Arizona board delays certification of votes

[Art Haberland]

If they don't get the counts in on time, they might not get counted at all, costing the GOP a congressman in Arizona.

https://time.com/6235360/arizona-del...ection-result/

[Figment]

Yet another occasion on which this new englander is completely baffled by the significance of county governments out west.

The whole notion of "county" is barely regarded as an organizational tool here. It's a line on the map which delineates where a weather-alert applies for a few hours.

It seems to be a whole other layer of government out there. And for what?

[John Smith]

Often people are their own worst enemies.

[Rapelapente]

Here the votes are counted manually, under control of representatives of the candidates.
We have the results 3 hours max after the voting closure in big or small cities.
It for sure needs quite a bunch of people but we manage to find enough.
I don't understand why counting machines are used.

[John Smith]

Here the votes are counted manually, under control of representatives of the candidates.
We have the results 3 hours max after the voting closure in big or small cities.
It for sure needs quite a bunch of people but we manage to find enough.
I don't understand why counting machines are used.

Speed, plus the machines aren't partisan.

[Rapelapente]

Speed? When did the vote occurred?

[Too Little Time]

Here the votes are counted manually, under control of representatives of the candidates.
We have the results 3 hours max after the voting closure in big or small cities.
It for sure needs quite a bunch of people but we manage to find enough.
I don't understand why counting machines are used.

How accurately can you count for 2 hours? I think it is harder than you believe.

[CWSmith]

Cost the GOP a congressman? That is not how I expected the story to go.

[David W Pratt]

Considering some of the choices, maybe they are hoping to settle on "None of the above"

[Rapelapente]

How accurately can you count for 2 hours? I think it is harder than you believe.

I regularly participate to the counting.
Each polling station is divided in 3 or 4 hundred people zones.
After the closure, the counting starts immediately.
It's done on tables under control of the public.
The envellopes are counted, then oppenned.
The results are taken by the authoryties.
It works perfectly.
Some attenpts have been done with machines.
The use of machines drives to contestations and frauds.

[Nicholas Carey]

If they don't get the counts in on time, they might not get counted at all, costing the GOP a congressman in Arizona.

https://time.com/6235360/arizona-del...ection-result/

You say that is if it were a bad thing.

[Nicholas Carey]

I regularly participate to the counting.
Each polling station is divided in 3 or 4 hundred people zones.
After the closure, the counting starts immediately.
It's done on tables under control of the public.
The envellopes are counted, then oppenned.
The results are taken by the authoryties.
It works perfectly.
Some attenpts have been done with machines.
The use of machines drives to contestations and frauds.

Here in the USA, those 300-400 person voting zones are called "precincts".

I rather like the idea of the precinct tabulating its own ballots. Small enough group to keep everybody honest.

[John Smith]

How accurately can you count for 2 hours? I think it is harder than you believe.

It is. The problem I've had with the 'fraud' claims is: If I could rig the machines so Biden wins, I'd rig down ballot elections so he'd have strong majorities in both chambers.

[John Smith]

I regularly participate to the counting.
Each polling station is divided in 3 or 4 hundred people zones.
After the closure, the counting starts immediately.
It's done on tables under control of the public.
The envellopes are counted, then oppenned.
The results are taken by the authoryties.
It works perfectly.
Some attenpts have been done with machines.
The use of machines drives to contestations and frauds.

How, exactly do machines equal fraud?

[Too Little Time]

I regularly participate to the counting.
Each polling station is divided in 3 or 4 hundred people zones.
After the closure, the counting starts immediately.
It's done on tables under control of the public.
The envellopes are counted, then oppenned.
The results are taken by the authoryties.
It works perfectly.
Some attenpts have been done with machines.
The use of machines drives to contestations and frauds.

I appreciate your competence.

In the last election, there may have been a dozen offices I voted for. For 300 voters that would be 3000 votes I would need to count. About 1000/hour. And not just count. I would have to get agreement with the others who were counting. I would find it surprising if 2 independent groups of counters produced the same result.

I find it interesting that there are people who use computers everyday trust them for almost everything except counting votes.

[Rumars]

I've counted manually in big precints, it's no problem if the process is well organized. It's true, the people are tired, your day begins a few hours before voting starts, but the only unknown is the quality of the people involved. It helps if you have a committee chairman that is not afraid to take responsibility.
The counting itself goes like this, one person handles the ballots, usually sitting on the floor in front of boxes labeled for each option, plus one for the invalidated. The rest of the committee sits behind him so they can all see the ballot. One or several persons keep the official tally, the observers (party or independent) keep their own. The handler takes one bulletin from the official ballot box, opens it and calls the vote. Everybody behind him can see the bulletin, so there are basically two scenarios possible:
1. everybody agrees since the voter has either marked it correctly or made an obvious mistake, and the bulletin lands in the appropriate box and added to the tally.
2. there is disagreement about the validity, in wich case arguments are made. The chairman has the ultimate decision power, everybody who disagrees is free to take note and make a complaint to the
higher authorities.
After the ballot box is empty the individual sorted piles are recounted for number and compared to the tally, then you write up the report. In the end it's a net zero game, you recieved n blank ballots, you return n ballots from wich x valid sorted per options, y invalid, z blank.

A vote counting machine is nothing more then a optical scanner with an integrated counter. It speeds the process up, and it ensures the same judgment about validity is applied uniformly across precints.

[Jim Mahan]

There are several articles online about the reason for the long delays. In California we have both early voting and vote by mail. Every registered voter gets a ballot in the mail, which they can mail back, or drop in a dedicated box or take to a polling location. In the last election there were over twenty-two million votes cast. Some of those get cast by eligible voters registering on voting day at the polling place. It's a lot of verification as well as counting. When the newstories about the expected delays that were happening came on the TV there was one volunteer supervising the count process in his precinct and said that they were working sixteen hour days, and no one was not taking it seriously.

The electronic counting does speed things up. Think about how long all of those twenty-two million votes would take to cast and count if they all happened on election day and in person. The spokesperson for the state elections office said the entire process of mailing ballots all the way to counting the last ones, takes about two months.

[Peerie Maa]

I appreciate your competence.

In the last election, there may have been a dozen offices I voted for. For 300 voters that would be 3000 votes I would need to count. About 1000/hour. And not just count. I would have to get agreement with the others who were counting. I would find it surprising if 2 independent groups of counters produced the same result.

I find it interesting that there are people who use computers everyday trust them for almost everything except counting votes.

By officers, do you mean public or civil servants?

If so that is where you are going wrong. Public and civil servants should be appointed on merit, like any other employee. That limits the votes to representatives only.
We hold two sorts of elections. MPs to government, and Councillors to town and county councils. One MP, one each councillor. Three separate elections, all counted by hand.
It works well.

[Jim Mahan]

I find it interesting that there are people who use computers everyday trust them for almost everything except counting votes.

IKR?

Two hundred years from now, our generation will probably be made fun of by those then current for being so backward and primitive.

"Wait they actually voted on paper? They had computers then, right? No wonder things were such a mess then. I'm sure glad our more recent ancestors figured this crap out before I was born. Can you imagine? Wow, paper ballots. And opinion polls? My insert your diety here. Wanna get me that manual thought reader? My transducer is acting up again and I can't tell if my daughter on Titan is trying to telepath me for a joke or not, or if it's one of those intra-lunar scams."

[ERGR]

We have paper votes and count them by hand. The initial result is always available the same night. Votes that are debatable are put aside when doing the initial counting and judged upon later. Also, absentee votes delivered at another precinct may arrive late. When the election is close, we may have to wait many days for the final result.
We have a proportional voting system so when it's close, we'll have to wait until the number of remaining votes for the whole country cannot alter the result before it's called.
The good thing with paper votes is that they leave a trail, can always be recounted if needed and have a high public trust. Automatic counting and optical scanners would be OK; the option for a manual recount is always there. We might go there but I really don't see the need.
There will always be paper votes that need manual judgement, so we'll have to wait for that anyway before calling the election if the vote is close.
/Erik

[Peerie Maa]

The good thing with paper votes is that they leave a trail, can always be recounted if needed and have a high public trust. Automatic counting and optical scanners would be OK; the option for a manual recount is always there. We might go there but I really don't see the need.
/Erik

Hanging chads, anyone? I'd like to see the optical scanner that could have counted those accurately.

https://www.npr.org/2018/11/12/66681...es-on-haunting

[Ian McColgin]

Hanging chads are not a computer problem. They were caused by dull punches.

Let me back up to a cycle before that general election. In the Democratic primary my guy won the first count but the opponent, an experienced pol who knew everyone, could not reconcile his personal count with the official so he got a recount.

I was a watcher for his opponent. On his side lots of incompletely punched spots. Turns out that in general elections, the Republicans were always on one side of the sheet, Democrats on the other. In an Off-Cape part of the district the D's were so heavily represented that the ballot punches just could not make a clean cut.

And thus was born the hanging chad.

On recount, the other guy won and has turned out possibly better than the guy I was supporting.

[Peerie Maa]

Hanging chads are not a computer problem. They were caused by dull punches.

That was not the point of my post. How hanging chads are created is irrelevant. How does a computer driven scanner deal with them?

[Nicholas Carey]

Hanging chads, anyone? I'd like to see the optical scanner that could have counted those accurately.

https://www.npr.org/2018/11/12/66681...es-on-haunting

Those didn't go through an optical scanner. They were electro-mechanical scanners. Open holes closed a circuit on the scanner.

Whether a hanging Chad was counted as a vote by the scanner would depend on its orientation in the scanner. If it was flopped over the hole, it would likely be not counted. If it wasn't blocking the hole it would be counted.

Problem was in the manual recount. Somebody had to make a call as to whether or not it was a legitimate vote.

We have optically scanned ballots. We fill in a circle in dark ink. When you feed the completed ballot into the ballot box, the ballot is scanned and tabulated. The ballot box is not connected to anything save mains power.

After the polls close, the ballot boxes are transported to the mother shop and connected to the master tabulator where they report their totals.

Before vote-by-mail, we had pretty definitive results by midnight, maybe 2 AM at the latest, save for a se tee and mail-in ballots.

It's a system that works excellently.

[Too Little Time]

By officers, do you mean public or civil servants?

If so that is where you are going wrong. Public and civil servants should be appointed on merit, like any other employee. That limits the votes to representatives only.
We hold two sorts of elections. MPs to government, and Councillors to town and county councils. One MP, one each councillor. Three separate elections, all counted by hand.
It works well.

Federal - Senate and house
State - Governor, Lt Governor, Secretary of State, State School Board, votes to retain various judges
County - Council member, Assessor
Local - Mayor, Council member, School board

My wife produces a list of votes for me to make, and I make the appropriate marks on the ballot.


Appointments on merit or selection by voting is a debatable issue, but we have made such decisions here as you have and people complain about civil servants regardless of the method of selection.

[Too Little Time]

Hanging chads, anyone? I'd like to see the optical scanner that could have counted those accurately.

I believe the scanners kicked them out. Then the argument was over the hand count(s). And someone made a decision as to how to count those ballots. That made some people unhappy.

But that is similar to what happened when the voting rules were changed during the 2020 elections. The courts made decisions. People got mad.

[Ian McColgin]

If the ballot is not completely punched, the counter can't recognize it so that vote is not counted. A person looking at the ballot can see the incomplete cuts. The bigger ones were a sort of U hence the term "hanging chads." (I don't know where 'chads' came from.) Some cut marks were so slight as to lead to interpretive discussion (argument) as to whether there was a vote, especially when incomplete punches appeared with two candidates for the same office.

Back then, the voting machines were just simple counters but in years since the data are more recorded and tabulated by computer.

Optical scanners, best thing now, can still frustrate the vote of people unable to color in the whole oval.

[Paul Pless]

re chads: from computer punch cards and tape, the waste from the punch was referred to as a chad

[johnw]

Here the votes are counted manually, under control of representatives of the candidates.
We have the results 3 hours max after the voting closure in big or small cities.
It for sure needs quite a bunch of people but we manage to find enough.
I don't understand why counting machines are used.

Americans like to try to solve social problems with engineering solutions.

As for why the count takes longer than it used to, some places have rules that say the mail-in votes can't even be taken out of the envelopes until the polls close. In other places, you have to mail your ballot by election day, so it can take a week until all the ballots arrive. The Trump administration tried to slow the mail delivery so that some of the ballots would be too late to be counted, and told Republicans to vote on election day. The idea was that Republicans would lead in the early count, announce victory, and try to stop the counting. Remember, in Bush V Gore, Republicans were trying to stop the counting for similar reasons.

Back in the dark ages, I was a journalist, and we'd know on election night (or more usually, early morning) who won. Now, it can be a week or more.

[Peerie Maa]

Federal - Senate and house
State - Governor, Lt Governor, Secretary of State, State School Board, votes to retain various judges
County - Council member, Assessor
Local - Mayor, Council member, School board

My wife produces a list of votes for me to make, and I make the appropriate marks on the ballot.


Appointments on merit or selection by voting is a debatable issue, but we have made such decisions here as you have and people complain about civil servants regardless of the method of selection.

We were not discussing you ticking boxes. We were discussing the ballache of having to count the plethora of votes cast.

As to elected officials, the US system elected a religious bigot who flatly refused to do her job, and a corrupt county Sheriff. Those are the tip of the iceberg visible to us furriners on this forum.

[Peerie Maa]

re chads: from computer punch cards and tape, the waste from the punch was referred to as a chad

That's interesting. We called the bits punched out of railway tickets "Didcots"

[John Smith]

I've counted manually in big precints, it's no problem if the process is well organized. It's true, the people are tired, your day begins a few hours before voting starts, but the only unknown is the quality of the people involved. It helps if you have a committee chairman that is not afraid to take responsibility.
The counting itself goes like this, one person handles the ballots, usually sitting on the floor in front of boxes labeled for each option, plus one for the invalidated. The rest of the committee sits behind him so they can all see the ballot. One or several persons keep the official tally, the observers (party or independent) keep their own. The handler takes one bulletin from the official ballot box, opens it and calls the vote. Everybody behind him can see the bulletin, so there are basically two scenarios possible:
1. everybody agrees since the voter has either marked it correctly or made an obvious mistake, and the bulletin lands in the appropriate box and added to the tally.
2. there is disagreement about the validity, in wich case arguments are made. The chairman has the ultimate decision power, everybody who disagrees is free to take note and make a complaint to the
higher authorities.
After the ballot box is empty the individual sorted piles are recounted for number and compared to the tally, then you write up the report. In the end it's a net zero game, you recieved n blank ballots, you return n ballots from wich x valid sorted per options, y invalid, z blank.

A vote counting machine is nothing more then a optical scanner with an integrated counter. It speeds the process up, and it ensures the same judgment about validity is applied uniformly across precints.

If the process is well organized. And if it's not well organized?

[John Smith]

Hanging chads, anyone? I'd like to see the optical scanner that could have counted those accurately.

https://www.npr.org/2018/11/12/66681...es-on-haunting

Actually, had they run those cards through the machines several times, they would reach a point where the hangers would fall off, and they'd get the same count twice. We'd count money again and again until we got the same figure twice.

[Jim Mahan]

Going back to the thread title and the point of the article included in the OP as a reference, this long thread has mostly drifted off topic. The OPs point isn't about the fact that processing the election takes time and some people don't yet understand that it's not due to anything but usual and expected stuff. The real topic is about why the Arizona election board is deliberately delaying certifying the election as a function of the R election denier-stealers trying to commit fraud to get their guys into position to commit another coup.

PHOENIX — The board overseeing a southeastern Arizona county whose Republican leaders had hoped to recount all Election Day ballots on Friday delayed certifying the results of last week’s vote after hearing from a trio of conspiracy theorists who alleged that counting machines were not certified.
The three men, or some combination of them, have filed at least four cases raising similar claims before the Arizona Supreme Court since 2021 seeking to have the state’s 2020 election results thrown out. The court has dismissed all of them for lack of evidence, waiting too long after the election was certified or asking for relief that could not be granted, in increasingly harsh language.


But Tom Rice, Brian Steiner and Daniel Wood managed to persuade the two Republicans who control the Cochise County board of supervisors that their claims were valid enough for them to delay the certification until a Nov. 28 deadline.

The article is much longer and worth reading. Back to the link in the OP http://time.com/6235360/arizona-dela...ection-result/