I hope it gets widely noted that not only do they have paper ballots (yay!!), but they are HAND COUNTED!! No tabulating machinery that can be highjacked and the results manipulated. I am not saying that all tabulated results are untrue, but the only way to confirm the veracity of the results is by hand-counting. Hand counting is the gold standard. Other first-world countries maintain hand-counting in order to ensure the integrity of their results (Germany, Canada, Scotland, etc.) We should insist on it here. And it is our duty as citizens to serve as election judges to preside at the polls and to count the ballots (just as it is our duty to serve on juries). Without citizen involvement, our election results are determined by private, profit-making corporations whose machinery literally tells us the results. We can't SEE the counting; it takes place within the computers whose counting software is a proprietary secret of the corporation that sells it and services it. Not only that, but we no longer rely on exit polling as a way of revealing questionable results! Our elections results have been screwy since 2000 when we went to not only machine tabulating, but also computer screen (no paper ballots) voting.
I have been an election judge when we counted the ballots and signed off on the sealed results. Now I have to sign off on a ticker tape result that the tabulator spits out, and I really have no way of knowing if it is a true, untampered result. It doesn't feel good. I can verify that the sign-in and registration numbers are correct; that the number of ballots equals the number of voters signing in; that there was no campaigning going on near the polling place, no coercion, etc. But I can't really verify that the result on the ticker tape is a correct tally of the paper ballots that were fed into it at the end of the day. We must demand the gold standard -- hand counting again.
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