With a significant percentage of the voting machines having issues, it would seem hard to justify fighting an attempt to hand count everything?
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| Hobbs the Democratic candidate for Governor is also the SOS and in charge of the election? |
The state law only requires that precincts selected to count by hand are selected at random. The law does not state how many precincts can be counted. A judge has temporarily blocked the call for a full recount as being against state law, but most legal observers suggest that the ruling will be overturned. Perhaps the language does not suggest you can do every precinct. but as long it is is random, they could do 99% of the precincts. There doesn't appear to be anything stopping that.
Now I find it odd how a few election cycles ago the idea of a paper trail and hand counting was the staple of Democratic arguing for "counting all the votes". Now they have apparently done a 180 and have declared that such "transparency" is bad for Democracy. Just like poll watchers are a threat to democracy, requiring Counties to declare up front how many ballots they have is a threat to democracy, and having any supervision of ballot counting is a threat to democracy.
So I am guessing someone will likely argue that a call for a hand count is a "threat" to Democracy. That catch all phrase no longer needs a rational reason to be used. It can just be tossed out whenever things might not go the Democrat's way.
At issue is the fact that hundreds of thousands of election day cast ballots have not yet been run through the machines due to the fact that there were (and possibly still are) problems with the ballots not having dark enough ink for the machines to read. These election day in person ballots are thought to be highly Republican and many prognosticators believe it will wipe out the small lead that Hobbs currently holds in Arizona.
I guess the logic would be that a machine count is more likely than a hand count to miss readable ballots and that the hand counts would be more damaging to Hobbs? I would understand if the law restricted the hand counts to 2% of the precincts (which is how it has been used in the past) - but it literally does not restrict anything. Sometimes you use the law in a manner that is most beneficial to the election integrity. This is not a question of which votes should count or not. But rather these are votes that everyone believe should count, but there remains questions to whether the machines will properly count them?
As many have suggested... what is the harm in doing both? If they turn out exactly the same, then it will make everyone feel warm and fuzzy that there were no problems. But if there is an issue, wouldn't election official want to catch that so it can be fixed before the next election?
