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0 pointsspecialist7y ago0 comments

I just skim read your county's manual. It's pretty stock.

Mail ballot processing is different from casting ballots at poll sites.

What should I call a ballot that's cast via the mail? "Postal ballot"?

"If your goal is to have a polite discussion, you're not getting there."

And you could have researched how your county's election administration works before responding.

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2 comments · 1 top-level

greglindahl7y ago· 1 in thread

You can stop being condescending already.

I didn't say that mail ballot processing was the same.

I said: "We use the same ballots for mail and in-person"

The same machines are used to count them.

So your comment "So now I believe it's likely they're still using the mark sense (opscan) devices for mail ballots." is odd because we use the same hardware to count in-person ballots that we use to count mail ballots, because they're the same physical ballots.

specialistOP7y ago

I had earlier tried to reply "You're right. I'll go for a walk", but got rate limited.

How a cast ballot's votes are counted is just one part of ballot processing.

To citizen's, marks on paper seems like a pretty straight forward thing. Like everyone else, I just marked my ballot and dropped it in the mail. Voila! How hard could it be?

To the election admins, poll and mail ballots are very different things.

Closest analog I can think of is "autonym".

Citizens think about the "what" and the admins think about the "how".

Poll ballots and mail ballots will never be comingled.

Poll ballots will never be "enhanced" or "duplicated".

Central count opscan machines are programmed differently. So they generate different reports. Which must be collated differently.

Signature verification is done differently.

There are many more failure modes with mail ballots. IIRC, my jurisdiction records 30+ different kinds of errors.

Mail ballot processing is a sausage factory. You gotta see to believe it.

But why am I telling you all this? I've had this same convo with 100s (1000s?) of people over the last 15 years. And I'm the conspiracy nut for daring to explain to people how their elections work.

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