2 Election Officials in a Rural Virginia City Sue the State Over Ballot-Counting Machines

[BumRushDaShow]

Source: US News and World Report/AP

Oct. 16, 2024, at 4:32 p.m.


RICHMOND (AP) — Two Republican election officials said in a recent lawsuit that they will not certify the results of the Nov. 5 election in a rural Virginia city unless the ballots are hand-counted, perpetuating a false notion that machines tallying the votes can be manipulated.

The suit against the Virginia Department of Elections and Elections Board was filed earlier this month in Waynesboro, Virginia, by the city's election board chair Curtis Lilly and vice chair Scott Mares. In the complaint, Lilly and Mares argued that election officials do not have access to the votes tallied by machines, which they allege prevents them from verifying “the results of the voting machine’s secret canvass.”

The counting system, Lilly and Mares argued, violates a provision of the state Constitution that stipulates such machines must be in public view. “As Electoral Board members are prohibited from hand-counting ballots, we cannot ensure that the vote tally produced by the voting machines matches the votes memorialized on the case paper ballots,” Mares said in an affidavit sent to The Associated Press. The electoral board members filed the lawsuit in Waynesboro District Court.

The Office of the Attorney General, which is defending the Department of Elections and State Board of Elections, declined to comment on pending litigation. The lawsuit comes as election conspiracy theorists across the U.S. are moving to support hand-counted ballots, nearly four years after former President Donald Trump falsely claimed the past election was stolen from him. But research shows that hand-counting is more prone to error, costlier and likely to delay results.

Read more: https://www.usnews.com/news/best-states/california/articles/2024-10-16/2-election-officials-in-a-rural-virginia-city-sue-the-state-over-ballot-counting-machines

[elleng]

1. The machines may be in 'public view'

without, presumably, giving election board chairs access to the votes tallied.

[onetexan]

2. LOL Same stunt that was just slapped down in GA

[Raven123]

3. Who are they kidding? MAGA doesn't want the votes counted.

Creating chaos, mistrust and stoking violence is their modus operandi.

[liberalgunwilltravel]

4. OK

The votes in rural counties won’t be counted then because Republicans don’t want their own votes to count. Sounds good to me. Maybe next time, they’ll choose to select election officials that will do their job.

[Think. Again.]

5. Can't they just count the number of voters as they vote?

[Bernardo de La Paz]

6. That's automatic, right? Voters are crossed off the rolls as they vote so they can't vote twice. . . . nt

[Think. Again.]

7. Yeah, so if the number of actual voters (who each receive one ballot)...

...matches the ballot count given by the machine, why would they need to (break state law and) hand count the ballots after the election closes?

[Think. Again.]

8. The simple solution to all this is...

... open-source voting machines for all federal elections, since open-source machines have publicly accessible source code that can be checked and rechecked by anyone to proof there is no malware or devious code.