Recounts are very straight-forward for this reason as well.

I am so glad that Colorado went to an all-mail ballot, though I'm intending to drop it off in person.

Many states have just a proportion of votes via absentee/mail, so I suppose some of them still have electronic in-person voting that may or may not have paper back-up.

I watched the sos on the news last week talking about hiring people to HAND COUNT PAPER BALLOTS and my heart soared

much harder to cheat a hand count with paper that we can see, is why trump hates the idea

on the other hand if states use the machines to count absentee ballots that is not as secure but any paper is better than no paper

time consuming. And they are being counted by exhausted poll workers who have been at the polls since 5AM.

In the old days, if while counting ballots you saw a "wrong" one, you simply made a mark on it to invalidate it. Or just tossed it into a wastebasket.

There's a reason we use electronic spreadsheets now instead of pencils and ledger paper.

if the count is done in the open, transparently then many people would have to go along with the cheating for it to work... I don't think most people are cheats but your experience maybe different

cheating is easier with electronics because thousands of votes can be changed electronically with no one understanding why, at least with hand counts they can only cheat one or two at a time

https://bradblog.com/?p=7875

brad blog literally has hundreds of examples of "electronic spreadsheets" changing with no explaination

since Colorado is all mail in ballots the counters have not been there working all day but I am sure they appreciate your concern

If there are paper ballots for people to count, there are paper ballots for machines to scan.

We live in a time when you deposit checks (the few that we get any more) by scanning them. FedEx scans our packages to track delivery. Everything you buy gets scanned and counted. Our phones have become bank tellers, sales clerks and cash machines.

And you don't trust machines to count ballots?

question about the results but instead they fight tooth and nail to just "recount"
them running thru the same machines

technology should be used to make vote counting more transparent not less

districts where there have been recounts?

probably not a big thing. So far. Anyway, we have had several recounts and one really tight one a few years ago was a congressional race that took weeks to decide. Went over every paper ballot.

One thing that bothers me is invalid ballots. Every election I've worked had as many as 10% rejected ballots-- this is usually for voting for too many people for an office, or not filling the little ovals properly. In person voting rules say the poll workers can't look at the ballot (we do anyway to save time) and definitely can't change anything on the ballot (we never do that) but the voter has three chances to fill out a ballot properly. And voter has a choice to cast the ballot disregarding the bad choices.

So, what happens when an absentee ballot is run through the scanner and is rejected because, say, someone votes for Biden on both the Democratic and Working Families line? Voter is not there to redo the ballot.

Or places X's instead of filling in the ovals? That's a big one.

in the scenarios you describe the voters intent is pretty clear with the exception of overvoting

Overall benefits of scanning are still there.

secret is a mistake when we could pay well mannered 4th graders to sort and stack, count ballots in full public view for next to nothing

if the American people are not allowed to oversee the count then we do not have a legitimate election

which is how someone like trump wins Michigan even though 1/3 of the Detroit precincts reported impossible results...more votes than voters

It's all done by party insiders. Both parties.

btw the thing I was wrong about is it wasn't 1/3 of Detroit precincts, it was 2/3s

https://www.detroitnews.com/story/news/politics/2016/12/12/records-many-votes-detroits-precincts/95363314/