Georgia Election Board Orders Hand-Counting of Ballots |Critics say the move could significantly delay the reporting of results in the battleground state and inject chaos into the post-election period(www.nytimes.com)

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.

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silence7@slrpnk.netOP

1 point

15 hours ago

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.

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bloodfart@lemmy.ml

-2 points

15 hours ago

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.

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silence7@slrpnk.netOP

3 points

15 hours ago

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.

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bloodfart@lemmy.ml

0 points

8 hours ago

I don’t buy that.

I know personally that election worker pay is dogshit. It’s way too cheap to do an election. Even if it weren’t, even if a person didn’t have my mistrust of machine voting, wouldn’t recognizing that the vote will likely be contested mean that going ahead and preparing to do a hand count anyway be the right choice?

I mean, we’re headed for hand counts in the future anyway because no one trusts the elections. Even if someone wasn’t a proponent of hand counts like me, isn’t it good to be ready?

What chaos that you talked about is gonna be brought on by this hand count? I can’t help but think that the whole election is chaotic…

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KairuByte@lemmy.dbzer0.com

0 points

15 hours ago

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?

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bloodfart@lemmy.ml

1 point

8 hours ago

Usually a hand count has several people count the ballot and if they disagree, an official gets called over to sort it out.

It’s why forcing a recount is not a good strategy unless you actually think you can win on it or have control of the source of ballots.

There’s too many people involved and the scale is too granular to make it possible to fake shit in a hand count without it being obvious.

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