You have an awful lot of faith in machines.
More on verification:
from PI article, "The canvassing board voted 2-1 to move forward with recanvassing the 573 ballots. "
"Canvassing" IS the process of verification.
Further:
"The absentee ballots were not counted originally because the voters' signatures had not been scanned into the county's computer system. Election workers should have checked the paper files, but instead the ballots were mistakenly rejected. The error was discovered only after Phillips saw his name on a list of rejected absentee ballots and notified Logan. "The facts are pretty clear there was a discrepancy in the canvassing of these ballots," Logan said. "There is a record that shows these are validly registered voters who did nothing wrong."
I'm just not sure what's wrong with this.
Hey, maybe the Seattle Times could distribute their Sunday papers by hand counting them? I mean, you know, since machines are so unreliable..