2 Election Officials in a Rural Virginia City Sue the State Over Ballot-Counting Machines

[BumRushDaShow]

Source: US News and World Report/AP

Oct. 16, 2024, at 4:32 p.m.


RICHMOND (AP) — Two Republican election officials said in a recent lawsuit that they will not certify the results of the Nov. 5 election in a rural Virginia city unless the ballots are hand-counted, perpetuating a false notion that machines tallying the votes can be manipulated.

The suit against the Virginia Department of Elections and Elections Board was filed earlier this month in Waynesboro, Virginia, by the city's election board chair Curtis Lilly and vice chair Scott Mares. In the complaint, Lilly and Mares argued that election officials do not have access to the votes tallied by machines, which they allege prevents them from verifying “the results of the voting machine’s secret canvass.”

The counting system, Lilly and Mares argued, violates a provision of the state Constitution that stipulates such machines must be in public view. “As Electoral Board members are prohibited from hand-counting ballots, we cannot ensure that the vote tally produced by the voting machines matches the votes memorialized on the case paper ballots,” Mares said in an affidavit sent to The Associated Press. The electoral board members filed the lawsuit in Waynesboro District Court.

The Office of the Attorney General, which is defending the Department of Elections and State Board of Elections, declined to comment on pending litigation. The lawsuit comes as election conspiracy theorists across the U.S. are moving to support hand-counted ballots, nearly four years after former President Donald Trump falsely claimed the past election was stolen from him. But research shows that hand-counting is more prone to error, costlier and likely to delay results.

Read more: https://www.usnews.com/news/best-states/california/articles/2024-10-16/2-election-officials-in-a-rural-virginia-city-sue-the-state-over-ballot-counting-machines

[elleng]

1. The machines may be in 'public view'

without, presumably, giving election board chairs access to the votes tallied.

[onetexan]

2. LOL Same stunt that was just slapped down in GA

[Raven123]

3. Who are they kidding? MAGA doesn't want the votes counted.

Creating chaos, mistrust and stoking violence is their modus operandi.

[liberalgunwilltravel]

4. OK

The votes in rural counties won’t be counted then because Republicans don’t want their own votes to count. Sounds good to me. Maybe next time, they’ll choose to select election officials that will do their job.

[Think. Again.]

5. Can't they just count the number of voters as they vote?

[Bernardo de La Paz]

6. That's automatic, right? Voters are crossed off the rolls as they vote so they can't vote twice. . . . nt

[Think. Again.]

7. Yeah, so if the number of actual voters (who each receive one ballot)...

...matches the ballot count given by the machine, why would they need to (break state law and) hand count the ballots after the election closes?

[AverageOldGuy]

12. Why?

Because they are MAGAts and MAGAts are assholes of the highest order.

[Think. Again.]

13. Can't argue with that.

[Think. Again.]

8. The simple solution to all this is...

... open-source voting machines for all federal elections, since open-source machines have publicly accessible source code that can be checked and rechecked by anyone to proof there is no malware or devious code.

[Ray Bruns]

9. The simple solution to all of this is to dismiss the lawsuit with prejudice and throw these people off the board.

I live in Virginia and votes have always been counted by machine ever since I started voting in 1982.

[AverageOldGuy]

11. Won't work

Won't work because then all sort of self-appointed computer code experts will come out of the woodwork claiming the coding is all wrong.

I'm a long-time Virginia local Electoral Board member. Already we are being flooded with FOIA requests from people who have no idea how ballots are developed and printed, how machines are tested, how voters are certified, , and the like, yet, they are demanding to see copies of this and that and of things that don't even exist. Every asshole is an expert in something they know nothing about and we have to tolerate them.

[Think. Again.]

14. Let them complain all they want...

open-source code would just prove them wrong every time.

[NHvet]

17. That's because

Some guy on some website or chat room told them about things they know nothing of, and they ran with it. I will call it as I see it, ignorant people being lead by even more ignorant people.

[AverageOldGuy]

10. Speaking as a long-time member of a County Electoral Board in Virginia . . . .

The State Dept of Elections or the local Chief Judge of the Circuit Court needs to intervene and fire these two assholes NOW.

Local Electoral Boards are REQUIRED BY LAW to test their voting machines BEFORE EACH ELECTION using official ballots to ensure the machines are tallying votes correctly. After what is called "Logic and Accuracy Testing" -- LAT --the Board must certify to the State that their machines have been tested and are accurate. That certification is an online form that the Board chairman must sign under penalty of law and submit to the State.

They should have done their LAT by now and certified that their machines are working properly. If not, they are in violation of state law.

In my county:
-- We line up all the machines to be used in the election plus two spares of each type of machine.
-- We pull out official ballots and hand-mark ballots using every possible combination of votes.
-- We then HAND COUNT these test ballots FOUR TIMES to ensure we have a correct tally.
-- Ballots are then fed into the machines, a tally is printed off the machine, and compared with the hand count.
-- If the hand tally and machine tally do not match (they ALWAYS match), then, we must double-check (again) our hand count and if all else fails, we call in technicians from the machine company to check the machines.

In my 12 years on our County Electoral Board, we have NEVER had an instance when the machine tally varied from the hand tally.

This is bullshit. These two assholes were appointed by the local Circuit Court judge who should intervene and fire them both.

Local parties -- Dem and Rep -- nominate people to the judge to be on the Board, the judge approves and has the authority to remove them. Someone in Waynesboro needs to petition the judge to remove them.


In VA, local electoral boards have three members -- two from the Governor's party, one from the other party. Because VA is now cursed with a MAGAt governor, each Board has two Rep members and one Dem.

Virginia has the longest early voting period in the country. We started early voting on Sep 20, end on Nov 2. In my county, it looks as though 40% - 50% of our voters will vote early. With this bullshit coming from Waynesboro, now I know we will be swamped with MAGAts asking why we don't hand count our votes.

Since early voting started, we have had 120 - 150 voters per day and at least a few always wisecrack --
-- "Does this machine county my vote or is it a shredder?"
-- "How many illegal aliens have voted today?"
-- And on and on and on.

Our sheriff has promised to arrest anyone causing a disturbance at our polls. So far, no one has been arrested but early voting still has 2-1/2 weeks to go.

[KS Toronado]

15. If hand counting is their winning strategy

then have grade school kids do the counting, not adults with an agenda.

[droidamus2]

16. Do they realuze

We switched to machine counting because there were known and long standing problems with hand counting. What are they going to do if the two counts are if by some miniscule among like 10 ballots throw out the whole election. With over 100 million votes there are bound to be dome minor discrepancies so that would be ridiculous.

[NHvet]

18. That's their goal

To sow mistrust and questions into the process thus allowing them to throw the election to the courts where they hold the advantage.