My experience as a poll worker in Pennsylvania

If it is what he says, then it was simply a copy of text that all soldiers swear to when they enlist. The U.S. Army is not a political organization and contains people from all backgrounds.

What really seems to have happened here is that the author was able to reasonably infer this police officers political affiliation from his clothing and that is not what is prohibited in these laws.

One has to be careful that comparisons are made between comparable entities. In this case, note that different states can begin processing absentee/mail-in votes at different times [0], so one state being able to handle absentee/mail-in vote processing without apparent incident does not necessarily say anything about how counting might progress in another state.

> Detroit, Philly, ..., Milwaukee

Absentee/mail-in vote processing/counting can only begin on Election Day.

> Atlanta, ..., Las Vegas

Signature verification can be performed upon receipt of the absentee/mail-in ballot, but actual counting can only start on Election Day

> Miami

Ballot verification/counting can start 22 days before Election Day

> or Cleveland, ..., or Cincinnati

Verification and scanning can occur before Election Day. Unclear whether "scanning" includes counting, or just how far ahead of time the process can start.

> or Iowa City

Affadavits may be reviewed the day before Election Day, but counting can only start on Election Day (and must be finished by 10 P.M. on Election Day)

> Or Dallas, ..., or Houston

Verification can be performed upon receipt. Jurisdictions with > or Nashville

Verification can be performed upon receipt, but counting can only start on Election Day.

So in short, some of the examples of cities that count "without incident" can conceivably do so because they have much more time to do so. Iowa City and Nashville are better comparisons, but that doesn't rule out some other factor that renders the comparison invalid.

> All of the other states and cities were able to get their ballots counted.

Do they actually have all their ballots counted, or do they simply not show up in news stories?

For example, Decision Desk HQ reports that Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Georgia have >99% of their ballots in, while Michigan, Kentucky, Utah, Alabama, Nevada, California, and Washington all are reported to have >95% of their ballots in. So by those metrics, states in the first group are doing better than states in the second group, but some states in the second group get attention heaped upon them, while others seemingly pass under the radar.

New York is a particularly egregious example, with a reported 77.3-88.0% of its ballots in. And yet very little attention appears to be devoted to it.

(This assumes DDHQ's numbers are actually reasonable/accurate, of course)

> especially after one State senate race was already overturned in a manual recount, where they discovered 6,000 votes were cast to the wrong presidential party due to 'bugs' in the voting machine software

You seem to be mixing some stories.

From what I understand, the race whose results got reversed was for the Oakland County Board of Commissions [2]. The margin was 1127 votes.

The 6000 vote reversal was from Antrim county. The Michigan Secretary of State has put out a statement about that specific incident [3], where they claim that the error was due to human error, not software error (though it's not entirely unreasonable to say the software is not entirely blameless, as pointed out in [4] by a University of Michigan professor who claims to have looked into the incident [5]), and that no manual recount was involved.

[0]: https://www.ncsl.org/research/elections-and-campaigns/vopp-t...

[1]: https://www.votetexas.gov/faq/early-voting.html

[2]: https://www.freep.com/story/news/local/michigan/oakland/2020...

[3]: https://www.michigan.gov/sos/0,4670,7-127-93094-544676--,00....

[4]: https://www.bridgemi.com/michigan-government/human-error-dom...

[5]: https://www.freep.com/story/news/politics/elections/2020/11/...

That is impossible to do with computers with the current average level of computer literacy.

The process described in the article seems a little different than the ones we used in Texas (Dallas County). We have our registration verified and check in, and then are given a paper ballot. You put that into the voting machine, cast your ballot which is recorded electronically on the machine, then printed on the paper ballot and returned to you. You're told to inspect it for accuracy, then deposit it in a _separate_ tabulating machine, which scans it and displays what it recorded when reading your vote, tabulates your vote electronically, and stores the paper backup in a locked deposit box inside the machine. From my understanding, if anything goes wonky during this process and you notice it, you can have the ballot invalidated and receive another to cast. At the end of the day, the counts are printed and stored along with the memory cards on every machine, and those and the secure ballot boxes are all stored with tamper evident seals.

So you have the electronic count on the voting machine from the memory card, the printed count from the voting machine generated at the end of the day, the electronic count on the tabulating machine from its memory card, the printed count from the tabulating machine generated each day, as well as the paper ballots as a backup, which from my understanding are re-tabulated en-masse on larger and faster machines after the election to get a second count as part of the certification process. All data points have to match. None of the machines are connected to the internet, so you'd have to gain physical access to them or the memory cards, and anything done would have to match the counts on all the other associated machines and receipts, plus the paper ballot backups. The Secretary of State also generates a list of voters who cast ballots each day by county and voting location based on when you first check in to vote, so that's another publicly auditable list that would have to match that is not related to the voting machines themselves.

Paper ballots are definitely more simple and probably just as secure, if not more, if handled properly. However, having multiple points of redundancy is invaluable to help quickly identify issues and ensure everything matches over multiple steps of the process.