Post #26505 by Goofyhoofy on the US Policy board

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Simple enough, have an election worker and a poll watcher, each count a box, and keep at it until they agree on a number. And if some ballots are proven lost, that is not reason to disallow the election, but rather work on tighter procedures for next year and keep at it until there is confidence in the machine count.

There is no time, whether hand counting or electronic counting, where the votes are tallied by one person. I don’t know where you’re getting your information (hmmm. Let me guess) but the idea of a poll worker purposefully ignoring ballots or over counting is just so much arm waving by idiot politicians working to destroy the country.

Hand counting is typically performed by teams or boards. Jurisdictions may have several types of teams, in addition to the manual tally teams: a duplication team may remake damaged ballots; a chain of custody team may be in place to maintain custody of ballots before and after tabulation; an adjudication team may determine voter intent from write-in votes, overvotes, and voter selections that deviate from the directions on the ballot; a results team aggregates the tally sheets; and an audit team may be in place to check the results.
https://verifiedvoting.org/election-system/hand-co...

Hand counting results in more errors, not fewer, in independent research tests.

Researchers from University of California, Berkeley and Rice University, evaluating the accuracy and speed of “Stack and Count” versus “Read and Mark,” found that 46.7% of all teams provided incorrect counts for at least one race, regardless of the method used. The key difference between the two methods was the amount of time spent counting, with “Read and Mark” taking roughly half the time as “Sort and Stack” to complete. Researchers also found that, while teams worked faster throughout the count, the increase in efficiency did not improve accuracy: “[E]ven with the relatively simple task of manually counting ballots, error is ever-present…. While the efficiency data suggests that participants in the study did become quicker at counting over time due to increased familiarity with the procedure, there is no evidence this made a difference in error counts.”

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