Hand counting ballots is impossible
https://apnews.com/article/hand-counts-ballots-voting-elections-93af22f5f7691e57b4a675a64c217627
CHICAGO (AP) — Four years of Donald Trump’s false claims about a stolen 2020 election have kindled growing suspicion of voting machines among conspiracy theorists. One of their solutions is to replace the tabulators that count every vote with people who will do that by hand.
Controversies over the issue have flared periodically in pockets of the country before the 2024 presidential election even though research has shown that hand-counting is more prone to error, costlier and likely to delay results.
The few counties that have attempted the massive task have found the process more time-consuming, expensive and inaccurate than expected.
In Texas’ Gillespie County, a hand-count of Republican primary election ballots this year stretched into the early morning hours, taking almost 24 consecutive hours with 200 people counting ballots, the Texas Tribune and VoteBeat reported. The hand-count cost taxpayers about double the wage costs of the 2020 Republican primary and involved fixing a series of errors, the news nonprofits reported.,,,,,
The hand-counting of ballots threatens to delay results by days, weeks or even months, depending on jurisdiction and staffing. Swapping machines with hand-counts would not only be slower but also increase the chances for mistakes and fraud, research has shown.
In a New Hampshire study, poll workers who counted ballots by hand were off by 8%, compared with a 0.5% error rate for machine counting.
“Human beings are really bad at tedious things, and counting ballots is among the most tedious things we could do,” Stewart said. “Computers are very good at tedious things. They can count very quickly and very accurately.”
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