Why Consider Hand Counting Ballots?Return to Hand Counting provides a complete process for hand counting ballots. But explaining the process uses less than 60 pages of a 350-page manual. Why the other 290 pages? To provide information (lots of it) to answer the Why Consider Hand Counting Ballots?
Are there Reasons to be Concerned about Computerized Voting Machines?From the early 2000’s through 2019, many Democrat members of Congress expressed grave concerns about the risks of voting machines, such as this quote from Sen. Ron Wyden,
“Both sides seem to agree that no votes were changed in the 2016 election, and I said, the experts I talked to say that, until you have a forensic analysis of a vote, until you go in there and scrub the whole system, you can't really say that.”
Can Voting Machines Make Errors or Be Manipulated?Elon Musk said in a 2024 post on “Electronic voting machines and anything mailed in is too risky.”
Senator Amy Klobuchar, D-MN, said about voting systems, “You could easily hack into them. It makes it seem like all these states are doing different things but, in fact, 3 companies are controlling them.”
Alarms were already being raised in 1996 by Pandora’s Black Did It Really Count Your Vote, and by Bev Harris in 2003, who found evidence of election fraud on the internet and wrote about it in Black Box Voting.
Why is America using voting machines?“The United States remains one of the few major democracies in the world that continue to allow computerized vote counting—not observable by the public—to determine the results of its elections.” (TDMSResearch, by Theodore de Macedo Soares)
No doubt it comes down to money. Elections have become industrialized and there are huge profits for a select group. According to a 2019 Congressional report sponsored by U.S. Senators Elizabeth Warren, Amy Klobuchar, and others, “The three vendors … collectively distribute voting machines and software that facilitate voting for over 90% of all eligible voters in the United States. Private equity firms reportedly own or control each of these vendors, which ‘have long skimped on security in favor of convenience,’ leaving voting systems across the country "prone to security problems.”
Isn’t It Easier and Faster to Count Ballots with Voting Machines?Our clerks, counties, and states purportedly have put all the necessary protocols in place to protect our elections. But the voting equipment systems are as complex as any other digital equipment and, for any technical questions asked, most clerks go to the vendors for the answers, as they are unable to answer themselves. Unfortunately, Americans did not elect the vendors.
Turning Point Action’s Tyler Bowyer said in a 2022 post on “They have intentionally made a simple process of voting that we did for hundreds of years in America so convoluted and complicated, now we have massive issues.”
Hand The Only Reliable MethodIn Return to Hand Counting, the Author provides nearly 100 sources, including those mentioned in this description, of news articles, books, and videos to shine a light on the risk of electronic voting equipment. It is a mere sampling of the evidence available on this topic.
A Complete Hand Count Process, with Commentary and Resources.