For the past 2+ years, I have been immersed in studying and learning what it will take to secure our elections. I have gotten to know many in this effort both in Idaho and around the country. Every day there seems to be something happening, usually ignored by big media, but dissected in detail within this election integrity community.
For the most part, the community is united on what happened in 2020, what vulnerabilities we have, and how we can fix them. It has made for a remarkable sense of teamwork and cooperation. That fellowship has made the enormous task not only bearable, but at times enjoyable.
So, I have debated and delayed writing this as what I am going to say breaks with the main narrative of the election integrity community. But it is time to speak the truth in love and hopefully it will be received in that spirit.
This effort to ‘get rid of the machines’ is not working and for good reason.
Unless we structurally change how our elections are run in the US, the machines are not going away. The reason is simple, but I rarely see it even recognized in the election integrity community.
The number of races on a ballot we have in our US elections precludes hand counting in any reasonable amount of time.
France is able to have results on election night because they have just one race. Argentina recently had their results done election night because it was one race. The Netherlands, Germany, Canada…every country I studied that does hand counting essentially has just one race or a very few races. But our elections here in the US can have 30 or so races and that drastically changes the landscape for hand counting.
The Numbers
We have ample evidence now in Idaho that our method of hand counting yields about 250 ballots counted per hour for a team of 3 people counting one race. If a precinct has 1000 voters and just one race, this means it will take four hours to count the ballots. If they start counting before close of polls, they can probably have the result within an hour after the polls close. That is very doable.
But here in Ada County for the last presidential election, we had about 2000 voters per precinct and around 30 races on the ballot. With those parameters and the 250 ballots per hour per race, we are now looking at 240 hours of counting for a team of 3. To finish the counting within four hours, it will take 60 teams of 3, or 180 people. That is roughly 20 times the number of people needed to staff a precinct now and it is not an easy task for clerks to fill the existing positions as it is. Do you see why clerks do not want to get rid of machines?
Other Counting Methods
Now, other methods of counting may be faster. The Missouri Model, in my estimation, is probably 3-4 times faster than the current ‘read and mark’ method used in Idaho, but we are still looking at 40-50 people to do the hand counting in a reasonable period of time.
This short video claims over 1000 ballots per hour, not too far off from the Missouri Model, but the number of people involved and information on accuracy is not provided. Also, are breaks included in the model as they are in the Idaho rate? Even if it is 5 times faster than the Idaho method, you are still looking at over 30 extra people at each precinct to do the counting.
I have seen other proposals. One is to hand sort the ballots and then weigh them with a scale in order to get the count. Interesting idea but there is much to be worked out for multi-race ballots and whether the time to sort and weigh is all that much different than tallying.
Another proposal is to video each ballot as it is being tallied and post those videos on-line so that anyone can check the counts. I think that could have merit, but it would require a considerable change to existing election operations – new equipment, new procedures, on-line connectivity and storage of video issues to name a few.
In summary, I don’t relish being the messenger of unpleasant news for those that want to get rid of machines, but unless you change how our elections are structured and address how to handle a 4 to 10-fold increase in staffing, it will be a disaster for clerks to remove the machines. This is why only a few counties have pursued doing so out of the 3000+ counties in the country.
But we hand counted in the past?
Yes, but our elections were structured differently. Before 1900, elections were typically based on a ticket. You voted for a slate of candidates. From a counting perspective, it is essentially one race which is completely doable.
As elections began to add more races, levered machines began to enter the picture to help count the vote. In the 60s, a company called Votomatic began selling a punch card voting system which became the dominant method of counting votes.
Votomatic was used in Florida during the 2000 election which saw the ‘hanging chad’ controversy. That was the impetus to replace punch card machines with today’s electronic voting machines. The bottom line, but for small counties, we have never hand counted multiple race elections like the ones we have now.
But voting machines are vulnerable!
Absolutely. While it is easy enough to program a machine to cheat, it is easy to catch cheating with hand counts. We have even seen stories of impossible machine counts that were probably not willful instances of cheating but human error in the configuration. Regardless, some random hand counting HAS to be employed not only to counter fraud, but to ensure the machines were not unintentionally misconfigured.
Here in Idaho, we began doing random, post-election hand counts after the 2022 primary. Statutes also allow any candidate to request a recount which includes a 5% hand count of ballots. With roughly two dozen hand counts that have now been done, there has yet to be any significant difference with the machine counts.
Why Machines Should Stay
Above, I made the case that without changing the structure of our elections, machines are necessary to get counting done in a reasonable amount of time. But I want to make another argument for the use of machines. I challenge anyone who wants to get rid of machines to actually participate in a hand count. Here in Idaho, you can sign up to be part of the hand counting team when post-election hand counts are done. I did that after the November 2022 election, and I hope I never have to do it again. In fact, I checked with our Secretary of State’s office and nobody that signed up for the May 2022 primary returned to do it again after the November 2022 election.
It is one thing to spend five minutes or so in a hand count demo but try spending 8 hours doing the very menial process of hand counting. I was getting carpal tunnel syndrome in my eyes as I looked back and forth from tally sheet to ballot. Even though there are frequent breaks, in an 8 hour shift you are tallying for probably 5-6 hours of that. It is grueling and I do not wish that on anyone.
Further, most races are not even competitive. What a waste of human time and effort to hand count races that the result is not even in question.
My Proposal
Machine count each race.
Hand count any races that people have concerns about.
Randomly hand count some races to check for fraud and configuration errors.
Longer term, we also need more transparency. We cannot have our elections run on proprietary technology, which means ES&S, Dominion, Hart Intercivic and the other smaller proprietary vendors must embrace completely transparent systems (see Voting Works) or they need to be put out of business. Cast vote records, ballot images, cast ballot lists and other items need to be publicly available after each election. County officials need to be able to open the machines and allay concerns of the public that they do not have modems or any transceivers of any kind inside.
Conclusion
If the people truly want to get rid of voting machines and replace them with hand counting, so be it. The elections belong to the people and should operate according to their will.
But I believe those that are pushing for removal of the machines are not addressing the root reasons why the machines are there. You can continue to demand removal, but you will not be taken seriously until you address the staffing issue laid out above.
For my colleagues who reside outside of Idaho, I know many of you are in a much different situation. We have it pretty good in Idaho as the proposal I made above is mostly in place. I know other states not only have no hand counting checks, but they are making such options criminal for clerks to even attempt. I do think a legislative effort to get hand counts to counter fraud and misconfiguration errors should be pushed anywhere it doesn’t currently exist.
Finally, it needs to be made clear that removing machines will not end election fraud. Absentee voter fraud has been proved in court in the past and several recent cases are pending now. Removing the machines would have zero impact on absentee voting fraud. The energy spent trying to get rid of machines would be better spent trying to secure absentee voting.
We can make voting with paper ballots & counting by hand work only when enough people get off their ass & get engaged civically. Why is this so hard to understand? We have traded security for convenience because Americans have become LAZY & ENTITLED.
Tim you make a great point, there are not enough people currently running the polls to even justify voting at the poll on machines! We should be pushing for internet voting through an app to resolve the current staffing issues. Let's trade transparency, locality, and security in favor of convenience. The application is internet connected, but will securely store your secret vote and not tabulate it until the close of the e-polls.
This system also would allow an easy recount, like you suggested is a way to identify potential issues with the system. Since the votes are stored in that application database, it would be very easy to just count those votes in the database and see that the numbers still match!
Handcount and machines will never be able to resolve the staffing issues or counting speed issues you pointed out, so it's time we do away with these silly notions of security and transparency and localized elections in favor of a system that expedites the counting.