Even if you want that, it’s a really bad idea to set new rules for how to count ballots a few weeks before the election, when you don’t have time to hire people or train them to do it right. This guarantees chaos.
That certainly would have been earlier. To be honest I think even if a person doesn’t have my own “hand counting is the best choice” views, planning on doing hand count in an election that was the subject of manipulation allegations two presidential elections in a row and is smart.
I mean, realistically even if you believe the machine count is fine, you’re most likely going to have to do an auditable hand recount anyway.
The normal action with machine counts is to randomly select a subsample and hand count those to validate. It’s just slow, expensive, and error-prone to hand-count really huge numbers of ballots with lots of offices on them. And that’s the whole point of this decision — to make it so that people don’t have a reliable count of votes the next day, allowing the opportunity to toss out the voters decisions entirely.
If hand counting is so error prone then why do we hand count during recounts and as you said during spot checks?
I don’t buy it.
Perhaps support for hand counting is partly coming from people hoping it will cause chaos. I don’t think it will based on my own limited experience in elections and weather it will or won’t, even the stopped clock of people who want to prevent and slow down the count tells the right time twice a day.
Why is it such a big deal to know the next day who the winner is? They don’t take office until the next calendar year.
Even if you want that, it’s a really bad idea to set new rules for how to count ballots a few weeks before the election, when you don’t have time to hire people or train them to do it right. This guarantees chaos.
Polls close in a little under two months. We already know how to hand count ballots. Best to start early.
Early would have been a year ago. Not now.
That certainly would have been earlier. To be honest I think even if a person doesn’t have my own “hand counting is the best choice” views, planning on doing hand count in an election that was the subject of manipulation allegations two presidential elections in a row and is smart.
I mean, realistically even if you believe the machine count is fine, you’re most likely going to have to do an auditable hand recount anyway.
You trust random ass humans to be 100% honest in their counts?
If machine counting says 50/50 and hand counting says 30/70, you’ve got an indicator of a problem. What is your control if it’s all human?
The normal action with machine counts is to randomly select a subsample and hand count those to validate. It’s just slow, expensive, and error-prone to hand-count really huge numbers of ballots with lots of offices on them. And that’s the whole point of this decision — to make it so that people don’t have a reliable count of votes the next day, allowing the opportunity to toss out the voters decisions entirely.
If hand counting is so error prone then why do we hand count during recounts and as you said during spot checks?
I don’t buy it.
Perhaps support for hand counting is partly coming from people hoping it will cause chaos. I don’t think it will based on my own limited experience in elections and weather it will or won’t, even the stopped clock of people who want to prevent and slow down the count tells the right time twice a day.
Why is it such a big deal to know the next day who the winner is? They don’t take office until the next calendar year.
Because you can do it well at small scale at modest expense. It’s expensive to do well and fast for ballots with lots of offices and in large numbers.
This decision, unaccompanied by money to hire people, basically guarantees chaos.