Republican efforts to hand count ballots in a seemingly low-profile Texas county primary election has led to a number of errors.

Gillespie County Republicans, led by Chairman Bruce Campbell, decided months ago to hand-count more than 8,000 ballots for the county GOP primary on March 5. Campbell then declared the results completely accurate and certified before, less than an hour after that certification, reversing course and saying discrepancies were found.

“It’s my mistake for not catching that,” Cambell said on Thursday while sitting inside the county election administration office. “I can’t believe I did that.”

The kerfuffle over ballot counting comes after a November rematch between President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump was solidified in primaries last week.

  • Altofaltception@lemmy.world
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    6 months ago

    There was a video showing ballot stuffing in Russia’s election.

    This Republican move seems to be an effort to emulate that election.

        • alliswell33 @lemmy.sdf.org
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          6 months ago

          Apparently the results from that poling station were annulled and the members of that local election commission were fired. Not sure this is proof of any widespread voter fraud in Russia.

          The video in the social media posts is CCTV footage taken in Lyubertsy in the Moscow Region of Russia in March 2018 during the Russian presidential election. After the video circulated online, election results from that polling station were annulled and the chairman of the local election commission and a member of the election commission were fired, according to the Washington Post.

          https://www.reuters.com/article/idUSKBN27Q21J/

          edit: also getting down voted for asking for a source is hilarious 🤣

          • Viking_Hippie@lemmy.world
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            6 months ago

            Not sure this is proof of any widespread voter fraud in Russia.

            Even if it isn’t, Putin “winning” 88% of the vote after eliminating all rivals one way or the other certainly doesn’t indicate a free and fair election.

          • Spazz@lemmynsfw.com
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            6 months ago

            Shilling for Russia and pretending their elections are transplant with fraud and completely rigged is why you’re getting downvoted

          • Prandom_returns@lemm.ee
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            6 months ago

            Nah, you’re getting downvoted because you think there’s no voter fraud in russia.

            Ignorance is bliss, I suppose.

  • RaoulDook@lemmy.world
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    6 months ago

    Chairman Bruce Campbell shouted “Hail to the king, baby!” before kicking over the entire container of 8000 ballots, forcing another recount because he suspected demonic influence on the election results.

  • NOT_RICK@lemmy.world
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    6 months ago

    Humans are error-prone; of course hand counting will lead to errors. Such a non-issue to try to fix. Dumb.

    • moody@lemmings.world
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      6 months ago

      That’s why typically there are other election employees and observers present. Canada’s federal elections are tallied by hand count, and results are always (as far as I’m aware) certified the same day. Canada’s population is about 40 million people, so not quite the US’s 330+ million, but a lot more than this town’s 8000.

    • NatakuNox@lemmy.world
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      6 months ago

      That’s their goal with the whole Dominion voting machines and crying about mail in voting. It’s to weaken our already outdated voting machines/processes and to make it easier to steal elections on their end.

    • Spazz@lemmynsfw.com
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      6 months ago

      Because they’re not trying to fix an issue, it’s an excuse to meddle with the election and make things worse so they can sell their “democracy is broken, vote for a strong man” schtick

    • Socsa@sh.itjust.works
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      6 months ago

      It’s dumb because this is a solved problem. Where I am we have bubble ballots where you mark the box, and the machine scans it and drops it into a box. Hand audits of this technology routinely show discrepancies of literally zero over millions of votes.

      This is the part which drives me crazy. The concern trolling over vote counting is so transparent, and all because the worlds stupidest orange clown has managed to inject that stupid into the brain of every Republican voter.

  • thefartographer@lemm.ee
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    6 months ago

    It’s disturbing how little actual information is in the linked article. I’m sure something truly concerning happened, but “more than 8,000 ballots” is literally the only metric provided and then the author just uses the article as an excuse to talk about Mike Lindell and Trump’s indictments.

    • sygnius@lemmy.world
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      6 months ago

      Keep in mind there are roughly 15 to 30 questions on each ballot. If they’re manually verifying each answer on each ballot, then it’s really easy to make mistakes.

        • sygnius@lemmy.world
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          6 months ago

          Have you looked at your ballot? You’re usually not just voting on just the primary candidate. There are also elections for senators, congressmen, judges, and town and state amendments usually included. 15 to 30 questions isn’t unreasonable. However for a town of 8,000, not sure how many town specific questions there are.

          • thefartographer@lemm.ee
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            6 months ago

            Yeah, I had 12 people on my ballot and live in a city with over 2 million. I assumed you were using assumptions, but even if you called it an estimation, I’d still give you partial credit for trying harder than the article to be informative.

  • skozzii@lemmy.ca
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    6 months ago

    Well I’m certainly shocked.

    The real question is how many of those votes were scribbled on fortune cookie paper?

  • Ann Archy@lemmy.world
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    6 months ago

    Thing about counting votes is, you can’t be corrupt.

    It’s not the votes that are wrong, it’s the corruption.

  • Melllvar@startrek.website
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    6 months ago

    The Republican push for hand-counted ballots has continued to emerge as the party criticizes a number of electronic voting systems, linking them to claims that the 2020 election was stolen via widespread voter fraud.

    One of the major proponents of paper ballots is Trump supporter and My Pillow CEO Mike Lindell, who has been an outspoken critic of electronic voting machines. He has said he wants U.S. elections to be held using paper ballots.

    Broken clock syndrome. You don’t have to be a MAGAt to think that paper ballots are more secure than digital ones.

    https://xkcd.com/2030/

    • ChonkyOwlbear@lemmy.world
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      It isn’t the paper ballots that are the problem, it’s the hand counting. Many states use paper ballots which are then counted by electronic tallying machines. This method gives results quickly and has the paper ballots to be counted manually if there are discrepancies. Hand counting is slower, less accurate, and just as vulnerable to malicious actors.

        • IphtashuFitz@lemmy.world
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          6 months ago

          These types of ballots don’t have chads. They have circles you fill out with a pencil or black marker, very similar to standardized tests like SAT’s. After you fill it out you feed it into an optical scanner that tallies the votes.

          At the end of the election officials simply add up the results from each optical scanner. And if there’s a legitimate concern about the counts, or simply a desire to audit a machine then you just pull the ballots from one or more machines, count the results, and compare those with what the scanner counted.

          So you have an easily audited paper trail and the ability to audit small sets of ballots/machines rather than hand counting everything.

            • Duamerthrax@lemmy.world
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              6 months ago

              Brooks Brothers riot and the SC otherthrew that election. I remember when that happened and I only years later learning about the riots. For some reason, I just remember people making Chad jokes.

              • AngryCommieKender@lemmy.world
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                6 months ago

                That was my first presidential election as a voting age adult. I was 20 that year. Before the DC sniper was caught, while they were doing their thing, I had surmised that they were taking potshots at The SCOTUS for overturning the legitimate election, and forcing Dubbaya on us.

  • Etterra@lemmy.world
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    6 months ago

    Well I mean when you defund education often and long enough, counting is bound to be cut from the curriculum eventually. I mean why teach those toddlers to count when you could instead be teaching them how to make the bootstraps they’ll need to pull themselves up with once they hit age 10?

  • captainlezbian@lemmy.world
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    6 months ago

    Well yeah, anyone who’s had a job dealing with any amount of counting knows that machine counts are inaccurate but nothing compares to the inaccuracy of hand counting details