re: #4 dat_said

AP: Can a state count all its votes by hand? A North Dakota proposal aims to be the first to try

What a cluster it would be to do hand counting of all votes. Doubt this would pass even if they get enough signatures to get it on the ballot. Gotta admire the confidence of the farmer who’s leading the effort that “They can find the people to do the job, because there are people that are willing to come in and do the hand counting.” Unemployment rate was 1.9% for the state this past October.

There’s also this tidbit at the end of the article:

And that is a state with a total population around 800,000. A state with millions of residents like New York would face a monstrous problem trying to do it since you have to store all the paper ballots (or paper output from a machine voting system) in order to handle them. And keep all that paper under proper security the whole time as well.