In a rare step, 3 South Dakota counties are set to vote on counting ballots by hand

[BumRushDaShow]

42. To address

Yes, the amount of boxes to check is a big difference.

Wow those ballots look insane!
That's why I mentioned it as perhaps a reason your counting may take longer. You initially responded by not addressing that point, and only rejected the "density" argument. Which I only brought up to show how countries with much higher densities, ie...way more people to process per sq. km, do just fine with paper ballots.

And I stand by the "density" argument being irrelevant. One of the biggest problems is getting (and paying for) enough people to manage "in person" voters, whether the voting location uses an actual paper "book" that has the list of voters in a precinct so that person can be identified and verified, and where they will "sign" the page with their name indicating they are voting (and the signature needs to match the copy of a signature that the book has) -OR- similarly nowadays, where those names in the binders are now stored in a database and the verification process is done electronically (an electronic "poll book", which here in Philly they just implemented last year) -





This is in addition to dealing with voters needing help to get through any touchscreen machines (if requested), and going through the process of AUTOMATED counting of the resultant ballots generated by those machines, and transmission of those results.

In 2020, the derisively-named "Zuckerbucks" helped a number of locales to get additional equipment and have money to pay people to actually work the polls and tabulations during the pandemic.

Federal election officials clear Zuckerberg's 2020 election administration grants

The GOP has criticized the $350 million in "Zuckerbucks," prompting GOP bans on private donations to help run elections.

Sept. 8, 2022, 12:52 PM EDT

By Ben Kamisar

The Federal Election Commission unanimously voted to dismiss a complaint over the 2020 nonpartisan election-administration grants funded primarily by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan.

The grants provoked significant ire among many conservatives in the aftermath of the election and was used by some to further false claims of widespread election fraud. But new documents published by the FEC show that in a 6-0 vote, the commission agreed that there's "no reason to believe" the non-profit, Zuckerberg or Chan committed any wrongdoing.

The Center for Tech and Civil Life announced in October of 2020 that Zuckerberg and Chan committed $350 million to help the group provide nonpartisan grants to election administrators dealing with the infrastructure challenges of running an election during a global pandemic.

"We should be doing everything we can to make it easier for people to cast their ballots," Chan and Zuckerberg said in a 2020 statement announcing part of the nine-figure donation. "These funds will serve all sorts of communities throughout the country — urban, rural, and suburban — and we remain determined to ensure that every state and local election jurisdiction has the resources they need so Americans can vote."

(snip)

https://www.nbcnews.com/meet-the-press/meetthepressblog/federal-election-officials-clear-zuckerbergs-2020-election-administrat-rcna46844

We here don't have those loaded ballots to slog through. The time we elect other politicians are at the municipal level. {Parks board, school trustees, etc.} Federally, and Provincially, its is only who your 'district's rep will be of the party of the PM or Premier you want. Simple, and only takes a few minutes.

Our federal ballot looks like this sample:

(snip)

Imagine now, in some states where there is "ranked choice" or "jungle primaries", meaning that for the "ranked choice" type, you may have 10 people running, from any party, for the election of a single office, and the voter will "rank" each candidate based on their top choice, then the next choice, and so on... #1 - #10 (where they might just rank a couple and leave the other names blank and unranked). And for the "jungle primary", you again have all parties running but usually the "top 2" vote-getters advance to the next round (whether to a general election or for some kind of run-off between those 2).

Tabulating the "top" vote getters manually can be error prone. I know here in Philly, we don't have either of those "formally named" types of voting however we do have something along the lines of having many candidates running for say 7 seats and the voter picks no more than 7 out of however many candidates are on the ballot. In some cases, that voter might only select 3 (and although those will be considered okay, it's still considered an "under-vote" ). If they pick more than 7, then that is an "over-vote" and would probably mean the ballot is discarded (or at least the vote for that office).

So yes, I see your point about the ballots.

But its all about having enough workers per district to process them. Even if it takes weeks, which I kind of doubt, I think the GOP's and Putin's attempt to destabilize faith in the democratic elections process would take a hit if the machines were retired. One less excuse for the magats to use. It may be worth the waiting for results just for that reason alone.

Well the "weeks" is what it often took back in the "old days" and here in Philly because of the GOP idiocy, it took almost a week to get to a point of "certifying" a win for Biden out of the state of PA, waiting for Philly's tranche to come in.

But THAT is why it's automated now so that you cut the amount of time to count and generally have results within a day or two, IF procedures are allowed to speed the process. Forcing the extraction of hundreds of thousands of ballots from envelopes to ONLY be allowed to happen the morning of election day has been one of the biggest obstacles to getting results quickly from mail ballots here. I won't even get into trying to manually "hand count" any of that.