It’s all so absurd. When it comes to the election, the election board is like a scorekeeper in a basketball game: It’s completely ministerial. All they do is deliver the results that were recorded by others.
They aren’t the ref. They aren’t the players. They aren’t officials responsible for review. They don’t make the rules of the game, nor how the score is recorded. They don’t decide the scores *themselves.*
There’s a reason even Georgia Republican leadership is against this move. It’s completely outside of their responsibility, and could invite weeks or *months* of delay for no reason whatsoever except to invite doubt into the results.
rgvtim on
Georgia is going to fuck this shit up so bad, they wont even get their electoral votes counted.
BringOn25A on
They counted primary ballots by hand. Now a Texas county Republican party says they found errors.
After declaring a successful hand count of ballots, Gillespie County Republicans had to fix a series of errors in the results reported from almost every precinct.
> FREDERICKSBURG — An hour after Gillespie County Republican Party Chairman Bruce Campbell declared the hand-counted primary election results completely accurate and certified them as final, he found another discrepancy.
> “It’s my mistake for not catching that,” he said, sitting in front of his laptop inside the Gillespie County election administration office Thursday. “I can’t believe I did that.”
> The late catch meant that Campbell had to ask the early voting ballot board chair, who had already left and lives 30 minutes away, to return to the elections offices, figure out how the error happened, and fix it.
> The election was a low-profile party primary, but stakes are high. Gillespie County Republicans, led by Campbell, decided months ago to hand-count more than 8,000 ballots. Experts agree and studies show the method is time-consuming, costly, less accurate, and less secure than using machines, but local Republicans, citing unsupported concerns about the accuracy of voting machines, were determined to try and show otherwise. Workers recruited and trained by the party counted until the early hours of the next morning, and declared the effort a success. Proponents of hand-counting are now touting GIllespie as a model.
********
> Netherland said he still isn’t confident the election results are accurate, based on the errors that he and others have found.
> On Thursday, Netherland said the Republican Party in Gillespie has introduced human error into the election process with the hand count.
> “We took something that worked and now broke it,” Netherland said. “We failed to guard the purity of the election with this hand count. What we just did is evidence that this hand count was not accurate.”
cvanhim on
Does he.. does he think that Biden caused the hurricane? I mean, he clearly has no idea how hurricanes work. I remember that from his first term, but is it **fhis** bad??
EmptyEstablishment78 on
I’m not a Georgia resident but I need to ask. Does Georgia have a time limit on ballot counting or a specific time ballots are to be turned in?
EmptyEstablishment78 on
I’m LOOKING FOR 10,711,908 votes…I mean ya gotta help me here..just 10,711,908…
Somerset-Sweet on
Georgia’s voting system is secure.
After voters registration and identity are verified, they randomly select an available booth and vote on a touchscreen. The touchscreen then prints a paper ballot, and the voter reviews the printout. If there are any errors, the ballot is destroyed and a corrected one reprinted.
When satisfied the ballot is correct, the voter inserts it into a randomly selected scanning and secure storage machine.
Each machine keeps it’s own vote tallies. Because of the random selection of machines by the voter, there is no correlation between them to exploit by flipping votes.
At the end of voting, the voting machine totals and the scanning machine totals will match, unless some ballots didn’t get scanned, or someone somehow tried to mess with the voting.
Georgia extensively tests the machines with the real ballot before the election, and audits the machine counts by hand counting votes after the election.
There is no reason to hand count the ballots before reporting the results,if the two sets of uncorrelated machine tallies match.
recurse_x on
At this point I hope Dems launch challenges to elections in every state Trump is winning because at this point if you have the money game theory pretty much says do it if your opponent will be too.
autotldr on
This is the best tl;dr I could make, [original](https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/30/us/politics/georgia-election-board-hand-counting-ballots-lawsuit.html) reduced by 58%. (I’m a bot)
*****
> Democrats sued the Georgia State Election Board on Monday, claiming that a new rule ordering counties to count ballots by hand would invite chaos on election night, create delays in reporting results for large counties and put the security of ballots at risk, according to a copy of the lawsuit obtained by The New York Times.
> The lawsuit, filed by the Democratic National Committee and Democratic Party of Georgia with support from Vice President Kamala Harris's campaign, argues that the state election board went far beyond its authority in passing the rule, and notes that the board is not a lawmaking body and that the rule conflicts with the process established by the Georgia General Assembly.
> The rule, passed by the Georgia State Election Board this month, requires local election officials to count ballots by hand after polls close to ensure the total number of ballots matches the machine-counted totals.
I just think it worth mentioning, that if you have 3 people in DeKalb County polling station hand counting 370,000 ballots, at 1 second per ballot, it would take each of them 103 hours- without break – to finish the count. If we assume 40 hours work weeks, thats 2.5 weeks without a single second of breaks, to just count through those once.
And if they are not all 3 aligned, they have to do it over again.
Its asinine.
Pusfilledonut on
It’s designed to take weeks to count, exceed the certification deadline, and create chaos. Republicans are hopeful it pitches the decision to the SCOTUS, further stalling a Republican defeat, or pitching it into the HOR so Mike Johnson can pick our president.
Alps-Mountain on
Really hoping the answer isn’t “it’s illegal but too late to change it back”
Mental_Camel_4954 on
Kamala Harris presides over the Senate. Shenanigans aren’t going to occur. According to Trump’s own logic, she can just declare herself the winner.
Good luck in court.
Kind-City-2173 on
Worst part is they trained all poll workers on the process and then just changed it so they wasted a bunch of time and resources
Kooky-Pirate9414 on
Hand counting is **not** intended to make anything secure. It is known to be error-prone and difficult to get exact. It is intended to tie up any county with a partisan enough effort to cause problems and interfere with certification. Larger population centers *which tend to vote Democrat* will be most affected.
mypoliticalvoice on
I’m all cool with them doing a hand count to verify the machine count if they hire 4X the people to meet the certification deadline.
They also need to publish their procedure for what they will do when the less accurate hand count inevitably doesn’t match the machine count by a vote or two.
narcimp on
Weird how these sorts of laws only get passed in swing states
Acrobatic_Ear6773 on
I don’t think people realize how difficult it would be to hand count these ballots.
My precint captain once turned off the machine too early and we had to hand count the few hundred ballots and we were there for HOURS. And that was just for some random town election, for a few HUNDRED ballots. As soon as she realized what she did, she legit started to cry.
Think about how many different choices there are to make on a ballot. Not just president, senator, congress, but your state representatives, each local elections, ballot questions etc. Some of these have multiple options AND write in options as well, each one has to be HAND MARKED.
There are 7 million registered voters in Georgia, and I gotta imagine there are over 100 different precincts. Imagine trying to calculate an excel spreadsheet with 7 million rows and 100+ columns.
This is an ABSURD rule, which lends itself to massive human error before you even get to corrupton.
Easy-Preparation-667 on
It’s just such a weird thing to do. Nobody actually wants to wait for that. Our system is fine the way it is.
Visible_Security6510 on
This stupid shit has migrated up to Alberta Canada. Our right wing nut job premier (US version of a governor) is trying to do the same thing except here our provincial elections have never even had a wiff of inaccuracy or anything even remotely fraudulent.
The only difference is for the first time in decades the left wing party is gaining seats and votes like crazy, so naturally the right wing is scared.
It’s just another right wing tactic to destroy the democratic process.
klumze on
They want to counting to take longer than necessary so the Supreme Court can give the vote to a favored nominee. I.E. Trump. Its not about being fair. Its about legally rigging an election.
23 Comments
Archive copy at https://archive.is/BFF82
“Those who vote decide nothing. Those who count the vote decide everything.”
― Joseph Stalin
The republicans’ goal is to create delays and chaos. Because they hate democracy. And if it’s really close, they will try some shady shit to steal it.
We need a blue wave in Georgia
[https://georgiademocrat.org/](https://georgiademocrat.org/)
It’s all so absurd. When it comes to the election, the election board is like a scorekeeper in a basketball game: It’s completely ministerial. All they do is deliver the results that were recorded by others.
They aren’t the ref. They aren’t the players. They aren’t officials responsible for review. They don’t make the rules of the game, nor how the score is recorded. They don’t decide the scores *themselves.*
There’s a reason even Georgia Republican leadership is against this move. It’s completely outside of their responsibility, and could invite weeks or *months* of delay for no reason whatsoever except to invite doubt into the results.
Georgia is going to fuck this shit up so bad, they wont even get their electoral votes counted.
They counted primary ballots by hand. Now a Texas county Republican party says they found errors.
https://www.texastribune.org/2024/03/19/texas-republican-hand-count-election/
After declaring a successful hand count of ballots, Gillespie County Republicans had to fix a series of errors in the results reported from almost every precinct.
> FREDERICKSBURG — An hour after Gillespie County Republican Party Chairman Bruce Campbell declared the hand-counted primary election results completely accurate and certified them as final, he found another discrepancy.
> “It’s my mistake for not catching that,” he said, sitting in front of his laptop inside the Gillespie County election administration office Thursday. “I can’t believe I did that.”
> The late catch meant that Campbell had to ask the early voting ballot board chair, who had already left and lives 30 minutes away, to return to the elections offices, figure out how the error happened, and fix it.
> The election was a low-profile party primary, but stakes are high. Gillespie County Republicans, led by Campbell, decided months ago to hand-count more than 8,000 ballots. Experts agree and studies show the method is time-consuming, costly, less accurate, and less secure than using machines, but local Republicans, citing unsupported concerns about the accuracy of voting machines, were determined to try and show otherwise. Workers recruited and trained by the party counted until the early hours of the next morning, and declared the effort a success. Proponents of hand-counting are now touting GIllespie as a model.
********
> Netherland said he still isn’t confident the election results are accurate, based on the errors that he and others have found.
> On Thursday, Netherland said the Republican Party in Gillespie has introduced human error into the election process with the hand count.
> “We took something that worked and now broke it,” Netherland said. “We failed to guard the purity of the election with this hand count. What we just did is evidence that this hand count was not accurate.”
Does he.. does he think that Biden caused the hurricane? I mean, he clearly has no idea how hurricanes work. I remember that from his first term, but is it **fhis** bad??
I’m not a Georgia resident but I need to ask. Does Georgia have a time limit on ballot counting or a specific time ballots are to be turned in?
I’m LOOKING FOR 10,711,908 votes…I mean ya gotta help me here..just 10,711,908…
Georgia’s voting system is secure.
After voters registration and identity are verified, they randomly select an available booth and vote on a touchscreen. The touchscreen then prints a paper ballot, and the voter reviews the printout. If there are any errors, the ballot is destroyed and a corrected one reprinted.
When satisfied the ballot is correct, the voter inserts it into a randomly selected scanning and secure storage machine.
Each machine keeps it’s own vote tallies. Because of the random selection of machines by the voter, there is no correlation between them to exploit by flipping votes.
At the end of voting, the voting machine totals and the scanning machine totals will match, unless some ballots didn’t get scanned, or someone somehow tried to mess with the voting.
Georgia extensively tests the machines with the real ballot before the election, and audits the machine counts by hand counting votes after the election.
There is no reason to hand count the ballots before reporting the results,if the two sets of uncorrelated machine tallies match.
At this point I hope Dems launch challenges to elections in every state Trump is winning because at this point if you have the money game theory pretty much says do it if your opponent will be too.
This is the best tl;dr I could make, [original](https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/30/us/politics/georgia-election-board-hand-counting-ballots-lawsuit.html) reduced by 58%. (I’m a bot)
*****
> Democrats sued the Georgia State Election Board on Monday, claiming that a new rule ordering counties to count ballots by hand would invite chaos on election night, create delays in reporting results for large counties and put the security of ballots at risk, according to a copy of the lawsuit obtained by The New York Times.
> The lawsuit, filed by the Democratic National Committee and Democratic Party of Georgia with support from Vice President Kamala Harris's campaign, argues that the state election board went far beyond its authority in passing the rule, and notes that the board is not a lawmaking body and that the rule conflicts with the process established by the Georgia General Assembly.
> The rule, passed by the Georgia State Election Board this month, requires local election officials to count ballots by hand after polls close to ensure the total number of ballots matches the machine-counted totals.
*****
[**Extended Summary**](http://np.reddit.com/r/autotldr/comments/1ft22fi/democrats_sue_over_georgia_requirement_that/) | [FAQ](http://np.reddit.com/r/autotldr/comments/31b9fm/faq_autotldr_bot/ “Version 2.02, ~694510 tl;drs so far.”) | [Feedback](http://np.reddit.com/message/compose?to=%23autotldr “PM’s and comments are monitored, constructive feedback is welcome.”) | *Top* *keywords*: **Election**^#1 **Board**^#2 **rule**^#3 **State**^#4 **Georgia**^#5
I just think it worth mentioning, that if you have 3 people in DeKalb County polling station hand counting 370,000 ballots, at 1 second per ballot, it would take each of them 103 hours- without break – to finish the count. If we assume 40 hours work weeks, thats 2.5 weeks without a single second of breaks, to just count through those once.
And if they are not all 3 aligned, they have to do it over again.
Its asinine.
It’s designed to take weeks to count, exceed the certification deadline, and create chaos. Republicans are hopeful it pitches the decision to the SCOTUS, further stalling a Republican defeat, or pitching it into the HOR so Mike Johnson can pick our president.
Really hoping the answer isn’t “it’s illegal but too late to change it back”
Kamala Harris presides over the Senate. Shenanigans aren’t going to occur. According to Trump’s own logic, she can just declare herself the winner.
Good luck in court.
Worst part is they trained all poll workers on the process and then just changed it so they wasted a bunch of time and resources
Hand counting is **not** intended to make anything secure. It is known to be error-prone and difficult to get exact. It is intended to tie up any county with a partisan enough effort to cause problems and interfere with certification. Larger population centers *which tend to vote Democrat* will be most affected.
I’m all cool with them doing a hand count to verify the machine count if they hire 4X the people to meet the certification deadline.
They also need to publish their procedure for what they will do when the less accurate hand count inevitably doesn’t match the machine count by a vote or two.
Weird how these sorts of laws only get passed in swing states
I don’t think people realize how difficult it would be to hand count these ballots.
My precint captain once turned off the machine too early and we had to hand count the few hundred ballots and we were there for HOURS. And that was just for some random town election, for a few HUNDRED ballots. As soon as she realized what she did, she legit started to cry.
Think about how many different choices there are to make on a ballot. Not just president, senator, congress, but your state representatives, each local elections, ballot questions etc. Some of these have multiple options AND write in options as well, each one has to be HAND MARKED.
There are 7 million registered voters in Georgia, and I gotta imagine there are over 100 different precincts. Imagine trying to calculate an excel spreadsheet with 7 million rows and 100+ columns.
This is an ABSURD rule, which lends itself to massive human error before you even get to corrupton.
It’s just such a weird thing to do. Nobody actually wants to wait for that. Our system is fine the way it is.
This stupid shit has migrated up to Alberta Canada. Our right wing nut job premier (US version of a governor) is trying to do the same thing except here our provincial elections have never even had a wiff of inaccuracy or anything even remotely fraudulent.
The only difference is for the first time in decades the left wing party is gaining seats and votes like crazy, so naturally the right wing is scared.
It’s just another right wing tactic to destroy the democratic process.
They want to counting to take longer than necessary so the Supreme Court can give the vote to a favored nominee. I.E. Trump. Its not about being fair. Its about legally rigging an election.