We agree. Don't use computers. Scantron is only there to get a fast count for the news agencies. Manual counting of physical paper ballots would still be done anyway.
To manually count by hand every ballot would mean not finding out a complete tally well until after Jan 20. When election day and inauguration day was selected, the number of ballots to count were a mere fraction of today's count.
Manually counting votes is so error prone that I'd have less confidence in it than a scantron type of ballot. At this point, I'm more in favor of giving each voter a ball/bead/chip to drop into a bucket for each position on the ballot. After checking in, you go to each position to receive your one token. If you don't visit a position, you do not get a token to pass to someone else. Tallying the votes could be as quick as weighing the bucket as the weight of the bucket/token will be known. Each election can change size/weight/color of tokens to be unique. If the weights total an irrational weight, it would be deemed suspect and a hand sort of the tokens can be done to find the odd token.
Hand counts are kind of obnoxious but they can't be beat for transparency. There's no reason it has to be done at once either. Ideally people would be able to vote over several days and counting can start right away.
Balls/tokens aren't a bad idea either though, but it sounds like people pocketing a ball/token would force a manual count even if they kept them since the total weight of all buckets combined would be off. I'd also worry about people bringing in heavier or lighter balls/tokens but the bigger risk would be poll workers handing out heavier or lighter balls/tokens to specific people (or types of people) because it'd be easier to make sure the weights would add up in the end.
Maybe we could force everyone to vote at every position (which should have an abstain option) then have the machine check the weight of every ball/token as it was inserted, and verify that one but only one was inserted, before it fell into the selected bucket?
To me, hand counts are beyond obnoxious. How many times does each ballot need to be counted? Just once? Someone with an agenda could cause havoc. Twice? Three times? Majority wins? How many times would non-unanimous count be allowed before the person making the odd result be dismissed/replaced? I can't remember the hanging chad debacle process, but I do seem to remember one person looking at it before handing it to the next person for confirmation.
I like the idea of placing the token into a verifier to validate authenticity before dropping into the bucket. Similar to a coin sorter where invalid tokens get rejected to a separate bin with a light and siren to ID the person trying to cheat. These could get expensive as you'd need one per candidate per position on the ballot.
Transparency comes much more from repeatable results than manual process. You run the same stack of 1,000 ballots through 2 optical scanners, they will give the same result unless one is busted (in which case do it with 3 or 4). This takes very little time and is reliable. Do it by hand and you are guaranteed to get a different result almost every time, and it will take forever.
