I mentioned in another post that in order to safeguard the 2018 election, congress should mandate

[shraby]

all paper ballots with a box to put them in and hand counted with observers present.

Someone mentioned that the elections are run by the states.

I reply to that! After the Bush/Gore fiasco, congress put in place electronic voting, urging all the states to adopt some version of it. If they could do that then, with the threat from Russia looming over the elections now, they can tell states to go back to hand counted paper ballots until they have thoroughly investigated the issue and have put in place safety measures that are effective and permanent with reviews every year henceforth.

[MineralMan]

1. I doubt our Republican Congress will have any interest in doing that.

Really.

[shraby]

2. Another black mark against them then. They are already suspected of being in cahoots with the perps.

Time they did something to alleviate the suspicions. Da?

[MineralMan]

3. Yes, but they don't care, really. As long as they think

the Republican base, whoever that is, will vote for them, nothing else matters to them. They will do nothing that ticks off that base, and just about everything that makes sense will tick off that base.

Don't expect anything positive to come from this Congress.

[2naSalit]

4. +1

[frazzled]

5. The reason states will oppose it

Elections are very expensive to run. In most municipalities, therefore, multiple races and offices, and sometimes multiple ballot questions, are combined in the even-year elections (either presidential or Congressional). Then separate local (mayoral, aldermanic, etc.) elections are held in the even years. For instance, in my state, judicial elections at the state and circuit level are conducted simultaneously with elections of federal, state, and county offices. So, for instance, in the last election, there were more than 50 different choices to be made on the ballot. It will be approximately the same for the 2018 ballot. Just in my precinct alone, hand counters would have to count approximately 1000 ballots with 50 races each, for a total of 50,000 counts. (In 2016, the turnout in my precinct was 85.7%.) There are 40 precincts in my ward alone, and 50 wards with similar numbers of precincts in the city. Imagine how long that will take. (Say, approximately 2,000 precincts would entail the counting of up to 50 million ballot choices.)

Now, it's possible that Congress could mandate that separate ballots for Congressional (or Presidential) races be distributed for hand-counting, allowing the rest of the races to be done differently. It's not hard to count 1,000 ballots in a precinct. It's impossible, though to count 50,000. But then governors, state senators and reps, county board members, etc., all the way down, will request this.

We haven't had hand-counted ballots in this country since before I started voting in 1972, and haven't had them in general since the late 19th century. They were the highly manipulable lever machines back then, easily hackable (and they were). And they'd been in use since 1892. I just don't see this happening: we live in a technological age, and our elections are complex (we don't vote for just one or two offices when we vote). It would be nice, but I highly doubt this will happen.