That’s factually inaccurate. I live in a battleground state and we’ve been through several independent audits.
Maricopa County also produced 2.1 million paper ballots out of around 2.5 million registered voters.
https://ktar.com/story/3585672/maricopa-county-passes-2-5-million-registered-voters/
You could mathematically compare the tabulations of the paper ballots to the machine ones and see whether or not there’s any significant difference. If there is, does that difference fall within a mathematical range that would have affected the results?
Arizona has 15 counties. Yavapai County is the only county that did not use any of the election machines made by companies that have been falsely charged with causing voter fraud by Republicans.
Maricopa county uses Dominion machinery, all the other counties in Arizona use ES&S. Maricopa county was the only county asked to audit multiple times and with law suits filed. Maricopa county is also Arizona’s Democratic stronghold. So let’s take a look at Maricopa election machines.
https://azsos.gov/elections/voting-election/voting-equipment
In the references links we see that all ballots in Arizona contain a paper part and specifics on the machinery’s usage. Further, the second one details and names the people responsible for testing and certifying machines prior to a machine being put into service and how they go about doing it. They have to prove they work before they are used in an election.
Specifically, the Dominion machinery tested and approved for use in Maricopa County are a digital scan device and an accessible ballot marking device.
Okay, so if the county is using a scanning device, that means there’s a physical copy on paper, because you have to have something to scan, right?Like my mail in ballot that I physically handed over to a regulated drop off. I handed my paper ballot to a very nice election official, he asked me if I double checked my choices and did I sign it in both places, checked to make sure the seal was secure, put it in a locked metal box, thanked me for my vote and gave me a sticker. Easy peasy.
That ballot got taken to a counting center, and tabulated via a Dominion digital scanning machine. The paper ballot I filled out was set aside for auditing purposes and potential litigation. It’s still sitting in a box in a warehouse somewhere waiting for all the litigation to end so it can be destroyed, eventually, mercifully.
The other machinery used by Maricopa County is Dominion Imagecast X accessible ballot marking device. There’s a users guide pdf available online (I can’t pick up that link on my phone) that states that after a voter reviews their electronic ballot, it gets printed out to finish the voting session. So, there’s a paper copy for auditing purposes that also is still sitting in a box somewhere waiting for all the litigation and election fraud nonsense to end.
Other counties in other states have their own procedures. The information is readily available online.
Believe me, elections in this country are robust and heavily scrutinized every election. We’ve been using these machines and procedures for years with few or no problems.
The problem we have right now is not the machines. It’s cutthroat tactics by a party that has admitted before the supreme court that it cannot win by playing fairly. Under such thinking, it’s ridiculous to think things would change for the better to go back to strictly paper and pencil voting with manual counts. Nor is it logical to assume that it would be easier. Voting is incredibly easy in this country. The difficulty is caused by voter suppression tactics, not the actual procedure itself
No, there’d just be some cockamamie claim that the election was rigged because the use of golf pencils magically erases votes for Trump so anybody who cast a vote for Trump with a golf pencil has been disenfranchised. People, Trump supporters, will believe it if it’s repeated enough. Or maybe it’ll be the paper. Trump voters are being silenced because images made on thermal paper vanish in direct sunlight at which point they’ll demand we use unbiased machines to prevent voter fraud. And Trump supporters will never think that through or bother to look into that wild claim. They’ll just believe it because doing so and gunking up the works in every way possible gives them a chance to win.
