Hand Count Elections Around the World
Examination of Germany’s Election System
Dear John,
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.
John, these nations declare voting machines are easily hackable and pose a limitless, undetectable, and untraceable cybersecurity risk; all of them.
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 assigned to 88,000 polling locations. Votes are cast within the precinct with printed voter rolls, ballots are inserted into a privacy envelope which the voter 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 which are recounted three times by different people, and finally once more in total. These results are posted 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, and final results posted within two weeks.
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.
If Arizona adopted Germany’s election model, we would need to raise the volunteer count from 7,482 to 47,563, 1.4% of the voting population.
