Think of the things we entrust machines to tally for us. Standardized tests that may determine an individual student’s future college prospects or even the amount of funding directed to a state. Doses of life-saving medication. Vegas-sized piles of cash.
Obviously all those things, like voting, can be audited by human beings from time to time to make sure the machines are doing their jobs correctly, but most people understand that humans aren’t better or more reliable than machines are for performing those tasks.
Some states directly pay the cost of screening and testing each TANF applicant, while others require the applicant to pay…Of the states requiring an applicant to pay for testing, some reimburse the cost to a recipient with negative results. If an applicant tests positive and the state paid for the test, the agency may seek reimbursement by deducting the test’s cost from a recipient’s program benefits.
Your post does point out that testing all applicants was ruled unconstitutional. States that still do this seem to focus on prior records/convictions for substance abuse, so the amounts are much less than what initially made the news, but nothing makes it clear who is getting that money:
When it comes to the GOP, I’m always more concerned about the public/private money grab. That tends to be their go-to move. They seem to enjoy attacking public institutions and punishing the people they don’t like by funneling resources intended for everyone into things that only benefit them (and their cronies)*. For example, states with majority GOP pols using federal money to cover the cost of their partisan anti-crime/anti-drug narratives, claiming public school funds to spend on private schools, getting police equipment or training from right-wing owned/operated firms, crippling services that work well so that they can advocate replacing them with private firms that do half the work at twice the cost, etc.
*This is particularly bad when they avoid paying taxes, but are intent on using funds to which they haven’t contributed their fair share.
Ok, I don’t know why you’re so hung up on this point, but if you believe that requiring wasteful drug testing of welfare recipients is a “fiscally conservative” policy that doesn’t cost more tax dollars than it saves, then there are many other examples that I could give instead.
That point is just one of many examples of the GOP combining fiscally conservative claims (big gov’t assistance programs shouldn’t exist, and they allow people to get taxpayer money they don’t deserve) with social conservative beliefs (tests to prove that recipients are somehow not deserving based on their definition) to achieve their goals. They want programs eliminated, but if they can’t get that they will attempt cuts in funding, enrollment, and/or scope.
From the thinkprogress article, I picked the state that wasted the most money - OK:
Of the 14,898 Oklahomans who applied for TANF benefits last year, 3,297 were screened and 964 of them were deemed suspicious to be using illegal drugs by the Department of Human Services. Of the 698 people who showed up for testing, 83 tested positive.
The process cost the state $52,507.99.
266 people who didn’t show up, in addition to the 83 who tested positive. So, the cost that year led to almost 350 fewer people in the program. Not showing up is a disqualifying factor. That’s the point - and their goal. This is why I doubt the GOP considers that testing to be wasteful spending.
Exactly! They’ll happily spend tax payer dollars for a few things - one is punishing the poor, especially POC. Bonus points if they’re also immigrants. Then comes punishing women. Third, they’ll happily shovel dump trucks full of tax payer dollars to their pals, especially famous athletes… So they are lying through their god damn teeth when they say that they are fiscally conservative. Anyone with even a little bit of knowledge of the economy under the last 7 presidents would know that literally every Republican left office with a deficit and each Democrat (except the current President, who is still in office) left office with a surplus… It is WELL beyond time for that fiction that Republicans are better at the economy to die, because it’s been literally eons since that has been the case…
Australia has hand-counted ballots at Federal and State level with a range of voting systems of varying complexity, including proportional representation in the Senate and some state upper houses, with largely preferential single-seat systems for the balance. Preferential systems are not simple, and if votes come down to preferences it can take a few days as final postal votes come in and preferences distributed.
We usually know election outcomes four or five hours after ballots close. It’s not hard, even with voting systems more complex than first-past-the-post. On the other hand, it ain’t cheap and is supported by a lot of volunteer scrutineers.
WTF!
I suspect each worker went line-by-line on each ballot, and noting the results for each line-item.
No wonder it took so long.
Give each worker a mask* to put over the ballot, so they only count one item, then they pass it to the next worker… each worker has a different mask, so they count a different item, etc, etc.
Different workers can have the same mask, as a cross-check, but no adjacent worker has the same mask.
So, instead of each ballot taking several minutes/worker, it only takes a few seconds/ballot/worker, and error checking is built in.
Sure, there might be more workers, depending on the ballot length, but each one won’t be spending 3 minutes/ballot.
ETA:
The mask only shows the checkbox area for a particular line on the ballot, so the worker has no idea who the candiates or what the issue was for that line…just which box was marked for that line: left box or right box…
Then maybe don’t do that. Have different ballots for different elections. That’s how the rest of the world does it, and hand counted election results are usually in a few hours after voting closes. You can still do it all on one election day, the voter just gets handed several pieces of paper (of different colour for easy identification) and returns them to several ballot boxes.
Same here in Ireland and you can have complex, multiple elections at the same time e.g. a referendum as well as PR STV so your ballot is split up and counted in different processes by different people. It’s not just that there are volunteer scrutinisers, they are adversarial scrutinisers, each one is also scrutinised and agreement reached. It can take time for a complex tight seat which gets challenged but you are confident that each vote is counted. There is no pile of votes from some county, no judgment call on whether some paper is cut right for the machines, and, kind of crucially, there are no big queues to the multiple vote centres that are open all around the place. Everyone can vote and everyone’s vote is counted.
Doesn’t mean that assholes can’t get elected so I don’t see why US politicians are so scared of having functioning elections.
The UK has elections pretty much every two years. There’s a regular cycle of local elections. General elections for Parliament happen when they happen.
We have paper ballots and they are split if necessary. I’ve never seen a set of ballots with more than 3 elections in it (police commissioner, town or local council, and county council. (Police commissioner is a new idea, only introduced about 10 years ago against popular opinion.) There is usually 5-6 candidates for any one position, two main parties, two minor parties and an independent or so. Consequently the UK voter and the person who counts their ballot, are faced with a relatively simple exercise.
I haven’t studied it but the impression I get of US elections is that everything in one paper, from President through congressperson, school board member, down to county dog catcher, plus write-ins. (No offence meant to dog catchers.) People vote straight tickets because it’s too much work to go through all the options.
Many are not… but some are, because they want to largely do away with elections to ensure their control over the country… it’s primarily the GOP, who have no real policy solutions to the problems we face (other than tax cuts and hate with a theocratic bent). Many Democrats are working to ensure access to voting for as many people as possible, including in republican heavy areas.
Where I live in California we vote using one long optically-readable ballot that has as many pages as necessary to include all the Federal, State and local candidates or issues up on any given election day. Gets scanned immediately and can be double-checked easily by machine or human being in the event of a recount. Works just fine.
Because we’re talking about hand counting. It is much quicker to count separate ballots. You can do the important elections first and the ones nobody cares about later. You can do them in parallel if you want. Optical scanning doesn’t come into it because we’re specifically talking about how hand counting seems to be feasible everywhere except the US.
Don’t the episodes of the hanging chads in the 2000 election, and the more recent Dominion Systems case (there’s another electronic voting lawsuit still ongoing) show there is a problem?
No, because A) the Trump campaign’s claims against Dominion were baseless and B) modern systems like the ones I just described use optical technologies that are easily read by either human or machine instead of the punchcard systems that Florida used in 2000.
Changing to a human-counting-only system would create far more problems and irregularities than it would solve.
States that still do this seem to focus on prior records/convictions for substance abuse, so the amounts are much less than what initially made the news, but nothing makes it clear 
From the thinkprogress article, I picked the state that wasted the most money - OK:
