the brain of every Republican voter.
That’s their goal with the whole Dominion voting machines and crying about mail in voting. It’s to weaken our already outdated voting machines/processes and to make it easier to steal elections on their end.
Chairman Bruce Campbell shouted “Hail to the king, baby!” before kicking over the entire container of 8000 ballots, forcing another recount because he suspected demonic influence on the election results.
Klaatu barada nikto!
Groovy
When asked if he counted the votes exactly he shrugged and said “look, maybe I didn’t count every single little tiny ballot, but basically yeah, I counted them.”
Republicans’ effort to count fails after they run out of fingers.
Well I mean when you defund education often and long enough, counting is bound to be cut from the curriculum eventually. I mean why teach those toddlers to count when you could instead be teaching them how to make the bootstraps they’ll need to pull themselves up with once they hit age 10?
Thing about counting votes is, you can’t be corrupt.
It’s not the votes that are wrong, it’s the corruption.
Well I’m certainly shocked.
The real question is how many of those votes were scribbled on fortune cookie paper?
