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.
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…
I know I sound like a broken record, but I don’t buy that.
Last time a recount was ended and decided by a governmental body other than the election boards it was bush v gore and the Supreme Court. Back then there was a judicial branch less accommodating to the republicans. If the goal was to appoint the winner that would be the way to go. Theres precedent and it’s much easier to wrangle seven judges than it is to get the whole house in line.
Why would it matter if the count is slow? Provisional ballots aren’t done for weeks after the election. In a close race it would be a long time till we’d know for sure anyway.
Why do you think only the republican counter will raise objections? That hasn’t been my experience…
When local boards refuse to certify an election the first step is a recount, not to kick it up the chain.
If it is as chaotic and as big a deal as you’re saying, wouldn’t the spotlight be on the count/recount in a way that would make it hard to manipulate?
I’m not gonna dox myself, but my objections to these lines of reasoning stem not just from having read extensively about the way 2000 was handled but also from my own experience working an election.
You mean the 2000 election that the hand recount took so long the supreme Court told Florida to stop counting when Bush was ahead, and then when all votes were counted Gore would have won?
Yeah. Great example of how delays caused by objections this rule allows can lead to not all votes being counted.
They would have had to recount the whole state of Florida to get the correct result (gore wins), not the counties they were recounting, so bush v gore was decided correctly. Maybe not for the right reasons, but it reflected reality.
What I was referencing was that it’s pretty silly to think that the plan would be to herd the house into choosing the president when it’s easier to influence five or six judges and it worked before.
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.
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.
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…
Pretty simple:
I know I sound like a broken record, but I don’t buy that.
Last time a recount was ended and decided by a governmental body other than the election boards it was bush v gore and the Supreme Court. Back then there was a judicial branch less accommodating to the republicans. If the goal was to appoint the winner that would be the way to go. Theres precedent and it’s much easier to wrangle seven judges than it is to get the whole house in line.
Why would it matter if the count is slow? Provisional ballots aren’t done for weeks after the election. In a close race it would be a long time till we’d know for sure anyway.
Why do you think only the republican counter will raise objections? That hasn’t been my experience…
When local boards refuse to certify an election the first step is a recount, not to kick it up the chain.
If it is as chaotic and as big a deal as you’re saying, wouldn’t the spotlight be on the count/recount in a way that would make it hard to manipulate?
I’m not gonna dox myself, but my objections to these lines of reasoning stem not just from having read extensively about the way 2000 was handled but also from my own experience working an election.
They’re pretty explicit about the plan here: chaos, providing an excuse to ignore actual votes
Where are you seeing someone saying that?
You mean the 2000 election that the hand recount took so long the supreme Court told Florida to stop counting when Bush was ahead, and then when all votes were counted Gore would have won?
Yeah. Great example of how delays caused by objections this rule allows can lead to not all votes being counted.
They would have had to recount the whole state of Florida to get the correct result (gore wins), not the counties they were recounting, so bush v gore was decided correctly. Maybe not for the right reasons, but it reflected reality.
What I was referencing was that it’s pretty silly to think that the plan would be to herd the house into choosing the president when it’s easier to influence five or six judges and it worked before.
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?
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.