CLAIM: Forensic tests completed on Dominion Voting Systems equipment show that dozens of votes cast for President Donald Trump in Ware County, Georgia, were “switched” or “flipped” to count for Joe Biden, who has been declared the winner in the presidential election. AP’S ASSESSMENT: False. A...
apnews.com
That’s what the whole hand recount thing was about art. The initial votes were tabulated by the machines. The recounts were tabulated by hand by counting the paper ballots (the ones the machines processed and supposedly flipped) manually.
Also: they did verify signatures. Prior to the ballots being opened and the votes being processed. They do it that way because voting is anonymous. Signature verification is the first step and it’s impossible to go back because the outer envelopes are destroyed after verification occurs.
Weak source.
This is the closest thing to a reply to my question:
Election officials caught the error during an internal audit, Nelson said. They corrected it during a full hand recount of paper ballots. A machine recount requested by Trump resulted in the same numbers as the hand recount, giving officials confidence in those results.
More of the same "mom asks the kids if they stole cookies from the cookie jar, they say no, therefore innocent".
There was no transparency in that recount, so they, the very people who's integrity is being questioned, can claim anything they want.
And there was no risk-limit audit, which is mandatory:
The state was obligated by law to perform a “risk-limiting audit”—a means of determining accuracy by counting a random sample chosen according to mathematical formulas. The technique has been tried in a small but growing number of states in recent years, and the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine concluded in a 2018 report that all states “should mandate risk-limiting audits.” But Raffensperger decided to forgo choosing a sample of ballots, insisting instead that counting all of the nearly 5 million ballots by hand, in less than a week, would be necessary to fulfill the obligation.
The latter received the imprimatur of the National Academies for a reason. For decades, many states have performed audits by hand-counting ballots in a fixed percentage of precincts. But a fixed percentage “may not provide adequate assurance with regard to the outcome of a close election,” according to the 2018 report. Risk-limiting audits, on the other hand, examine “randomly selected paper ballots until sufficient statistical assurance is obtained,” as the report’s authors wrote. The so-called risk limit refers to the largest possible chance that the audit will not correct an inaccurate result. For example, a 10 percent risk limit means an audit has a 90 percent chance of identifying the correct result of an election. The formulas underpinning the audit determine how many ballots will need to counted to reach that limit.
In the end, Georgia lawmakers decided to ignore most expert advice, and spent $107 million on a new computerized voting system, including voting machines that print out paper ballots—the object of this week’s count.
Observers, including the inventor of the auditing process used by the state, were skeptical of a measure seemingly aimed at placating the GOP.
www.thenation.com
, inventor of the risk-limiting audits:
Steven Rosenfeld: You have some concerns about Georgia’s audit.
Philip Stark: There’s this term flying around called “risk-limiting audit.”
SR: You created it. This exercise in Georgia is not that.
PS: People are defining it to suit their convenience. Let’s not worry about the terminology, but instead focus on what voters actually would like to have. I would claim that voters would like to have confidence that the reported winners really won. That’s what this is all about. And that the risk that they care about is the risk that an incorrect outcome will be certified.
SR: Right, for all kinds of reasons.
PS: When I invented risk-limiting audits, that is the risk I was talking about, and that was the risk that was being limited [by this kind of audit]. And in order to do that, you need a trustworthy paper trail of votes. Among other things, even if can trust that every piece of paper accurately reflects what the voters said, they need to keep track of the paper and keep it secure. And a precursor to doing a statistical risk-limiting audit that you have a complete inventory of the paper, so that you can draw a random sample of the paper.
SR: I understand. It’s not an easy thing to do. And Georgia didn’t do that.
PS. The way that Gabe [Sterling, the state’s elections operations manager] is being incredibly misleading about all of this is saying, ‘Look how great it was that we audited and we uncovered the fact that some batches of ballots were never scanned, and some memory cards [from ballot scanners with vote totals] were never uploaded and what not. All of that has nothing to do with the risk-limiting audit. That is all a precursor to starting a risk-limiting audit.
SR: You’re saying that the lapses they found should have been found and fixed earlier.
PS: Yes. Those are all ballot accounting measures. They’re standard canvass activities. They’re reconciliation measures like checking the number of poll book signatures against the number of ballots, so that you have a separate physical count of the number of ballots against the reported tallies from the voting machines. That is all stuff you have to do before you start the audit.
If you don’t have control over how many ballots there are, you would never notice if there were 100,000 ballots missing from the machine totals. Right? So, one fundamental flaw in what Georgia is doing is they’re relying on the voting system to tell them how many ballots there are, rather than relying on other procedures and cross checks to tell them how many ballots there are. Because some ballots were never scanned and some memory cards were never uploaded, the voting system doesn’t know about those ballots, and a random sampling based RLA would not have had any chance of selecting those ballots. The sample needs to be drawn from a comprehensive list of ballots, not just the ballots the voting system happens to have a record of.
It’s clear that Georgia’s process has been anything but transparent. Observers have been kept away from the ability to actually verify the counts. Even observers with party credentials couldn’t verify that what’s being input to ARLO [the vendor’s counting software] accurately reflects those counts, or [examine] the inner workings of ARLO—which has had a number of changes in the course of this. ARLO was never designed for this kind of thing. They [Georgia] would have been better off using Google Sheets. They could have let the rest of the world watch in real time, with a read-only version to see as they enter the data. They could have given separate logins to everyone in the county election offices who were entering data, so that they can trace the edit history of any cell in the [overall vote counting] spreadsheet. Instead, they’ve got people sharing logins. They’ve got an opaque system that nobody can watch.
Maybe this whole thing gives election officials more confidence that they got right answer [from the state’s new vote count scanners], but there’s no reason it should give the public more confidence that they got the right answer because too much of it [this audit] was done out of public view. First and foremost, the public has no reason to believe that election officials have accounted for every ballot–since we already have several examples where they didn’t.
The other thing that Gabe kept saying is this [audit] is uncovering human errors in the count, not machine errors. We know that the scanner settings on the Dominion scanners erase voter marks [because lightly marked ballots are not read]. We know the majority vote-by-mail voters were Biden voters. I would expect their hand count to pick up [missed] votes and to get more votes for Biden than for Trump. And we’re not seeing any of that. There’s no reason to presume that it’s the people who are wrong and it’s the machines that are right.
On November 20, Georgia certified its 2020 election results. Georgia did something not seen in any other state. It double checked its results, which had been compiled electronically, by conducting a hand count of every presidential ballot.
billmoyers.com
abcnews.go.com
www.newsweek.com
www.ntd.com
babylonbee.com
