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Comment by HWR_14 | Hacker News Reader

> this recent idea that it takes weeks to count votes, that we might not know the results for weeks – is completely unacceptable

Why on earth would that be? The "counting period" was originally set at 5 weeks. Between laws saying that you cannot start counting mail in ballots before the close of polls on election day, laws that (rightly) limit how many hours that can be spent counting ballots, etc. I'm not sure how to square that with instant results.

Maybe we just be patient counting the scores in a contest that takes 18 months to run?

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You have a super computer in your pocket. There is no reason counting votes should take any longer than it takes to receive them.

You want to trust democracy to OCR? Heck, there are lawsuits where humans disagree.

But, even if you ignore that two individuals (or three) representing all the candidates each count by hand a stack of ten, have to agree, sign off that they agree, etc. I think you underestimate other problems. You're focused on the counting.

Just consider how long it takes to open the outer envelope, check the signature on the inner envelope (again, by multiple people who represent different campaigns), and physically remove and unfold that sheet of paper. Now multiply by several million. Add in some extra time for managing stack of ten ballots.

Or, to put it another way, we don't vote with a phone app. We are willing to pay extra for security.

Addition is fast. Opening ballots, verifying signatures, checking voter is legit, and then marking it all down takes time. Especially when bound by law to not open envelopes until 7pm eday.

On another thread here, someone was explaining to me that mail-in ballots are separated from their provenance by design. So what exactly are these election workers spending hours doing to “verify signatures” and “check voter is legit?”

That information is on the outside of the envelope and is verified before the envelope is opened. In some states, the ballot is inside another envelope that is opened after the voter info is separated from the ballot.

Well, you have to physically open up the envelope to pull ballots out. You have to look up the purported voter in the registration database. Check--does it exist? Does the signature match? Did the voter already cast a ballot? Get second opinions on this data for auditability purposes. And when all that's done, now you can put it in the machine. Except maybe the machine doesn't like the ballot because the ballot had to be folded to go through the postal system, so now you have to spend time flattening out the paper to get the machine to accept it.

Let's say it takes a minute to process a single ballot. That means a single poll worker can go through a couple hundred ballots--500 is a nice round number-- a day. And all of this is going to be processed generally at a centralized facility at county level, and because of the pandemic, you might have 500,000 of those to get through. Even with 100 workers working those ballots, that's still going to take 10 days to get through everything.

So… you want the voting machines to be networked?

I really suspect you’re being intentionally difficult here, this is not such a simple problem as you suggest.

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