It's important to add some context to the "hand count" idea in the US. It was part of a larger scheme to overturn the results of the 2020 election which involved creating doubt about the validity of results in key states. The larger scheme involved various extra-legal attempts to have state legislatures invalidate the election, have the Supreme Count step in, or have the counting of Electoral Votes disrupted and the final decision on the presidential election made in the House of Representatives. Calling into doubt the machine counts and asking for hand counting of ballots is part of that scheme.
Not one official who was elected in 2020 at the state legislature level called for invalidating their own election and recounting their race.
And one county in Arizona that was considering hand counting, a county that voted overwhelmingly across the board for the party attempting to overturn the election, looked at the practicality of a hand count and decided it was too expensive and problem prone.
https://www.naco.org/news/numbers-stack-against-hand-count-m...
We hand count in Canada and don't have a notable accuracy problem, and ballot security is a rare concern. We manage that by having simple ballots which make voter intent clear while having the count being run by an independent, non-partisan national organization _and_ each table where tabulating is occurring can be watched over by representatives of the parties running.
_And_ we have mail-in ballots.
When issues do arise it tends to occur when a ballot box needs to be transported between locations; when this occurs it is taken quite seriously by Elections Canada.
It works great. Perhaps the USA should contact Elections Canada and learn a thing or two.
How many positions and measures do you vote on in your ballots?
In my US County I vote on 20+ ballot measures and positions most elections. Very few other countries have the ballot complexity and sheer number of votable items like the US.
We separate election of candidates from policy referendums.
Typically ballots only have a handful of names on them; municipal ballots tend to have more due to the size of council. Occasionally there's a great many, due to efforts like the Longest Ballot Committee, and Elections Canada makes the ballot a write-in instead of multiple choice.
Only because fearmongering about election fraud isn’t a top priority of a major political party. That’s all we have going on in the USA - one party’s head has constantly baselessly called into question the accuracy of election results and so now it’s big news.
We do hand counts here in Canada and it's pretty accurate. We do have scrutineers as part of the process and ballot security is pretty paramount. Recounts are mostly automatic and done when margins are too close.
I think America leaned too far in on the voting machines, TBH.
I worked as a poll clerk in a Canadian federal election once and counted ballots and the experience left me with full confidence in the system. It would be impossible to game on a large scale and incredibly difficult on a small scale.
From what I recall, our polling station, which served only a small portion of the city, was broken into several polls, each run by 2 or 3 poll workers.
At then end of the day the poll workers personally counted the ballots they collected at their poll (so every ballot was counted at least twice, and each individual only counted a fraction of the ballots at the station.) Monitors from the different political parties were free to watch the whole process.
I'm definitely getting some details wrong, but generally the whole thing, plus automatic recounts for tight races left no doubts for me.
I worked one election as a scrutineer and came away with the same thought. It's an amazing ballet of process that is challenging to hack, and it makes me irrationally upset whenever I see politicians here trying to import vote irregularity BS from elsewhere.
Depending on where you are in the US, hand counts are not realistic. California ballots are notoriously long, with upwards of 50-something contests on a single ballot: regular "pick one" elections, ranked-choice voting, and many ballot initiatives.
The US has indeed largely moved towards "voting machines," but I should be explicit about what this means. These aren't the touchscreen computer-only (direct-recording electronic) machines that were hastily deployed after Bush v Gore. The overwhelming majority of states and municipalities now use some kind of optical-scan paper ballot technology, like scantron forms that are tabulated and kept safe in a box with a scanner bolted onto it. So even if the scanner is broken, there's a reliable record of voter intent.
It's a contributing factor, but not something to solve. It arises from our multi-layered forms of government, where states are very strong and hold a lot of power to themselves. Some states have ballot initiatives. Some don't. Some states allow for ranked-choice voting for certain offices. Some don't. Some states (like California) love direct democracy and having lots of elected offices that are normally appointees in other places. This is why it's states--not the federal government--that run elections; each state has a different political system that sets the requirements for elections.
I voted in the last Canadian election and showed my American correspondences. They were so upset by how low tech it was. But that’s a feature. I’d never want our democratic system to be Americanized.
Hand counts and paper in the UK too. It's just not a problem you need to solve with machines, and while UK politics is deeply stupid, flawed and unserious in many ways, at least this endless, endless bullshit and screeching over chads and machines and hacking and conspiracies and all the other nonsense the cousins get up to is not part of it.
Results don't take long to count, even though there are about 30 million ballots. Polls close at 10pm, the first constituency declares some time between 11 and midnight usually, it's 90% done by about 6am[1], and the last will be some time on the second day if there are multiple recounts. Due to the FPTP system, it doesn't really even matter about the rest once the post is already reached - which is its own problem, but it's not like machine-based recount drama doesn't drag on for ages too.
The machines aren’t the cause of the endless screaming. The conspiracy theorists also claim to find plenty of “evidence” of tampering with physical ballots and the counting process.
The "problem" isn't that hand-counting is too inaccurate or too slow (as if governments can be changed so quickly that a few days delay matters). The problem is that to compromise hand-counted, paper elections, you need to compromise a lot of people.
First paragraph is very reasonable. Second is insane. It clearly does not follow from "Canada does accurate hand counts" that "voting machines are inaccurate".
In fact voting is extremely accurate throughout the democratic world regardless of counting method, and this fact wasn't particularly controversial for decades and decades.
The idea that we somehow have a problem to be solved is the actual attack on democracy. And it's working. I know it sounds like hyperbole, but there is a very serious risk that the USA has already seen its last peaceful democratic handover of power. The people with control of the levers of power seem extremely disinclined to accept loss of that power.
TFA is about the US. It cites cases where hand counting has resulted in higher error rates in the US.
Voting machines are have proven to be reliable in the US. Dominion Voting continues to rack up huge defamation wins in court over this.
You're just FUDding.
You let machines count your money don't you? Who insists on a hand count of the currency to verify your monthly checking or brokerage account? They don't even count cash by hand, it's all done via machines.
Something as powerful and important as political control shouldn't be relying on something as brittle and vulnerable as software. Even NASA launches with software bugs, from time to time; and the electronic voting vendors aren't up to those standards.
I think we can use technology to do better than paper ballots with hand counting, but one tweet mentioning 25% error rate is not reason enough for this title in my opinion. This smells of "big tabulator" sponsored article. :D
The article is trying to combat a bad faith initiative with factual information. The truth is that adding delays and uncertainty to the process are the goals, not just some unhappy byproducts. Delays and uncertainty make room for contesting results you don’t like. That’s the whole plan.
India has a centrally managed federal voting administration. The US has an extremely layered and very distributed system managed by each state and county. There are different trade offs here but these are completely different ways to run elections and thus have different speeds.
Ultimately they are tallying individual votes. The units are not harder to count in one system vs another. Maybe localities have processes that slow things down, but if that is the case, they can look to institute the processes of districts/counties that count quicker.
In Germany we do hand counting and i have participated on multiple occasions and would say
1. it is really hard to do any fraud for multiple reasons:
\* the people counting are pseudo randomly chosen
\* but even if you somehow managed to get "your" people to count then you've only secured one very small portion of the votes
\* the counting areas are near to each other so some random citizens would be able to observe multiple counting areas at once
\* there is no "winner takes all" rule in Germany and neither is there a electoral college.
2. The counting and reporting processes are well monitored and documented so that simple inconsistencies become visible right away either in the counting group (7-9 people in general) or when they phone in the results to the central point.
3. There is obviously a cost involved in having people count BUT i can't imagine it being more that paying for the counting machines since the people involved aren't paid normal wages but instead expense allowances.
I fully support handcounting over machine counting! But the US would still have to get rid of old traditions, namely electoral college and gerrymandering practices. The popular vote should be the deciding factor most of the time!
How many items are on these ballots? Due to the distributed nature of US governance my ballots easily have 20-30 items each election. It is quite different than countries that hand vote.
Well over 200 iirc. But most people just vote for the large list and do not use vote splitting ("Kumulieren und Panaschieren"), so the impact of these options isn't that much - the problem more is handling these giant sheets of paper.
What many people outside the US may not realize is that ballots here may include 40-60+ races. The presidential race appears on the same ballot the races for Senate, House of Representatives (both national races,) state wide positions like governor, attorney general, superintendent of public instruction, state treasurer and secretary of state, and state mine inspector. In some states superior court judges are on the ballot for "retention" as well as State Supreme Court positions. Then come the state legislature races. Most states have two houses so a state-level Senate and House. Then come county positions, Sheriff, Board of Supervisors, Recorder, Treasurer, County Attorney, Justice of the Peace and constable. Then the school board races so you may have a high school district board and an elementary school district board. Then come the referendums and initiatives that either the state legislature put on the ballot or citizens gathered enough signatures for; these typically change state law but sometimes implement or remove new taxes. In 2024 in Maricopa County, AZ we had a two page ballot because the legislature added 20+ initiatives to try and implement laws the governor had vetoed.
In any case, the idea that these ballots can be accurately hand counted is absurd. In some of the hand count examples in the states mentioned in the article only one or two races on ballots with 10's of races were recounted and even those recounts were problematic.
What's really telling is that none of the people elected in 2020 or 2022 or 2024 at the state legislature level are calling for recounts of THEIR races. Machines are fine when the right party wins.
Machines are the only way to deal with a ballot with 60 races. There are other parameters that could be put in place to help improve people's faith in the system. San Francisco makes ballot images available via a web portal. It's entirely possible that an AI model could be trained to rapidly recount any and all of the races to validate the official results. Tighter ID requirements would be OK, it's 2025 and even people in the hills and reservations should have IDs.
However, I think a weakness in the arguments is that many of the tabulation machines we have are very old, poorly designed for vote integrity (eg no paper ballots or confusing scan sheet design), and closed source which can lead to accusations of both hardware/software flipping votes and the systems being impossible to audit.
To counter these concerns you can use paper ballots everywhere, open source software for the machines, and risk limiting audits to verify the count.
Voting Works builds software for both sides of these voting processes as OSS with machine scanned paper ballots.
Hand counts is the way it is done in Sweden. It means that anyone can easily (well, as easy as possible) both understand the system and inspect it locally (all counting is open to the public).
The result is delivered in a matter of hours, and since vote counting is a parallell process it scales well enough that I doubt it would take much longer in the US. The US have massively more complicated ballots though, which I think is another issue entirely that you guys must solve.
I doubt it would be very expensive either. You don't have to pay people very much to do their civic duty every couple of years and count a couple hundred ballots.
> The US have massively more complicated ballots though, which I think is another issue entirely that you guys must solve.
Frankly this is never going to happen. The US democracy is extremely distributed and as a result each school district, water district, county, city, state and the federal government each have races and ballot items that citizens vote on.
Undoing this system is likely intractable without completely redesigning the US system of governance.
You have tons of items in Sweden as well and you vote on 3 levels of government and you can even write down in text name of any candidate you want and those text votes do get counted.
So no USA is not a special flower here, you can absolutely hand count those things.
The only secure way is privately produced black box voting machines with secret proprietary software. It's really the most efficient way to manipulate huge numbers of votes while involving as few people as possible. Manipulating vote counts with hand-counting requires large numbers of human agents distributed across many counties - a logistical nightmare.
Of all of the approaches in the article, I like the one about doing both to audit each other the most. Even if the extra time delays mentioned were unresolvable, I'd rather wait a couple of days and pay slightly more to run the election than spend more time and money with political battles about which counting approach is superior.
If you insist on 'immediate' results just do a machine count first with a mandatory hand count afterwards. The machine count gives fast results which can be confirmed by the hand count. If there are significant discrepancies redo the hand count until there are two counts which give the same results.
Handcount in Slovenia, first count done on local polling location, with a recount done by a central election comission and certification of the result. It works.
edit: First results are in within a couple of hours, depending on how many things are on the ballot.
Article without references to other countries where manual count is the only way. At least here in Chile we count votes by hand, results are ready at most 6 hours after poll closing time and Zero fraud has been reported in more than 30 years.
Are we talking about intentional or unintentional inaccuracies?
Unintentional ones should be distributed more or less evenly, if everyone have 10 less votes it should not change the end result.
But intentional ones, with the objective of trying to rig the result in one particular direction, and deep enough into whoever is doing the count/election. But in the end, it goes to how big the conspiracy should be? You may need just a few to rig all the voting machines (do you have the source code? of what was actually running in production everywhere?), but with human counters to get to the right scale you may need to involve really a lot of people.
Interestingly, in most of Europe, paper ballots and hand counting are preferred methods. We have seen times when electronic ballots have had glitches and have had inaccurate counts. Electronic ballots have experienced errors in tabulation and also loss of data, so it's not foolproof. In addition, vendors are known to be slow to patch security vulnerabilities in their systems --this leads to loss in confidence. Also as others have observed, in order to subvert paper ballots and counting, you have to compromise lots of people.
What a load of nonsense. In several EU countries, ballots are counted by hand and an accurate result is there usually by midnight.
In Germany, the Supreme Court has banned voting machines as unconstitutional.
The method is simple: Have relatively small voting districts, recruit civil servants as supervisors. Allow anyone from all parties to supervise and be present, especially during counting. Hand out the ballot sheet upon displaying an ID. Upload the counted result to a website where people can check that the reported count matches the actual count.
The EU has a lot of problems, efficient voting isn't one of them.
Are minor, random inaccuracies due to hand-counting mistakes the main danger a voting system must guard against, or is it against covert, malicious manipulation from compromised computer systems?
> Prior to 2022, no legislatures were considering this [mandating hand counts] extreme proposal.
An honest article wouldn't call the counting method used in most of Europe, Canada, Japan, India, and countless other countries, "extreme". Of course it deftly omits mention of any other country, leaving the reader uninformed. I'm sure it's just a coincidence..
It's clearly neither. The real danger is note the adjudication of the elections themselves, it's the acceptance of the results. The danger is the belief by a plurality of the ruling party's support base that elections are somehow fraudulent, because that empowers the ruling party to ignore democracy. We may already be there, and threads like this are in fact the means by which democracy dies.
How about we don't compromise a voting system with black boxes just because there are unrelated attacks against it? If you prefer, you can think of it as following in the example of "more enlightened" countries, like in Europe, Canada, India, etc.., that already do it this way.
I am from one such country, and I enjoy not having a bottomless rabbit hole of computer security underpinning our elections.
It's important to add some context to the "hand count" idea in the US. It was part of a larger scheme to overturn the results of the 2020 election which involved creating doubt about the validity of results in key states. The larger scheme involved various extra-legal attempts to have state legislatures invalidate the election, have the Supreme Count step in, or have the counting of Electoral Votes disrupted and the final decision on the presidential election made in the House of Representatives. Calling into doubt the machine counts and asking for hand counting of ballots is part of that scheme.
Not one official who was elected in 2020 at the state legislature level called for invalidating their own election and recounting their race.
And one county in Arizona that was considering hand counting, a county that voted overwhelmingly across the board for the party attempting to overturn the election, looked at the practicality of a hand count and decided it was too expensive and problem prone. https://www.naco.org/news/numbers-stack-against-hand-count-m...
We hand count in Canada and don't have a notable accuracy problem, and ballot security is a rare concern. We manage that by having simple ballots which make voter intent clear while having the count being run by an independent, non-partisan national organization _and_ each table where tabulating is occurring can be watched over by representatives of the parties running.
_And_ we have mail-in ballots.
When issues do arise it tends to occur when a ballot box needs to be transported between locations; when this occurs it is taken quite seriously by Elections Canada.
It works great. Perhaps the USA should contact Elections Canada and learn a thing or two.
How many positions and measures do you vote on in your ballots?
In my US County I vote on 20+ ballot measures and positions most elections. Very few other countries have the ballot complexity and sheer number of votable items like the US.
We separate election of candidates from policy referendums.
Typically ballots only have a handful of names on them; municipal ballots tend to have more due to the size of council. Occasionally there's a great many, due to efforts like the Longest Ballot Committee, and Elections Canada makes the ballot a write-in instead of multiple choice.
> and ballot security is a rare concern
Only because fearmongering about election fraud isn’t a top priority of a major political party. That’s all we have going on in the USA - one party’s head has constantly baselessly called into question the accuracy of election results and so now it’s big news.
In the most recent election there were efforts to convince Canadians that fraud was occurring.
https://www.ctvnews.ca/federal-election-2025/article/mislead...
https://factcheck.afp.com/doc.afp.com.44PT663
We do hand counts here in Canada and it's pretty accurate. We do have scrutineers as part of the process and ballot security is pretty paramount. Recounts are mostly automatic and done when margins are too close.
I think America leaned too far in on the voting machines, TBH.
I worked as a poll clerk in a Canadian federal election once and counted ballots and the experience left me with full confidence in the system. It would be impossible to game on a large scale and incredibly difficult on a small scale.
From what I recall, our polling station, which served only a small portion of the city, was broken into several polls, each run by 2 or 3 poll workers.
At then end of the day the poll workers personally counted the ballots they collected at their poll (so every ballot was counted at least twice, and each individual only counted a fraction of the ballots at the station.) Monitors from the different political parties were free to watch the whole process.
I'm definitely getting some details wrong, but generally the whole thing, plus automatic recounts for tight races left no doubts for me.
I worked one election as a scrutineer and came away with the same thought. It's an amazing ballet of process that is challenging to hack, and it makes me irrationally upset whenever I see politicians here trying to import vote irregularity BS from elsewhere.
Depending on where you are in the US, hand counts are not realistic. California ballots are notoriously long, with upwards of 50-something contests on a single ballot: regular "pick one" elections, ranked-choice voting, and many ballot initiatives.
The US has indeed largely moved towards "voting machines," but I should be explicit about what this means. These aren't the touchscreen computer-only (direct-recording electronic) machines that were hastily deployed after Bush v Gore. The overwhelming majority of states and municipalities now use some kind of optical-scan paper ballot technology, like scantron forms that are tabulated and kept safe in a box with a scanner bolted onto it. So even if the scanner is broken, there's a reliable record of voter intent.
https://ballotpedia.org/Voting_methods_and_equipment_by_stat...
I can't help but wonder if this utter complexity of voting led to many of America's current problems. It's a unique approach with unique problems.
It's a contributing factor, but not something to solve. It arises from our multi-layered forms of government, where states are very strong and hold a lot of power to themselves. Some states have ballot initiatives. Some don't. Some states allow for ranked-choice voting for certain offices. Some don't. Some states (like California) love direct democracy and having lots of elected offices that are normally appointees in other places. This is why it's states--not the federal government--that run elections; each state has a different political system that sets the requirements for elections.
I voted in the last Canadian election and showed my American correspondences. They were so upset by how low tech it was. But that’s a feature. I’d never want our democratic system to be Americanized.
Hand counts and paper in the UK too. It's just not a problem you need to solve with machines, and while UK politics is deeply stupid, flawed and unserious in many ways, at least this endless, endless bullshit and screeching over chads and machines and hacking and conspiracies and all the other nonsense the cousins get up to is not part of it.
Results don't take long to count, even though there are about 30 million ballots. Polls close at 10pm, the first constituency declares some time between 11 and midnight usually, it's 90% done by about 6am[1], and the last will be some time on the second day if there are multiple recounts. Due to the FPTP system, it doesn't really even matter about the rest once the post is already reached - which is its own problem, but it's not like machine-based recount drama doesn't drag on for ages too.
[1]: https://researchbriefings.files.parliament.uk/documents/CBP-...
The machines aren’t the cause of the endless screaming. The conspiracy theorists also claim to find plenty of “evidence” of tampering with physical ballots and the counting process.
Everyone should be invested in ensuring votes and the ballots are error free and untampered. Everyone should be in favor of accurate counts.
We should also not be accepting votes with date stamps past election day. Or votes with no date stamp.
If we go all-in on electronic ballots, I think this is the place we could use a block chain to ensure security, traceability and accountability.
The "problem" isn't that hand-counting is too inaccurate or too slow (as if governments can be changed so quickly that a few days delay matters). The problem is that to compromise hand-counted, paper elections, you need to compromise a lot of people.
First paragraph is very reasonable. Second is insane. It clearly does not follow from "Canada does accurate hand counts" that "voting machines are inaccurate".
In fact voting is extremely accurate throughout the democratic world regardless of counting method, and this fact wasn't particularly controversial for decades and decades.
The idea that we somehow have a problem to be solved is the actual attack on democracy. And it's working. I know it sounds like hyperbole, but there is a very serious risk that the USA has already seen its last peaceful democratic handover of power. The people with control of the levers of power seem extremely disinclined to accept loss of that power.
"insane" is a little rude, that's not a great reply to my comment by any stretch.
Voting machines are far easier to hack than human processes, and there have been numerous presentations on this particular topic.
American politics being off the deep end is an entirely different topic.
TFA is about the US. It cites cases where hand counting has resulted in higher error rates in the US.
Voting machines are have proven to be reliable in the US. Dominion Voting continues to rack up huge defamation wins in court over this. You're just FUDding.
You let machines count your money don't you? Who insists on a hand count of the currency to verify your monthly checking or brokerage account? They don't even count cash by hand, it's all done via machines.
That's a terrible analogy, and it's impossible to list all the reasons why.
Money doesn't work like ballots. All ballots are the same value, and each voter is entitled to one only.
If the pennies in my account are miscounted, I certainly won't give a damn.
Something as powerful and important as political control shouldn't be relying on something as brittle and vulnerable as software. Even NASA launches with software bugs, from time to time; and the electronic voting vendors aren't up to those standards.
I think we can use technology to do better than paper ballots with hand counting, but one tweet mentioning 25% error rate is not reason enough for this title in my opinion. This smells of "big tabulator" sponsored article. :D
The article is trying to combat a bad faith initiative with factual information. The truth is that adding delays and uncertainty to the process are the goals, not just some unhappy byproducts. Delays and uncertainty make room for contesting results you don’t like. That’s the whole plan.
Somehow India is able to process 600+MM ballots in one day. Speed in counting is possible.
India has a centrally managed federal voting administration. The US has an extremely layered and very distributed system managed by each state and county. There are different trade offs here but these are completely different ways to run elections and thus have different speeds.
Ultimately they are tallying individual votes. The units are not harder to count in one system vs another. Maybe localities have processes that slow things down, but if that is the case, they can look to institute the processes of districts/counties that count quicker.
In Germany we do hand counting and i have participated on multiple occasions and would say
1. it is really hard to do any fraud for multiple reasons:
2. The counting and reporting processes are well monitored and documented so that simple inconsistencies become visible right away either in the counting group (7-9 people in general) or when they phone in the results to the central point.3. There is obviously a cost involved in having people count BUT i can't imagine it being more that paying for the counting machines since the people involved aren't paid normal wages but instead expense allowances.
I fully support handcounting over machine counting! But the US would still have to get rid of old traditions, namely electoral college and gerrymandering practices. The popular vote should be the deciding factor most of the time!
Quick googling shows that japan manually counted 55 million votes in less than 24 hours in 2024 parliament elections.
Taiwan also has a very efficient and transparent process.
How many items are on these ballots? Due to the distributed nature of US governance my ballots easily have 20-30 items each election. It is quite different than countries that hand vote.
Even in Germany, the turnaround for our largest elections (local governments) where the paper is > 1 m² in size is less than 24 hours.
But how many items is that?
Well over 200 iirc. But most people just vote for the large list and do not use vote splitting ("Kumulieren und Panaschieren"), so the impact of these options isn't that much - the problem more is handling these giant sheets of paper.
What many people outside the US may not realize is that ballots here may include 40-60+ races. The presidential race appears on the same ballot the races for Senate, House of Representatives (both national races,) state wide positions like governor, attorney general, superintendent of public instruction, state treasurer and secretary of state, and state mine inspector. In some states superior court judges are on the ballot for "retention" as well as State Supreme Court positions. Then come the state legislature races. Most states have two houses so a state-level Senate and House. Then come county positions, Sheriff, Board of Supervisors, Recorder, Treasurer, County Attorney, Justice of the Peace and constable. Then the school board races so you may have a high school district board and an elementary school district board. Then come the referendums and initiatives that either the state legislature put on the ballot or citizens gathered enough signatures for; these typically change state law but sometimes implement or remove new taxes. In 2024 in Maricopa County, AZ we had a two page ballot because the legislature added 20+ initiatives to try and implement laws the governor had vetoed.
In any case, the idea that these ballots can be accurately hand counted is absurd. In some of the hand count examples in the states mentioned in the article only one or two races on ballots with 10's of races were recounted and even those recounts were problematic.
What's really telling is that none of the people elected in 2020 or 2022 or 2024 at the state legislature level are calling for recounts of THEIR races. Machines are fine when the right party wins.
Machines are the only way to deal with a ballot with 60 races. There are other parameters that could be put in place to help improve people's faith in the system. San Francisco makes ballot images available via a web portal. It's entirely possible that an AI model could be trained to rapidly recount any and all of the races to validate the official results. Tighter ID requirements would be OK, it's 2025 and even people in the hills and reservations should have IDs.
Personally I agree.
However, I think a weakness in the arguments is that many of the tabulation machines we have are very old, poorly designed for vote integrity (eg no paper ballots or confusing scan sheet design), and closed source which can lead to accusations of both hardware/software flipping votes and the systems being impossible to audit.
To counter these concerns you can use paper ballots everywhere, open source software for the machines, and risk limiting audits to verify the count.
Voting Works builds software for both sides of these voting processes as OSS with machine scanned paper ballots.
https://www.voting.works/audits
https://www.voting.works/machines
Hand counts is the way it is done in Sweden. It means that anyone can easily (well, as easy as possible) both understand the system and inspect it locally (all counting is open to the public).
The result is delivered in a matter of hours, and since vote counting is a parallell process it scales well enough that I doubt it would take much longer in the US. The US have massively more complicated ballots though, which I think is another issue entirely that you guys must solve.
I doubt it would be very expensive either. You don't have to pay people very much to do their civic duty every couple of years and count a couple hundred ballots.
> The US have massively more complicated ballots though, which I think is another issue entirely that you guys must solve.
Frankly this is never going to happen. The US democracy is extremely distributed and as a result each school district, water district, county, city, state and the federal government each have races and ballot items that citizens vote on.
Undoing this system is likely intractable without completely redesigning the US system of governance.
You have tons of items in Sweden as well and you vote on 3 levels of government and you can even write down in text name of any candidate you want and those text votes do get counted.
So no USA is not a special flower here, you can absolutely hand count those things.
The only secure way is privately produced black box voting machines with secret proprietary software. It's really the most efficient way to manipulate huge numbers of votes while involving as few people as possible. Manipulating vote counts with hand-counting requires large numbers of human agents distributed across many counties - a logistical nightmare.
Of all of the approaches in the article, I like the one about doing both to audit each other the most. Even if the extra time delays mentioned were unresolvable, I'd rather wait a couple of days and pay slightly more to run the election than spend more time and money with political battles about which counting approach is superior.
If you insist on 'immediate' results just do a machine count first with a mandatory hand count afterwards. The machine count gives fast results which can be confirmed by the hand count. If there are significant discrepancies redo the hand count until there are two counts which give the same results.
Handcount in Slovenia, first count done on local polling location, with a recount done by a central election comission and certification of the result. It works.
edit: First results are in within a couple of hours, depending on how many things are on the ballot.
Article without references to other countries where manual count is the only way. At least here in Chile we count votes by hand, results are ready at most 6 hours after poll closing time and Zero fraud has been reported in more than 30 years.
Are we talking about intentional or unintentional inaccuracies?
Unintentional ones should be distributed more or less evenly, if everyone have 10 less votes it should not change the end result.
But intentional ones, with the objective of trying to rig the result in one particular direction, and deep enough into whoever is doing the count/election. But in the end, it goes to how big the conspiracy should be? You may need just a few to rig all the voting machines (do you have the source code? of what was actually running in production everywhere?), but with human counters to get to the right scale you may need to involve really a lot of people.
Electronic voting is the way forward, like done in Brazil.
25% error rate seems more like corruption than errors.
Interestingly, in most of Europe, paper ballots and hand counting are preferred methods. We have seen times when electronic ballots have had glitches and have had inaccurate counts. Electronic ballots have experienced errors in tabulation and also loss of data, so it's not foolproof. In addition, vendors are known to be slow to patch security vulnerabilities in their systems --this leads to loss in confidence. Also as others have observed, in order to subvert paper ballots and counting, you have to compromise lots of people.
This field is ripe for security consulting firms, but they seem completely uninterested. Weird.
What a load of nonsense. In several EU countries, ballots are counted by hand and an accurate result is there usually by midnight.
In Germany, the Supreme Court has banned voting machines as unconstitutional.
The method is simple: Have relatively small voting districts, recruit civil servants as supervisors. Allow anyone from all parties to supervise and be present, especially during counting. Hand out the ballot sheet upon displaying an ID. Upload the counted result to a website where people can check that the reported count matches the actual count.
The EU has a lot of problems, efficient voting isn't one of them.
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Are minor, random inaccuracies due to hand-counting mistakes the main danger a voting system must guard against, or is it against covert, malicious manipulation from compromised computer systems?
> Prior to 2022, no legislatures were considering this [mandating hand counts] extreme proposal.
An honest article wouldn't call the counting method used in most of Europe, Canada, Japan, India, and countless other countries, "extreme". Of course it deftly omits mention of any other country, leaving the reader uninformed. I'm sure it's just a coincidence..
It's clearly neither. The real danger is note the adjudication of the elections themselves, it's the acceptance of the results. The danger is the belief by a plurality of the ruling party's support base that elections are somehow fraudulent, because that empowers the ruling party to ignore democracy. We may already be there, and threads like this are in fact the means by which democracy dies.
How about we don't compromise a voting system with black boxes just because there are unrelated attacks against it? If you prefer, you can think of it as following in the example of "more enlightened" countries, like in Europe, Canada, India, etc.., that already do it this way.
I am from one such country, and I enjoy not having a bottomless rabbit hole of computer security underpinning our elections.