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Early would have been a year ago. Not now.
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?
The election board has a majority who deny the 2020 results. What exactly do you think they're planning to do?
I don’t know what people think or plan.
I’m interested to see if people have been discussing how to use the election process to disrupt the election itself though.
I also don’t think it’s a big deal if a hand count takes longer. Like I said before, provisional ballots aren’t finalized for weeks after the election so what’s the big deal?
It allows time to make all sorts of wild claims about voter fraud
It also provides a level of transparency to refute those claims if there is no fraud.
In the future there will be more contested elections. If you want to stop hearing people claim voter fraud then we need to start practicing clear and open processes now instead of pushing those people to the sideline.
Most elected officials don’t take office until January. The window between the election and Those people being seated is two months and some weeks no matter what. If the count is done in two hours, two days or two weeks, there’s still two months and some weeks to drum up a fraud case.
It doesn't if the people doing the counting are interested in creating bogus claims of fraud.
Again, I don’t see anyone saying that they’re planning to lie in order to claim fraud.
I’m also not entirely convinced that a hand count can be manipulated as easily as you’re suggesting based on the election work I’ve been involved in.
This honestly seems like one of those times that a stopped clock is right, a person truly believes there is gonna be fraud or recognizes that there are gonna be claims of it and pushes to prepare for the worst.
Let me flip the script on you:
Georgia was the focus of a lot of claims of election fraud last time around. If your goal was to build trust in the election process there, wouldn’t you want to go ahead and be prepared for the worst, a hand count?
They're already lying about past events which makes it clear that they're going to keep on lying.
Okay, you and the Georgia board of elections disagree about the 2020 result.
What is the right way to go about building trust in the election process in that circumstance?
Is it to just tell the people who think there was manipulation to sit down and shut up or is it to go ahead and prepare for the inevitable accusations of manipulation?
What im trying to make clear here is that I think that the board of elections is making the right call, even if they don’t think hand counts are inherently better like I do, and even if they’re nefariouslly planning to drum up unfounded accusations of manipulation, because they’re making the call that has the most opportunity to build trust in the election process back up.
How should it be?
You can't with them, because their aim is to destroy trust, not create it.
If you can’t build trust with a group what do you think is the way forward?
Take away their power to destroy trust, which is what they're there for.
How so?
Remove them from office or change the law so that office they hold does exist or change the power the office holds so it can't do the kinds of things they want to do.
Okay let me get this straight:
There’s a group of people who don’t believe you can trust the elections. They think there’s a big conspiracy to manipulate them and have taken positions in the board of elections in order to make sure it’s done right (whatever that means).
You and others think that theyre the ones involved a conspiracy to manipulate the election, and have occupied those positions in order to further their plot. You and others believe that they’re going ahead with a hand count, the method used when an election is in contention and its results need to be verified, so that the process will slow down and their candidate will be appointed by the house.
You don’t think that trust can be built with that group and that they should be purged from office and the ability of those positions to verify and certify elections should be removed.
You think the best response to a conspiracy minded movement which doesn’t trust the elections and has occupied the positions in government ostensibly tasked with election security and veracity with the stated purpose of making sure there is no manipulation is to force them out of those positions and take away that power.
This is “put battery operated speakers in stop signs that remind schizophrenics to take their medication” level thinking and I’m here for it.
The problem is that their vision of "done right" is to block non-whites, non-males, and non-their-kind-of-Christian from voting.
Letting them have it be their version "done right" means that they get their way forever and trample the rights of other Americans.
there are insane bigots.
I do not see evidence that this group is pushing forward a bigoted agenda in deed.
I am open to being wrong. If you have evidence of it, I want to see.
I don’t think that a hand count in a state whose election results were called into question last time is a crazy move.
I think suspicion of a conspiracy to use a hand count to slow the process down to the point that the election is decided by the house is not a good reason to prevent a hand count.
I feel like I’m missing something critical here, but it doesn’t seem like you want to resolve people’s concerns or build trust because you believe those concerns don’t merit addressing and that it’s not possible to build trust with the people you see as your enemies.
They're not explicit, but when you see for example, Rick Jeffares having run for office and never managed to get a single dark-skinned person standing with him, it's blindingly obvious what's going on.
Okay, like I said, there are insane bigots.
What is going on?
"Again, I don’t see anyone saying that they’re planning to lie in order to claim fraud."
Everyone here has taken a lot of time to explain this to you. Here is an article that explains what is really going on.
https://amp.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/sep/18/trump-election-georgia
This is the opposite of building trust.
It is just "hand counting good" with you and frankly it makes you look stupid because you are willfully missing the point.
I’m sorry for not replying to you sooner, I couldn’t find any examples of people lying to claim fraud in that article.
I read it a bunch of times and it’s very possible that I missed it, so point it out if you think so.
That’s why I didn’t get back to you till now.
I’ve really tried to not argue from the standpoint that hand counting is ontologically good, but that there’s a reason why in this case, in this election, under the conditions that Georgia is and will be under, hand counting is a better choice.
In a bunch of comments up the chain I say as much and I’ve been trying to stay consistent with that.
I’m really not willfully trying to avoid the point.
I did go back and look at the comments and there were people doubting hand counting. I think this is misplaced and I do agree with your sentiment against this.
That is all fine and dandy, but in the context of what is going on right now in Georgia calling for hand counting in the 11th hour is asinine. There are many elections officials that are conspiracing as we discuss this.
The fact that people are on here doubting hand counting is a symptom of the discord that sowing election misinformation leads to.
This is the real issue, that we are allowing our systems to get damaged by falsehoods. Until we stop the lies things will stay shitty.
i agree that we need to build trust in the process. I think the right way to do that is to go ahead with a hand count. if they're conspiring to cast doubt like you're saying, it's the way to put a stop to that line of thinking.
be realistic here, georgia was the subject of allegations of tampering last time around and just because of that there will be allegations this time around. it would have been better to prepare earlier but the unserious move is to wait till election night to start the hand tally.
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.
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.