I’ve heard it said on multiple occasions that good old-fashioned hand counting is the safest way to ensure election integrity. In fact, many awards shows tout the fact that their votes are hand counted and verified by real humans.  The wisdom behind it stems from the belief that manual attention to the process by “real” people is the only way to ensure votes are properly verified and tallied. Electronic systems can, after all, experience glitches, programming errors or hack attacks by would-be election throwers.

And while that theory may sound reasonable,  if I had to make a choice based on years of running elections both ways, I would pick electronic voting any day of the week. I don’t disagree that technology can sometimes function less than perfectly, but human error happens exponentially more often and almost always requires one or more re-counts to ensure the results are truly accurate. Add on the hundreds of hours it takes to administer a hand-counted election, and hand counting becomes even less appealing.

Electronic voting alleviates many of the issues of hand counting: accuracy and time being the two most important. Also critical to keep in mind is that while the process is executed electronically, there is still a significant amount of human oversight involved to ensure a perfect result, but it happens on the front end.  Meticulous review of all the data and weeks of rigorous pre-election testing all go into making the electronic method quick, effective and safe.

On the question of security, every election administrator should of course, be concerned about the security systems of their vendors, so due diligence in selecting a vendor is indeed crucial. Industry leaders (like Votenet Solutions) have multiple safeguards in place to ensure maximum security and uncompromised results to give any election manager the necessary peace of mind.

There may still instances when hand counting is the most suitable option for a client, such as when the number of voters is extremely small (less than 50), but making the switch to electronic voting for most of our clients has allowed us to spend more time on the campaign – getting voters excited, driving participation and increasing the quality of the results by getting more voters to the polls.