Hand-counting paper ballots is no good at all, argue critics, unless.....
you really want to know who the actual winner of the election was..
While hand-counted paper ballots are routinely discredited by those who stand to gain from secret vote counting, you'll note the odd paradox that in the closest of elections, those same individuals are often the first to demand a fully public hand-count of paper ballots (in jurisdictions where they still exist) to determine who actually won and who actually lost.
In short, hand-counting paper ballots is no good at all, according to the oxymoronic logic of its critics, unless you really want to know who the actual winner of the election was.
It was the fully public counting of hand-marked paper ballots that gave evidence that the unofficial, electronically-scanned election night results in Minnesota's recent U.S. Senate race were wrong. A hand-count settled the results of Washington State's Gubernatorial contest in 2004. And in the 2006 Republican Primary election in Pottawatomie County, Iowa, a hand-count found that seven races had been tallied incorrectly by the county's optical-scan system. Unfortunately, that sort of publicly observable counting has become the exception rather than the rule in this country, and it happens only rarely, in elections where the candidates can afford the extraordinarily high legal costs of a contest, or when the results are so obviously twisted that officials are left with little choice but to count the ballots by hand.
"Hand-counting paper ballots is recognized as the gold standard in state laws across the country," Ellen Theisen of the non-partisan election watchdog organization VotersUnite.org told me. "Why settle for anything less?"
http://www.bradblog.com/?p=7417
H.R. 2894) is a bill going through the house it won't be in play for two more election cycles, but when it does, it protects the private source code from public inspection.
"Theisen's thoughts echoed Lehto's interpretation of the findings of the High Court in Germany. "By letting software count our votes," she said, "we give software control over our government."
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