Germany hand counts their ballots, results in quickly

[LeftInTX]

21. Election conspiracy theories fueled a push to hand-count votes, but doing so is risky and slow

The few counties that have attempted the massive task have found the process more time-consuming, expensive and inaccurate than expected.

In rural Nye County in Nevada, where volunteers in 2022 embarked on an unprecedented full hand-count of midterm votes, mismatched tallies led to recount after recount. After the first day of counting, the county clerk, Mark Kampf, estimated a discrepancy of nearly 25% between the hand and machine count, attributing it to human counting error. The painstakingly slow process was halted by the state’s Supreme Court over concerns that early vote tallies could be leaked publicly.

Shasta County, a conservative rural county in northern California, last year abandoned plans to hand-count ballots after the plan was estimated to cost $1.6 million and require more than 1,200 additional employees.

https://apnews.com/article/hand-counts-ballots-voting-elections-93af22f5f7691e57b4a675a64c217627

Everything you want to know about converting is here:

The Reality of Full Hand Counts: A Guide for Election Officials
trying to replace a modern voting system with a full hand count leads to significant obstacles for election officials as they conduct free, fair, and secure elections.

https://statesunited.org/resources/hand-counts/

Why Hand Counting Ballots Could Create an Election Disaster

Mark Kampf was determined to count the ballots by hand, lawsuit after lawsuit against him be damned. The year was 2022 and Kampf was the newly elected county clerk for Nye County, Nev., after campaigning on a platform that included adherence to the lie that the last presidential election had been stolen from Donald Trump. In Kampf’s mind, running a clean election meant not trusting the process used in 2020. So instead of using machines, Kampf was going to hand count 20,000 ballots in a week.

After two weeks of court battles that stretched past Election Day, Kampf finally had the go ahead to launch his team of hundreds of volunteers—mostly older residents who had the time to go through the arduous task of tabulating the results. They got through 2,500 ballots on that first day. But despite working in groups of three, as many as a quarter of the ballots had to be read a second time because of obvious errors.

Eventually, Kampf resorted to machines to complete the official count. Nye County’s folly is just one example of a pattern that is remarkably consistent: outside of the tiniest jurisdictions, hand counting is hard, slow, expensive, and highly unreliable. And if Kampf’s count of 1-in-4 ballots being read incorrectly is accurate, he actually did better than most. A study from Rice University estimated that hand counts got the results right just 58% of the time. Machine-based voting has an error rate of less than 1%, according to two decades of research.
https://time.com/7071959/election-2024-hand-count-ballots/

We have huge ballots in the US! If we only had one race, it would be different.

Gillespie County needed 200 people to count 8,000 ballots, but they likely needed 400 or 500. 140,000,000 ballots would require 7 million people. To get a scale of how it would be, our county would need to employ about 50,000 temporary workers to hand count ballots.