Hand Count Works!

Hand count works!

The contrary is simply indefensible. The data and the record are absolutely clear. Those who think not must be classified as either [a] vastly uninformed or [b] working as hired guns for interested parties - whose interests are NOT honest elections.

Let’s first just look at what working on the recount of a major, high-profile real-life hotly-contested governor’s election was like.

Then we should note: a CalTech-MIT study; and a little common sense.

Washington State election for Governor, 2004

In 2004 here in Washington State we had an election for Governor which made headlines everywhere for the extraordinarily close result. The election was conducted with hand-marked paper ballots and opscan machines. [primarily; [1]] State-wide, Gregoire won by about 130 votes after a hand recount of more than 2.8 million ballots. It was finally settled in Court. [2]

Here is how it looked in King County, in which Seattle is located.

We had 594,000 absentees’ ballots and 305,000 polling place ballots, about 900,000 total here.

—Begin clips [3]

My team of three sorted and counted 5,544 votes during a nine-hourshift. We agreed unanimously - the Republican, the Democrat and I, the county worker - about who should get every one of those votes.

Each ballot was counted by the Republican appointee: McClellan, 21, a recent University of Washington grad who applied to be the Rossi family nanny and got this job because her brother-in-law works for the campaign.

Then the same stacks were counted by the Democratic appointee: John Reese, 53, a Seattle pro-Palestinian activist who said he was "way left of liberal; I guess I'd call myself a radical."

They kept their counts secret and gave them to me. If the numbers matched, we reported the results and resealed the box. If they differed, we started over. If the second counts still didn't agree, we were instructed to return the box to be given to a new team.

The system of checks and double-checks didn't stop there. If our tallies for a precinct varied by even one vote from the machine recount, another team would later reopen the box and count the entire precinct by hand again.

...With all the recent news about uncounted votes and ballots being found in the side pockets of precinct machines, I expected a slipshod operation. I was completely wrong.

I am now convinced that in the counting of votes, humans are unquestionably superior to machines.

..."I'm so impressed with this system," McClellan said. "It's near impossible to corrupt, and it seems much more sensitive than a machine count. All the criticisms I hear about what we're doing are wrong."

Reese agreed. "I don't have much faith in the American political system, but I have faith in what we're doing here," he said. "I would put people counting over machine counting any time."

...those critics who are blasting the manual recount on the face of it don't know what they're talking about. Such as former Gov. Dan Evans: "Can you imagine 300 newly hired, ill-trained, overworked people counting by hand with people looking over their shoulders and getting accurate counts? It's ludicrous."

I can do more than imagine it, governor. I saw it with my own eyes.

===End of clips

CalTech-MIT

Clip
“The central finding of this investigation is that manually counted paper ballots have the lowest average incidence of spoiled, uncounted, and unmarked ballots, followed closely by lever machines and optically scanned ballots. Punchcard methods and systems using direct recording electronic devices (DREs) had significantly higher average rates of spoiled, uncounted, and unmarked ballots than any of the other systems.” [4]

Common Sense

People count paper currency world-wide to the satisfaction of all concerned [aside from occasional disputes over poker ...].

Canada, Sweden and other nations, all around the globe, hand count paper ballots routinely.

Canada’s Paper Ballot System [5]

Summary numbers:
Registered voters - 21,243,473
Number of polling stations - 60,728
Average of registered voters per station (minimum of 250 per precinct)-350
Total ballots cast - 12,997,185
Average ballots cast per polling station - 214
Ballots rejected - 139,412 or 1.1% -
Voter turn-out - 61.2%

Within four hours after the last polls closed in Canada's parliamentary election, officials had hand-counted virtually every one of nearly 13 million paper ballots.

Sources; Notes

[1] Three counties had DREs as well as opscan systems used for both polling place and absentee voting. Some aspects of the results were interesting; and there was a court case. But none of this is really relevant to our present concerns.

[2] “Tedious hand recount begins,”
Seattle Post-intelligencer 12/9/04
click here

“Counter for a day finds few bugs in recount process”
Seattle Times 12/18/04 Danny Westneat
click here />click here />
[D. Westneat is a very well-regarded long-time staffer for the Seattle Times.]

[3] “Judge upholds Gregoire's election; Rossi won't appeal”
Seattle Post-Intelligencer 6/6/05
click here />

[4] “Residual Votes Attributable to Technology - An Assessment of the Reliability of Existing Voting Equipment”
The Caltech/MIT Voting Technology Project 3/30/01
click here />
[5] “Voting Inside-Outside the Box”
League of Women Voters of Washington State Committee - telecon with Pierre Blain, a spokesman for Elections Canada.
click here />http://www.elections.ca/loi/ref/CEA-LEC_e.pdf />

by abacus (2 articles, 2 quicklinks, 4 diaries, 64 comments) on Friday, March 23, 2007 at 12:12:53 AM
 

cal tech study

I was very interested in following up on some of your links- the cal tech study link doesn't seem to work

 I thought one of the most powerful things you said was describing people's reactions to the experience of hand counting- I remember reading a Thom Hartmann article about how Germans experience the week they take to count votes- in a very positive, pro- participatory democracy way

I think that's a good way to have this conversation that people can perhaps hear rather than just thinking and talking about HCPBs in the abstract

thanks

andi

by andi novick (54 articles, 0 quicklinks, 0 diaries, 15 comments) on Friday, March 23, 2007 at 1:08:11 PM
 

CalTech-MIT Link

Sorry; of course I should have checked it.

Here's another link, but to a secondary document not the original. If I can find one to the original I'll send it.

BTW: thanks for a great piece.

by abacus (2 articles, 2 quicklinks, 4 diaries, 64 comments) on Friday, March 23, 2007 at 4:36:31 PM
 

Less talk, more walk.

In New York, and beyond, think outside the box, and in your thinking shift the paradigm.

Have paper ballots on which each voter writes the name of the candidate being voted for. Period. Simplicity everyone understands. Write the name -- Pencil. Paper. Write who you vote for.

But some voters can't spell, or some have handwriting that is difficult to read. So what? And your point is? In a new paradigm, give voters your credence in abilities and voters can, and mostly will, extend ourselves to perform to our expectations of each other. Ask yourself, could you write the name of who you are voting for? Surely, you can. Well, so can everyone else.

But handwritten names would take so long to count. So what? Employ more counters.

But handwritten names is not the way we have always voted. So what? It is the easiest to understand and explain. It is the way voting began. It it universal and uniform. It is fair. It is just.

But it would upset the existing power structure to change over to the new system. So what? And your point is? The new handwritten voting system works better, simplicity is more reliable.

But there are so many names to write. So what? Write your candidates in advance and take those notes with you. Better yet, using Oregon's Vote-by-Mail method, registered voters receive their ballots and have two weeks to consider, decide, and mark their votes.

I claim that young voters would be attracted to handwritten voting, for trusting it more, and so more young voters would vote. Let's ask several of them and see what they say. After all, they are the ones who have to live the most with whatever system is instituted.

Technology's 'automatic'-ness was supposed to make our lives easy. Instead, it has made our lives hasty. As good drivers know: Slow down and live. I claim that haste has made waste of our lives today, and wasting has made our lives hard.

Just saying, outside the (ballot) box, perhaps we can think of what we can do, instead of thinking of what can be done for us and getting what is done to us.

by meremark (1 articles, 3 quicklinks, 26 diaries, 525 comments) on Friday, March 23, 2007 at 12:52:12 PM
 

Better Link for Annotated Bib of 15 Expert Reports

Annotated Bibliography: Electronic Voting and Fair Vote Counts. http://www.opednews.com/articles/opedne_rady_ana_070117_annotated_bibliograp.htm
Annotated bibliography of 15 Expert Reports on electronic voting and fair vote counts -- summarized and sourced for your reference.

Andi - this article is very comprehensive and well-researched. I appreciate the new sources you provided - especially the GAO's March 07 report. 

Above I provide the link to the updated annotated bibliography which you mentioned at the end of your article.

by Rady Ananda (133 articles, 300 quicklinks, 38 diaries, 1227 comments) on Saturday, March 24, 2007 at 10:51:04 AM