“”The tabulation equipment can’t read red ink.””
I am not familiar with just HOW paper ballots are read. Certainly the dozens of people we see opening envelopes and stacking the ballots aren’t COUNTING the VOTES. HOW does that get done and if they are fed into a machine for reading (tabulating), why can’t we see it BEING DONE?
Why is ANYONE opening envelopes and stacking ballots allowed to have any marking device (pen or otherwise) in their hands?
actually that’s how it is done. The envelopes are validated, then opened and stuffed into machine. THe machine reads the ballot and counts all the votes, makes its tally. By the way, to protect them they are NOT on any web. The transfer from the machine to the computer is done by memory chip. They actually have two chips if one disappears. Then the machine count goes to some big computer which tallies the totals.
Why we cannot see this? Well there is a privacy concern. They do not want everybody to see how you voted.
THese optical machines are actually quite good.
The problems are not the machine. Sharpie maybe.
Main problem is ballot harvesting - making false ballots, voting for people, even dead people, but mostly registered non-voters. Fumbling registrations.
BTW. the check is done by having representatives of both parties on each step. Basically the two parties are checking the other party, and so hopefully nobody cheats!
In Detroit I heard that they actually ejected the Republicans out of the tally. Now we really have a problem!
As matter of fact most votes are fair and counted properly!
Unfortunately the 1% is the problem! It was said the republicans need to get 51% to assure to get elected. The Dems could steal the 1%. Nowadays, in some places they seem to be able to steal even more!