The Simplicity of Hand Count Elections

Examination of Germany’s Election System

A Conventional paper ballot, hand count election is not a radical solution to our election cybersecurity crisis.

Over 24 Nations hand count elections including larger nations like Argentina, Australia, Canada, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, Japan, Malaysia, Netherlands, Norway, Russia, Spain, Sweden, and the United Kingdom.

These nations declare voting machines are easily hackable and pose a limitless, undetectable, and untraceable cybersecurity risk; all of the machines.

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.

How did America conduct elections for over 200 years?

A Germany Case Study

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 to be easy to use and well liked and election administrators were able to reduce the number of polling stations and staff in each polling 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 of 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 the voter is registered to vote, and issue a ballot based on their preferred party, accompanied with a privacy envelope which the voter inserts their ballot and seals and drops it into a locked, transparent ballot box.

The polling stations open at 8am and close at 6pm including electoral offices who 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. These results are entered by the polling station secretary. Counting is conducted until the early morning hours and preliminary results are posted as early as 5:25 am 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.

Click here for Arizona Germany Model Infographic.

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 states contract with 3rd party voting machine vendors, public scrutiny and reliable examination of voting machine records is PROHIBITED.

When did we surrender the people’s right to a free, fair, and transparent election? Never.    

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RELATED VIDEO: Voter fraud, mail-in voting, and why Trump is right to warn about them

EDITORS NOTE: This ACT For America column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

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