You must only use automation to count ballots, it's the law. Bill limiting ballot hand counting in California becomes law; one county pledges to defy statute California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed legislation into law on Wednesday that will limit the ability of local governments to manually count ballots less than a year after one northern county’s governing board ditched its contract with Dominion Voting Systems and decided to tabulate results by hand. Set to go into effect immediately, the law deals a blow to Shasta County’s conservative-majority Board of Supervisors, which voted 3-2 in January to cancel its contract with Dominion amid a flurry of unsubstantiated conspiracy theories about the company in the wake of the 2020 election, leaving it without a way to conduct elections for a time. In response, state legislators introduced and overwhelmingly passed AB 969 in September, which allows hand-counting under narrow circumstances: during regularly scheduled elections in places with under 1,000 registered voters and special elections with fewer than 5,000 voters. It will also block counties from canceling contracts for voting systems in the future without a transition plan and a finalized agreement for a new state-approved system.
Unfortunately the article did not really give the clearest view of exactly what this law does. What I gleaned from the article is that those ballots have numerous issues and contests on them, making hand-counting impractical. But that does not mean they could not hand-count only one of the contests on that ballot, maybe the most important one, like a vote for governor or president. I'm still unclear about whether this law would actually prevent them from doing that. Especially if some outside organization was willing to provide the funding for the local county government to pay for the hand-counting. In my opinion it's obviously pretty disturbing if the state is going to tell local county governments they cannot hand-count votes. It opens the door up for possible fraud. It looks like the county can choose an electronic voting system from an approved list, but still, under the law, it's a state body who ends up getting to decide what that list is. And it's not so easy to see what's going on inside those electronic voting machines, if they are actually correctly doing what they are supposed to. Maybe I am just overly suspicious but it seems some of these states are trying to do everything they can to make sure ballots cannot be verified and vetted. Making it easier for fraud to be committed without everyone being able to know.
Does your OP's lack of any personal take, of which to speak, mean that you have no opinion on this? Or, are we supposed to infer it all, from your one line: "You must only use automation to count ballots, it's the law?" I believe it has been well established that hand counting of large numbers of ballots, is less accurate than machine tabulation. Further, the opportunities for cheating are far greater in number, when there are a whole lot of humans involved. Since the law allows the practice of hand counting to continue "in places with under 1,000 registered voters and (in) special elections with fewer than 5,000 voters," it seems a good legislative move. This is presuming California must already have protocols on the books, for checking machine accuracy (preferably, before every election).
Its prolly less accurate when the machines function as advertised. But no way in hell are the opportunities for cheating reduced. Maybe less individuals have the opportunity to cheat, but its way easier for the folks with access to cheat bigger and easier to hide the evidence. But it doesn't matter too much either way so long as a paper ballot exists to check against later, and access to those ballots is not difficult to reach.
From what I'm reading, it seems like this law "prohibits elections officials from performing a manual vote count in any contest held on an established election date, or on a date other than an established election date that is 154 days in advance of the election". Or they have to submit a plan to the secretary of state (of California) who must approve counting the votes. California AB-969 In other words the local county government would not be allowed to count the votes by hand until after the election is already over and the votes have been electronically counted and there is an official winner.
I thought my statement pretty well summed it up. It makes recounts superfluous if all you can do to "recount" is just run it through the same system again. So was it really necessary to make hand counting illegal?
personally, I think both should happen, electronic and hand counts then compare the two numbers, they should match make our system fail-safe, one double-checks the other use those two methods to validate each other, don't people want honest results
Your snip does not say anything about recounts. IOW, by outlawing hand counting, as a standard method for counting votes in an election, I would not assume, that this precludes the use of hand counting, in a "re-count." Perhaps it does, but your snip does not clearly address this.
Does your non sequitur and meaningless response, mean that you don't know (other than through assumption) whether or not this ban applies as well, to re-counts-- the subject of my post?
It means that I oppose the general idea of banning hand counting, and you seem supportive of it If you agree with the law, you agree with the law. I don't.
Right-- and I gave my reasons, including the fact that hand counting has been well-demonstrated to be less accurate, than machine tabulation. I'd also included a caveat about regular checks of the machines, to confirm their reliability, and freedom from any tampering. With that stipulation, what possible argument favors hand counting?
There never was an argument. I just disagreed that hand counting should be illegal, and you do, So we don't have an argument, just a disagreement.
