The pro-Trump board members got their way, all the ballots officially need to be counted by hand now.
Sounds like it’s going to be a goddamned logistical nightmare, if not an outright impossibility.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/09/20/trump-georgia-election-board-hand-count-ballots/
Of course the chaos is the point.
We’ll see what the “adults” in the party do about this… Raffensperger has some power here, as do the courts.
Yep, precisely.
Also… Tim Walz has read the manual…
PLEASE tell me Georgia doesn’t use punch out (“butterfly”) ballots. If any of the news anchors on election night utter the 
phrase “hanging chads” WRT Georgia I may need a new monitor.
Who is “Chad”? The last guy the MAGA folks tried to hang after an election was named “Mike.”
Once again it’s so weird to see Raffensperger being on the right side of an election integrity issue. Per CNN he has been fighting this, and we will see where it goes with the courts:
Edit to add- here’s a statement from Raffensperger that was posted on the Secretary of State website:
One of the many things that’s disturbing about this is that hand counting at every precinct would break the chain of custody and introduce new opportunities for bad actors to commit some kind of fraud. There’s a damn good reason that ballots are traditionally put into locked boxes which are transported to central, secure locations before being counted.
I don’t think any states use paper ballots anymore? Here in GA we have touchscreens which prints out your ballot when you are done, which lists your choices so you can double check it and a QR code… then you turn it into a worker who monitors you as you feed it into the tabulation machine. Then you get your sticker!
I think we did in 2022 in MD, but that was early voting.
We’re still using paper ballots in Michigan.
ETA: Here is a breakdown by state:
Plenty still do, but I don’t know if any of them are the old punchcard style that was infamously used in Florida. In California we use an ink marker and the ballots are read by machine.
And @anon58741709… hm! TIL!
In VA (at least in my precinct) we use a paper ballot that goes into a reader. And then you get your sticker.
To summarize: Systems based on human-and-machine-readable optical paper ballots good, old school error-prone punch ballots bad. And it only took us a couple of decades to get our shit together after the 2000 debacle!
Also not a fan of the “direct recording electronic” systems since they could theoretically be hacked to alter the count and are more difficult to audit but it looks like few states still depend on those. Weird that most of the states that do still use them are red states given all the right-wing paranoia about election theft.
I guess technically, we also have paper, but it’s a print out from a touchscreen computer…
I much prefer this. The printed out ballot from the machines here have the names (which can be verified by you), and the printed code (which can’t).
Best of both worlds. All the efficiency of a computer tally system, but if there’s even the tiniest suspicion that any part of the system isn’t recording or tallying the results correctly it’s simple for a human to verify at any point in the process.
Wild that it took so long, really. We’ve been using scantron technology for standarized tests since the 1970s.
ummm …
Neither Hovde nor his bank are accused of breaking laws…
noted WisPolitics, “An executive of the bank was recently implicated in a federal indictment detailing his attempts to bribe a member of the U.S. Congress to get U.S. banks to once again do business with the bank.”
that seems legal and totally above board /s
i truly think it was a form of voter suppression. states that wanted clear reporting had it.
flordia not only had the error prone punch machines, it also had the butterfly ballot that made it difficult to know which candidate you were voting for. favoring, no surprise, districts with the money to keep the machines in good working order; and the gop
even when places started to switch to electronic voting, people had to fight tooth and claw to get a paper trail. and in those early years, surprise again if those places without the paper trail were in areas “favoring” conservatives
I used to teach an Information Design class. I used this image in the introductory slideshow as a case study in how poor information design changed the course of human history.
Yes, most people were able to figure it out. But most isn’t good enough when you’re talking about something riding on margins this thin…
i really admire oregon’s vote primarily by mail system. scantron type forms plus a detailed voter guide, and plenty of time to think through the options
ga’s seems really good from an accessibility standpoint though. bubble forms usually require assistance if you have vision or limb troubles. or, if english isn’t a person’s first language. having an electronic “meditator” can really help cover those gaps
