When they stop closing polling stations in low income areas and actually ARRESTING people for handing out water to people standing in a queue for hours on end, then make in-person voting mandatory. Not before.
If you get rid of the machines. There will be no lines. Set up another table and let more people vote at one time. It is stupid to have to wait in line for hours to vote. It should be illegal. They should be required to have more polling stations if the lines are going to be like that. The law is against campaigning at a poll station. And it should be illegal.
Again having lines like that should not be allowed. The longest I have ever waited was 10 min.
Because, back in the day before conspiracy theories that originated in Russian troll farms and were spread by Q-Anon and other Trump supporters, counting by machine was proven to be more accurate and faster than hand-counting. Recent recounts, done by hand have supported this. Thus, AZ and other states set up legal voting procedures that required counting to be done by by certified voting machines. There will always be those who cannot accept modern technology or who will blame losses on anything except the voters' choice. If we were to return to hand-counting, then new procedures would have to be legally set up far in advance of the election. IMO, hand-counting is as likely, if not more likely, to result in election fraud and more likely to be incorrect or result in delayed reporting of results. This is a manufactured issue and personally, I don't get my opinions of voting machines from Sidney Powell, Mike Lindell, and the other nut jobs with whom Trump has surrounded himself.
If it's a choice between A or B, machines are fine. When there are six candidates and voters must number each square on the ballot in order of preference, currently machines can't handle that. Many people have sloppy handwriting (I'm one of them).
Computers do what they are programmed to do. Be it count correctly or do weighted votes, switching votes,.etc. All of which the machines are capable of...
This is why you have 2 people, one from each party working together. If they agree on the ballot then we can assume it is correct. And neither one allowed the other to overcount or undercount their candidate/party.
Machines can also be connected to the internet allowing hacking. They should not have the ability to connect to the internet wired or via wifi.
Both humans and machines can be used to give inaccurate results. The solution is to put multiple safeguards in place. Machines only do what humans tell them to do, they do not go rogue like humans can. Yes, there are vulnerabilities, and there are people who do wrong things like not understanding why internet connections are not safe for voting machines, so let's address that. There was just as much outrage over how humans handled ballots as there was over voting machines. Based on my own decades of experience with using computers to collect and report data, for speed, accuracy, and consistency, I will opt for computers over humans every time. Go ahead and have the last word.
So why is the SoS Hobbs (also candidate for AZ Governor) opposed to having the machine count and also the human count to verify each other? As you said both can be inaccurate.
I can't speak for Hobbs. But, I will reiterate. Machines do what humans tell them to. They are not the problem.
This post was edited by Jane S at October 23, 2022 5:16 PM MDT
We can agree on that machines do what people tell them to do.... This is why we need oversight of the machines because some human told them what to do. And any country/city/state who's citizens want to verify with humans the results of the machines should have that right.
This has been my position long before Trump ever ran...but yes, the shenanigans that were pulled in 2020 only intensified my position on election processes.
Slartibartfast 