The counting process is even easier to verify: it’s conducted in the open and so observers have their own chance to see each ballot and be confident that it has been counted correctly. This isn’t to say that there’s no opportunity for fraud via sleight-of-hand or voter impersonation (more on this later) but it’s largely one-at-a-time fraud, affecting a few ballots at a time, and is hard to perpetrate at scale. When put together all three properties provide a high degree of confidence that the right ballots are available to be counted. For instance, in Santa Clara county ballots are taken from the ballot box and put into clear tamper-evident bags for transport to election central, which limits the ability for poll workers to replace the ballots. The last property typically relies on technical controls. The first two of these properties are readily observed by observers - whether independent or partisan. All the ballots in the ballot box and only the ballots from the ballot box make it to election headquarters.Only the ballots of authorized voters make it into the ballot box.Note that it’s necessary to ensure this because otherwise it’s very hard to prevent multiple voting, where an authorized voter puts in two ballots. Only authorized voters get ballots and only one ballot.The security properties of the voting process mostly come down to ballot handling, namely that: If each of these is done correctly, then we can have high confidence that the election was correctly decided. It’s easiest to break the election in two phases:
The major virtue of hand-counted paper ballots is that they are simple, with security and privacy properties that are easy for voters to understand and reason about, and for observers to verify for themselves Jurisdictions will usually have some mechanism for challenging the tally of a specific ballot. The key requirement here is that any observer can look at the ballots and see that they are being recorded as they are cast.
Obviously other techniques are possible, but as long as people are able to observe, differences in technique are mostly about efficiency rather than accuracy or transparency. Talliers announce the tally at each multiple of ten (“10”, “20”, etc.) so that they can roll-back the tally if the two talliers get out of sync. Each tallier records the tally by crossing out numbers on a tally sheet to keep track of the vote tally.The witness observes each ballot to ensure that the spoken vote corresponded to what was on the ballot and also collates ballots in cross-stacks of ten ballots.The caller speaks aloud the choice on the ballot for the race being tallied (e.g., “Yes…Yes…Yes…” or “Lincoln…Lincoln…Lincoln…”).The typical tally team uses four people consisting of two talliers, one caller and one witness: In practice, the hand-counting method used by counties in California seems very similar. Joseph Lorenzo Hall provides a good description of the procedure for California’s statutory 1% tally here: The vote counters go through each ballot one at a time and determine which choice it is for.
The counting process varies between jurisdictions, but at a high level the process is simple. If they are to be locally counted, then the process is as below if they are to be centrally counted, they are transported back to election headquarters for counting.
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