Democracy and Elections: How Do Electronic Voting Machines Get Their Information? Reply to Jim Marchant, Candidate of Nevada’s Secretary of State, Jim Lindell,
Mr. Lindell said that it was important to give information to the public. Digital recreations of the ballot choices of every voter had been sent to him by local supporters in more than a thousand election jurisdictions. Mr. Lindell said the records support his theory that balloting has been manipulated nationwide, although election experts repeatedly have debunked such claims.
The 2020 election was stolen by a piece of software so if computers are removed from the voting process, you can further secure your election.
At a county commission meeting in Nevada’s Nye County this March, Jim Marchant, a denier in the Republican Party who is the party’s nominee for the state’s Secretary of State, asked local officials to stop using their vote-counting equipment.
He said that it is important for you to secure the trust of your constituents in Nye County by assuring they have a fair and transparent election, and that is by not using electronic voting or tabulation machines.
The false sentiment of election denial is pervasive in far- right corners of the country, shepherded by the founder of MyPillow and his associates.
To people without knowledge of elections, hand-counting ballots might sound nice. The problem is that counting tactic has actually been found to be significantly less accurate, more expensive and more time-consuming than using tabulation equipment.
Do We Really Need Hand Counts? Reply to Simon on a Democratic Party Call for a Hand-Counting Voucher
“No county, thankfully, has gone in for that. But it is a movement and we’re keeping our eye on it,” Simon, a Democrat, said in an interview with NPR. “It’s distressing to see.”
“Computers — which ballot scanners rely on — are very good at tedious, repetitive tasks. Humans are bad at them,” wrote Charles Stewart III, who directs the MIT Election Data and Science Lab, in the Washington Post. “Counting votes is tedious and repetitive.”
The difference in the recount and hand-counted paper ballots was 0.28 percent, whereas the difference for scanned paper ballots was 0.15 percent. In the 2016 recount of the election, hand counted paper ballots were lower by 0.18 percent while scanned ballots were lower by 0.13 percent.
Simon says that the data shows it is not as accurate to do a hand count. If there are more than 30 contests on a ballot you’re asking election judges to do at least 30 individual and separate hand counts. And people are people. They get tired, they make mistakes. “
Costs for local election offices that are under-resourced if they were to move back towards hand-counting ballots would increase, says a former local voting administrator.
Considering many of the Republicans who are calling for hand counts are the same people who cast doubt on the 2020 election because results weren’t finalized on election night, Morrell says it shows they haven’t done their research.
“I just think they don’t understand what that looks like and how much time that takes and what the process is to do it accurately and correctly,” Morrell said. They wouldn’t be calling for that.
Correspondence to an Election Audit Director: A Response to Lehman, the Secretary of State, and a Response to Tatum’s Comments on the Post-election Audit in Texas
“How is the November midterm election the third or fourth thing on my radar?” Forrest K. Lehman was asking the director of elections and registration. It should be the number one.
A lot of requests for election records are the most pressing problem in the country.
The county clerk in Winnebago County, Wis., Sue Ertmer, said she fielded some 120 demands for records in only a couple of weeks last month. She said that it gets a little harder to get a lot of other things done when you get those types of requests. It is a little overwhelming.
The requests come from a variety of sources, but a number of election officials noted that Mike Lindell, the pillow salesman and purveyor of conspiracy theories about the 2020 vote, has encouraged supporters to submit them. At a seminar hosted in Springfield, Mo. in August, election deniers gave instructions on how to file records requests.
Earlier this week, the director of the Forensic Audit Division of the Texas secretary of state’s office sent a letter to Harris County election officials informing them that it would be sending “a contingent of inspectors” to observe the “central count” next week, when early voting in Texas is slated to begin. The letter said the inspectors would “perform randomized checks on election records” and that the state attorney general’s office will also “dispatch a task force … to immediately respond to any legal issues identified by secretary of state, inspectors, poll watchers, or voters.”
The teams are necessary, the secretary of state’s office said, because of their findings in an ongoing “audit” of the 2020 presidential election in Harris County, which includes Houston.
That so-called post-election audit in Texas, a state that former President Donald Trump carried in 2020, was launched as Republicans in states including Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Arizona forged ahead with partisan reviews that appeared designed to undermine the 2020 election results and demonstrate local Republicans’ fealty to Trump.
Chad Ennis, director of the Forensic Audit Division, said in the Tuesday letter to Clifford Tatum, the Harris County elections administrator, that the audit division had identified a number of mobile ballot boxes from the 2020 general election that lacked “proper chain-of-custody” and that they are requesting corrective action.
The head of the Harris County Democratic Party stated that Gov. Greg Abbott and Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton are working overtime to destroy voter confidence with a pressure campaign that will intimidate election workers and cause chaos in the election process. He added that Tuesday’s letter from the secretary of state’s office “reads like an attack on drive-through voting, which expanded voting access during the COVID pandemic.”
The secretary of state’s office responded in a statement later Thursday, calling the suggestions from the three Harris County officials “completely false and a cynical distortion of the law – and the truth – in an attempt to mislead voters, members of the public, the press and the U.S. Department of Justice.”
“We send them to many other counties, large and small, every single year,” Taylor said. Typically, we will send election inspectors if there is at least 15 registered voters who request them to be in their county to look into the disputes during large elections.
On Tuesday, Trump posted on social media that he wasn’t sure the election was legitimate in Pennsylvania. Here we go again! He wrote down his thoughts. It was a rigged election.
The supposed proof of Trump is questionable. An article on a right wing news site didn’t show rigging. Rather, the article baselessly raised suspicion about absentee-ballot data the article did not clearly explain.
In 2020, Trump and his allies made a prolonged effort to discredit the presidential election results in advance, spending months laying the groundwork for their false post-election claims that the election was stolen. Some Republicans in the lead up to Election Day in 2022, have used the same rhetoric.
A state that could decide which party has control of the US Senate is Pennsylvania.
After Pennsylvania’s acting elections chief, Leigh Chapman, told NBC News last week that it could take “days” to complete the vote count, Republican gubernatorial candidate Doug Mastriano, who has repeatedly promoted false conspiracy theories about the 2020 election, said on a right-wing show monitored by liberal organization Media Matters for America: “That’s an attempt to have the fix in.”
It is not. The Republican-controlled state legislature has refused to pass a no-strings attached bill to allow counties to begin processing mail-in ballots earlier than the morning of Election Day.
But other prominent Republicans piled on. Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas tweeted a link to an article about Chapman’s comments and added: “Why is it only Democrat blue cities that take ‘days’ to count their votes? The rest of the country manages to get it done on election night.”
Even aside from the fact that the big cities that tend to lean Democratic have many more votes to count than the small rural counties that tend to lean Republican, Cruz’s claim is plain false.
The election authorities in America do not announce official vote totals on election night. Rather, media outlets make unofficial projections based on incomplete data.
Corrupt Candidate John Fetterman in Michigan Can’t Win the 2020 Senate Race: An In-person Absentee Voting Suggestion
The health challenges of the Democratic candidate in Pennsylvania’s Senate race, Lt. Gov. John Fetterman, have also been used to cast preemptive doubt on the possible outcome.
The right-wing thought the election was stolen due to Biden being such a poor candidate. On Fox last week, as Media Matters noted, prime-time host Tucker Carlson made a similar argument about Pennsylvania’s Senate race – suggesting people should not accept a Fetterman win because it would be “transparently absurd” for a candidate who has had difficulties with public speaking and auditory processing since a stroke in May to legitimately prevail.
But there would be nothing suspicious about Fetterman winning in a state Biden won by more than 80,000 votes in 2020. Fetterman has led in many (though not all) opinion polls – and polls have repeatedly found that Pennsylvania voters continue to view him far more favorably than they view his Republican opponent, Dr. Mehmet Oz.
The city of Detroit, like other Democratic-dominated cities with large Black populations, has been the target of false 2020 conspiracy theories from Trump and others. And now the Republican running to be Michigan’s elections chief is already challenging the validity of tens of thousands of Detroit votes in 2022.
Less than two weeks before Election Day, Kristina Karamo, a 2020 election denier and the Republican nominee for Michigan secretary of state, filed a lawsuit asking a court to “halt” the use of absentee ballots in Detroit if they weren’t obtained in person at a clerk’s office and declare that only those ballots obtained via in-person requests can be “validly voted” in this election. That request would potentially mean the rejection of thousands of votes already cast legally by Detroit residents – in state whose constitution gives residents the right to request absentee ballots by mail.
Karamo’s lawyer vaguely softened the request during closing arguments on Friday, The Detroit News reported. Other prominent Republicans have kept out of the lawsuit.
Other Republican candidates have vaguely hinted at the possibility that Democrats might somehow cheat on Election Day or during the counting of the votes.
Republican Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin told reporters this week that “we’ll see what happens” when it comes to accepting the results of his reelection race, The Washington Post reported, adding: “I mean, is something going to happen on Election Day? Do Democrats have something up their sleeves?”
The Daily Beast reported that Blake Masters, the Republican Senate candidate in a tight race in Arizona, told a story at an October event about how he can’t prove it’s not true that, if he beats Democratic incumbent Sen. Mark Kelly by 30,000 votes, unnamed people won’t just “find 40,000” for Kelly. He told the same story again in June.
There is no basis for the suggestion that there could be tens of thousands of fraudulent votes added to any state’s count. The effect of the comments of Masters and Karamo on the minds of Republican voters is that they would distrust any outcome that doesn’t go their way.
Midterm elections in the United States are often presented as a referendum on the party in power, and that message appears to be resonating this fall. The intentions of the party that hopes to regain power, as well as what each vote will mean for the future of the country, need to be considered by voters.
The next Congress will count the electoral votes in the presidential election in 2024, and its members will be the ones to consider and act on any objections to the vote’s legitimacy. Eight Republican senators and 139 Republican representatives sought to overturn the results of the 2020 election on the basis of spurious allegations of voter fraud and other irregularities. A group of people are likely to win re- election, and may be joined by others who also have doubts about the election’s integrity. Their presence in Congress poses a danger to democracy, one that should be on the mind of every voter casting a ballot this Election Day.
It will also be the first time that the U.S. electoral machinery will be tested in a national election after two years of lawsuits, conspiracy theories, election “audits” and all manner of interference by believers in Donald Trump’s lies about the 2020 election. A small but growing splinter of the Republican Party is embracing violent extremism as part of that test.