Or just paper votes and volunteer scrutineers from any party that wants to provide them peering over staff's shoulders (and getting in the way a bit). Works fine in Australia.
Mid-term Elections, preparing for a less than peaceful outcome
- Thread starter XsjadoBlayde
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Yeah but we tried that. The Supreme Court eventually stepped in and decided that, contrary to its own ratio decidendi in that very case, the guy the banks and defense sector liked more should win instead of counting the votes that would actually decide the election.
That's the one where the votes were counted, it was close so they were recounted and it was still close so the so-far losing candidate requested strategically chosen locations be recounted again under different rules at which point the other candidate sued on grounds that using different rules to count different parts of the state violated equal protection, it eventually hit SCOTUS and SCOTUS more or less said that the counts so far had to stand because by this point it was something like the day before the deadline by which the count had to be certified.
It often gets argued as SCOTUS just picking the winner, but it's worth noting that recounts were actually completed in some of those specially chosen locations and at no point prior to this did any count completed meaningfully change the result.
Rather, two later surveys were performed that favored Gore - one looking at ballots that were officially counted as not voting for president because no hole was punched through the punchcard, but looking for dents in the paper might allow one to possibly discern the vote - these were in a location that had been picked for that second recount and examining the dimples suggest that those votes might have gone his way, potentially letting him win by the slimmest of margins presuming that counting under those rules was limited to the areas requested (because there's a lack of data for the rest of the state it would be silly to comment on what would have happened had a third statewide count under those rules been performed). The other was a survey done of ballots that had voted for more than one president, and assuming they "meant" to vote for whichever party they favored downballot, though virtually none of these were in places where a second recount was requested so even had SCOTUS found the other way, these wouldn't have impacted the results. Apparently the lesson is that Democrat voters have trouble with punchcards?
Using punchcards sounds like an awfully over complicated method when, if I understand correctly, the ballot paper could literally have Candidate A and Candidate B with a tickbox next to each that the voter could, with a pen/pencil/blotter put a very visible and easy to understand mark of preference.
Like, Jesus Christ.
Like, Jesus Christ.
Counting votes manually is a lot of work, and carries a risk of human error that a machine theoretically eliminates (even though it doesn't). However, it's a very open and transparent process; when I stood for local government myself and all the other candidates were standing next to the table making sure it was being done correctly.
Worth noting that often there's plenty of other thing to vote on than just US president. You might have minor race or referendum on some other aspect. So you can have 10+ thing that need to be counted, multiply that literally millions and it takes a lot of time. Ideally the machine does the counting but there's a paper trail for recounting.
It's also the one where Katherine Harris tried to certify the results before the (state-mandated) recount could be completed, when 18 of Florida's 66 counties never even performed the (again, state-mandated) recount in the first place, and then Harris set an arbitrary deadline she knew county election officials could never meet. While the Gore campaign had been entirely within its legal rights under Florida state law to request manual recounts of individual states.
The problem with the SCOTUS decision was that, despite their ratio in the decision, they decided to force recounts stopped entirely as opposed to rule a forthcoming statewide recount be held to the same standard. Because Florida had an arbitrary safe-harbor deadline that had zero statutory significance other than to exist, when the actual state deadline was Dec. 18 and the federal deadline was Dec. 27.
See, in my state we used scantron sheets, like you'd use for standardized testing. Still use them now, except now they're fed into a fancy touch screen thing that prints the ovals for you, before being taken over to be scanned and put in a lockbox. Specifically removes the risk of underfilled or misfilled ovals.
I believe last election ours were papers to fill in the bubbles by hand, but then you run it through the scanner yourself and get a screen to verify it read your votes correctly before you confirm. Logistically, it was excellent, as you could have a dozen people in the active process of voting in our little voting center with only two big expensive voting machines to make the digital record, as the longest part of the process was with paper and pencil. It got people through super fast.
...but not under different standards for what is considered a valid ballot than the rest of the state. The rest of the state was counted with multiple presidents punched through or no presidents punched through as being no vote, and no count operating under those rules ever suggested these recounts were going to change anything, noting that some of Gore's recounts actually were completed.
Any survey that implied that Gore might have actually genuinely won relied on things like "if they voted for multiple presidents, let's decide they *really* voted for whichever party they voted for more downticket" or "nothing is punched through, but if you look closely the paper is dented by a candidate so let's count it as a vote for them."
Hypothetically they had 3 business days to complete any desired recounts. But recounts using the same rules as the first time were highly unlikely to change the result, and recounting part of the state under different rules than the rest is a blatant equal protection violation. So, the only case where the SCOTUS decision actually just determined the president not in line with the election results is if they managed a statewide manual recount under new rules in a record time and that change in counting rules changed the result.