Simplicity of Hand Count Elections
Simplicity of Hand Count Elections
What the Left Doesn't Want You to Know!
Hand Count Elections Around the World
Examination of Germany’s Election System
A conventional paper ballot or hand count election is not a radical solution to our election cybersecurity crisis.
Over 24 Nations hold hand-count elections, including larger nations like Argentina, Australia, Canada, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, Japan, Malaysia, the Netherlands, Norway, Russia, Spain, Sweden, and the United Kingdom.
These nations declare that voting machines are easily hackable and pose limitless, undetectable, and untraceable cybersecurity risks—all of them. American government officials have been deceiving the people for decades with one failed automation experiment after another, each new form less secure than the last. They sell the illusion of convenience to Americans while profiting on the back end. It's time we wake up to this deception and demand real election security.
In America, bi-partisan opponents of voting machine bans claim conventional hand count elections are unreliable, inaccurate, and/or too expensive, claims that are demonstrably false.
German Constitutional Court Rules Voting Machines Unlawful
Germany piloted its first electronic voting machines in Cologne in 1998. By the 2005 general election, nearly 2 million (3%) German voters were using machines to cast votes. Voters found the machines easy to use and well-liked, and election administrators were able to reduce the number of polling stations and staff in each station. Sound familiar?
After the 2005 election, two voters brought a case before the German Constitutional Court arguing that the use of electronic voting machines was unconstitutional and that it was possible to hack the voting machines, thus the results of the 2005 election could not be trusted.
The German Constitutional Court upheld the argument. The Court noted elections are constitutionally required to be public in nature and “that all essential steps of an election are subject to the possibility of public scrutiny unless other constitutional interests justify an exception . . . The use of voting machines, which electronically record the voters’ votes and electronically ascertain the election result, only meets the constitutional requirements if the essential steps of the voting and of the ascertainment of the result can be examined reliably and without any specialist knowledge of the subject . . . The very wide-reaching effect of possible errors of the voting machines or deliberate electoral fraud make special precautions necessary in order to safeguard the principle of the public nature of elections.”
This decision by the German Constitutional Court, stressing the need for transparency in the electoral process without specialist technical knowledge, effectively ended Germany’s recent use of electronic voting.
How Votes are Cast and Counted in Germany
In the 2021 Election, there were 61,181,072 Registered Voters, and 46,854,508 (76.6%) cast a vote. Germany organized 650,000 Election Workers to assist with 88,000 polling locations, averaging 72 ballots per volunteer. Votes are cast within the precinct with printed voter rolls. They verify that the voter is registered to vote and issue a ballot based on their preferred party. The ballot is accompanied by a privacy envelope, which the voter inserts, seals, and drops into a locked, transparent ballot box. The polling stations open at 8 a.m. and close at 6 p.m., including electoral offices, which stop accepting votes cast by post.
Upon closing, eight to ten poll workers divide out the ballot envelopes and distribute them evenly across tables, where ballots are recounted three times by different people and finally once more in total. The polling station secretary enters these results. Counting is conducted until the early morning hours, and preliminary results are posted as early as 5:25 a.m. the next day. It usually takes two weeks to officially announce the final results, allowing time for audit requests and recounts to take place.
Arizona Battleground State Comparison
In the 2020 election, there were 4,281,301 registered voters, and 3,420,759 (79.9%) cast a vote. Arizona organized 7,482 Election Workers to assist with 1500+ polling locations, averaging 457 ballots per volunteer.
If Arizona adopted Germany’s precise methods of conducting their elections, we would need to raise the volunteer count from 7,482 to 47,563, representing 1.4% of the voting population.
If a country that is 14 times the size of Arizona, with 14 times the voter turnout, competently conducts hand count elections and reports preliminary results by the early morning hours, Arizona and the other 49 states can achieve the same results!
When did we surrender the people’s right to a free, fair, and transparent election? Never! When states contract with third-party voting machine vendors, public scrutiny and reliable examination of voting machine records are PROHIBITED.
Germany’s Federal Constitutional Court Judgement Press Release (Excerpts) 3/3/2009
The use of voting machines, which electronically record the voters' votes and electronically ascertain the election result, only meets the constitutional requirements if the essential steps of the voting and the ascertainment of the result can be examined reliably and without any specialist knowledge of the subject.
While in a conventional election with ballot papers, manipulations or acts of electoral fraud are, under the framework conditions of the applicable provisions, at any rate only possible with considerable effort and with a very high risk of detection, which has a preventive effect, programming errors in the software or deliberate electoral fraud committed by manipulating the software of electronic voting machines can be recognized only with difficulty. The very wide-reaching effect of possible errors of the voting machines or deliberate electoral fraud makes special precautions necessary in order to safeguard the principle of the public nature of elections.
The voters themselves must be able to understand without detailed knowledge of computer technology whether their votes cast are recorded in an unadulterated manner as the basis of vote counting or, at any rate, as the basis of a later recount. If the election result is determined through computer-controlled processing of the votes stored in an electronic memory, it is not sufficient if merely the result of the calculation process carried out in the voting machine can be taken note of by means of a summarizing printout or an electronic display.
Limitations on citizens' ability to examine the voting cannot be compensated by an official institution testing sample machines in the context of their engineering-type licensing procedure or the very voting machines that will be used in the elections before they are used for their compliance with specific security requirements and for their technical integrity.
Also, an extensive array of other technical and organizational security measures alone is not suited to compensate for the citizens' inability to examine the essential steps of the electoral procedure. The possibility of examining the essential steps of the election promotes justified trust in the regularity of the election only if the citizens themselves are able to reliably retrace the voting.
It is not constitutionally required that the election result be available shortly after the polls close. Past Bundestag elections have shown that, without the use of voting machines, the official provisional result can generally be ascertained within a few hours.
The Federal Voting Machines Ordinance is unconstitutional because it infringes on the principle of the public nature of elections. The Federal Voting Machines Ordinance does not ensure that only such voting machines are used, which makes it possible to reliably examine when the vote is cast and whether the vote has been recorded in an unadulterated manner. The ordinance also does not place any concrete requirements regarding its content and procedure based on a reliable later examination of the ascertainment of the result. This deficiency cannot be remedied by means of an interpretation in conformity with the Constitution.
The voting machines did not make an effective examination of the voting possible because the votes were exclusively recorded electronically on a vote recording module; neither voters nor electoral boards nor citizens who were present at the polling station were able to verify the unadulterated recording of the votes cast.
The essential steps of ascertaining the result could not be traced by the public. It was not sufficient that the result of the calculation process carried out in the voting machine could be noted by means of a summarizing printout or an electronic display.
Notice that the German Constitution’s requirement was that the average citizen should be able to easily conduct an audit without specialized training, whereas in America, the citizen is expected to trust the machines and the '“trained experts” to reliably determine results and the citizen is not permitted to question or audit the outcomes.
This charade of election security with the use of machines and federal certification processes must end! No matter if a machine is reportedly "open source," made in America with 100% American parts and other security measures, machines will never provide real cybersecurity or protection from bad actors within our country. Where there are machines, there are programmers and countless ways to access and manipulate data completely undetected, even in a completely closed system. If it plugs into a wall, it is accessible remotely. It's time to give elections back to the people!
We're the USA. We have the ability to Hand Count Trusted Ballots
Whatever they object to it is the way to correct the problem.