All allegations against Dominion voting machines were pretty much disproved by subsequent manual vote courting. Again, the machines leave a paper trail that allows manual counting for verification. That makes simple handcounting without any assistance more prone to errors and less paper trail as well.
In what world would manual counting have less paper trail?
What is for sure - with voting machines, there is less validation. Hand counting means - all ballots are counted always (by volunteers with all parties invited) - whereas voting machines means a spot-test (in some states), and only a full manual count is when a recount is demanded.
All this to say - I think Dominion did a thorough job - but this all only happened because the election was close. What about those where the election isn't "close"?
Voting by hand takes days, which is why it is only done automatically for close elections.
However, a losing candidate may request a recount after the election. In most states, if the margin is outside of a stated threshold, that candidate must pay for the recount. If there is a discrepancy between the two counts, then a hand recount is performed.
If an election isn't close, then the respective Secretary of State will audit (by hand) a random selection of precincts to verify vote totals match, but this is a security check and generally takes place weeks after the election.
Voting by hand takes days - in the US. Not in Finland, France or the many other countries where voting is done by hand 100% successfully for decades with timely results.
Here's the conundrum - what constitutes what's "out of threshold"? If a voting machine, either by design or flaw, pushes a close vote outside the threshold - then that's a way to bypass the checks & balances and can be exploited by the unethical.
Scale matters. 160 million votes were cast in the U.S. in each of the past 2 elections.
36 million votes were cast in France in the last election.
The U.S. is capable of counting 36 million votes by hand overnight as well, and most votes were once counted by hand in the U.S.
What constitutes what's "out of threshold"? If a voting machine, either by design or flaw, pushes a close vote outside the threshold - then that's a way to bypass the checks & balances and can be exploited by the unethical.
That paragraph is disingenuous. A vote that is outside the threshold for an automatic recount is not a close vote; the margin between candidates is thousands of votes (or more).
If a voting machine has a design flaw or other flaw, that would have been discovered during one of the several inspections and trial runs it was put through before being certified for use. Moreover, many states now require paper receipts of all ballots cast (as a result of Russian hacking of election machines in 2016), so if there is any suspicion of manipulated results, the human-legible ballot receipts can be tallied. States with these types of printed ballot receipts will audit the electronic tallies against hand-counts of the printed ballots on a random precinct-level basis.
> Scale matters. 160 million votes were cast in the U.S. in each of the past 2 elections.
> 36 million votes were cast in France in the last election.
> The U.S. is capable of counting 36 million votes by hand overnight as well, and most votes were once counted by hand in the U.S.
I don't understand this argument. In France, a population of roughly 67 million people can count 36 million ballots by hand overnight. That's 1.86 people per ballot.
In the US 328 million people cast 160 million ballots. That's 2.05 people per ballot.
Since counting is done at each individual polling place, what's actually keeping the US from doing the same as France? It's not like they're shipping around all of the ballots to one place, and they're limited by geometry and ballot distribution to volunteer counters. Create a polling place per 10,000 people, and within X miles of everyone. Smaller polling places would finish faster, but the big polling places don't really have to scale past what European countries already count successfully every election.
Voting in France is like a rain spread out over the country, because the population is more spread out across geographic centers. It's easier to handle votes.
Voting in the U.S. is like a series of scattered torrential downpours, because more than 70% of the population lives in a metropolitan area. It's not simply a matter of the number of bodies, at the scale the U.S. metro areas deal with you have significant concerns about the physical logistics related to moving that many ballots that much smaller, less dense countries do not have.
