Recount until the Democrat wins.

It works. It’s consistent. It makes the children happy.

May as well stick with it.

CosmicConservative’s last blog post..Moon River

California prints the instructions from point 1 on the ballot, but "intent of the voter" is the legal standard. For point 2, I think the scan machine spits out overvotes, but there’s no verification for undervotes or misvotes. Some precincts use voting machines, but they’re the full Diebold-style black box monstrosities rather than a way of preparing a paper ballot. I don’t know about point 4.

The key part of my plan for minimizing opportunities for humans to screw things up is to make the counting standard objective and to make the machine count final unless audits turn up evidence that the machines are miscounting the ballots. There’s still room to screw things up — voters can fill in the wrong oval and not check the readout on the machine, absentees can’t check the readout at all, the audit hand-count can get the count wrong, and my plan does nothing about old-fashioned registration fraud — but less than in the current system in most states.

I worked tech support Election Day for a company that makes electronic ballot machines and they pretty much already do everything you listed to one degree or another.

I won’t go into details but never underestimate the ability of a user (voter/ballot counter) to still frak it up.  No system is going to operate perfectly as long as people are still involved.

We should acknowledge, however, that no matter what it "feels" like, paper ballots are less reliable than electronic.

But otherwise, I’m surprised every state doesn’t do it this way.