My Vote HASN'T counted yet!

The truth about "counting" ballots.

I’m writing this article because there is a fundamental misunderstanding about our voting/ballot counting system.

NOBODY’S ballot was verified “counted” yet EVERYONE’S ballot has supposedly been counted. Is that clear, yea, I didn’t think so.

Here’s the way the system works.

First, dealing with mail in ballots, aka paper ballots. The RoV (Registrar of Voters) office gets your ballot delivered in an envelope hopefully with your signature out where all can see. It then gets run through their expensive signature verification and sorting (by precincts) machine which is the first time your paper ballot has been officially recognized as received by the RoV.

It then gets opened and “inspected” to make sure there are no identifying marks that can tie it back to the voter and that it hasn’t been marked with the wrong color pens, bleed-thru felt tip markers, something spilled on it requiring it to be “duplicated” by hand and who knows what all else they are looking for.

The envelope goes into a bin and the ballot goes into another bin, forever separating the 2 so that no one can know who voted for who, it’s called preserving anonymity.

If the system and all it’s safeguards are in place, every paper ballot that goes through this process SHOULD go on to be run through a tabulator and your votes counted as you intended them to count...SHOULD.

In a perfect world where there is no nefarious characters, no cheaters, no interference, no changing votes, no ballot injections, no illegals voting, no lost thumb drives, no manipulated thumb drives, your vote would count EXACTLY as you had intended.

So when you go to check to see if your ballot was “counted”, it was first marked as received, after that, it’s ASSUMED that your ballot was fairly, safely and securely tabulated the way you intended. After the “canvas” of the election results by the County Commissioners, miraculously your “received” ballot will change to “counted” even though they have absolutely no way of knowing beyond a shadow of a doubt that it was, especially, the way it was intended because they all are ANONYMOUS.

To change your “received” to “counted” they simply run a program that changes all ballots that are in good standing (aka not rejected or not cured) to “counted”.

Also, companies like Ballot Trax are 3rd party companies that rely completely upon the SoS’s (Secretary of State) office to get them the latest and greatest data. You would be better going directly to the SoS Elections pages to check on your ballot status.

Before you get all up in arms about this being a world of computers and “machines” doing something nefarious, keep in mind that hand counting paper ballots has used the same anonymity rules and while you expected your ballot to be counted the way you intended, it was said best by a communist dictator “It’s not who votes that counts, it’s who counts the votes.” well before machines entered the equation.

Hopefully this will make you feel better, I know it didn’t for me.