Those who would undermine election security and accuracy are being criticized for the growing campaign in rural Ohio counties to switch from contemporary voting equipment to hand-counted paper votes.
The proposal was criticized in Friday’s program of Today in Ohio.
If we allowed fools to start dictating policy, it would be disastrous. Chris Quinn stated during the conversation that some people simply wish to dismiss science because they don’t understand it. This method of thinking is outdated. And if they want to be in the Middle Ages, I sincerely hope we had a time machine that would allow us to transport them there.
In Monroe and Seneca counties, a group identifying as the Coalition of Concerned Voters is pushing for a local referendum that would switch from computerized voting machines to manually tallied paper votes. Their dispute? Ohioans don’t believe the audit process, which samples about 5% of ballots, and they never truly had a role in the use of computers in the first place.
After President Donald Trump pledged to outlaw voting machines nationwide—something he has no authority to do—the movement gained momentum. Leila Atassi says organizers say eight other counties are requesting information on how to conduct similar referendums.
However, voting rights organizations and election authorities are raising the alarm, stating that such a shift would result in slower counts, more errors, less voter accessibility, and much higher expenses for taxpayers. The state’s existing system is the gold standard, according to Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose.
Laura Johnston illustrated the issues with human counting with a touching personal story: I’m not a moron. Even after taking calculus and all the most challenging math subjects, I still can’t consistently add up Girl Scout cookie orders correctly. Therefore, it is ludicrous to count ballots by hand.
We are reminded of why we switched to machines in the first place by the history of manually counting ballots. When authorities painstakingly counted and recounted ballots, election results would take days to complete. Because machines are quicker and more accurate than humans, they were used just as intended.
The recommendation to eliminate the machines is part of a risky pattern. This is only one aspect of Donald Trump’s ten-year campaign to erode our confidence in the world’s greatest electoral system, as Quinn pointed out in the episode.
Important safety features of our present voting system include paper backups that may be manually counted in the event of a close or contested election. The machines are put through a thorough certification and testing process. The movement to do away with them aims to cast doubt on a system that has consistently shown itself to be dependable, not to make elections more secure.
Voters in Ohio should be questioning why some politicians want us to distrust the technologies that have made our elections more efficient, accurate, and accessible than ever before, rather than whether we should go back to outdated counting techniques.
Check out the conversation here.
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Listen to the whole episodes of Today in Ohio, where With Editorial Board member Lisa Garvin, Impact Editor Leila Atassi, and Content Director Laura Johnston, Chris Quinn delivers our daily half-hour news podcast.
