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Counting by hand is fine. I see no value in the process being instantaneous. Especially not compared to the monetary cost and organizational overhead.
They couldn't even hand count an election of 127 people correctly. Imagine how big the errors would have been with thousands of votes.
The fact is that this isn't being counted by full time well-trained accountants, but by temporary and on-call employees at best, and lots of them are retirees, who can afford not to have a full-time gig.
Hand counting requires more blind faith trust than a machine you can easily audit at any time.
It's not just about the speed, it's about an inhuman level of consistency and memory that the machine provides.
How does the auditing work in these cases?
Also I found news reports about some US states still using machines without paper trail...
Every state has it's own laws and every set of equipment is a little different, so each county can be a little different too , but the basics are that you pull a few scan batches, count them by hand, and then compare to what the computer says. If the two ever don't match, you know you have a problem and you count again to make sure the problem wasn't the humans recounting. Then you check to make sure they weren't scanned wrong. If you still have a problem after that, the auditor should be calling the secretary of state as fast as they can and I would guess the goal would be to get a new tabulator in there ASAP to start fresh on a completely different system.
With regard to machines with no paper trail, counties can choose to be as OCD or laid back as the law and their elected official (the auditor) wants them to be; the auditor is theoretically there to represent the interests of the people and make sure the system is trustworthy.
I'm my county the April election was small enough that they ended up recounting every single ballot as part off the audit since it was only about 200 ballots for one taxing district.
You should also be able to observe if you want to, contact your county and ask how to get on the list and you can observe first-hand exactly how they do it.
I'll also point out before I go, that the audits of the machine show that the system looks to be working right, but when you batch audit a hand count all you can do is verify that one batch because humans are not a consistent process.
Alright, thank you for the information! I still think that those machines are unnecessary but I can see how they are at least not making things worse.
No paper trail still seems like insanity though, especially if auditing comes down to a non-technical person with "training" connecting some box to the machines that then tells them it's OK.