Posted on June 9, 2024 by Theodore de Macedo Soares
The United States remains one of the few major democracies in the world that continue to allow computerized vote counting—not observable by the public—to determine the results of its elections [1]. Countries such as Germany [2] Norway [3], Netherlands [4], France [5, 6], Canada [7] , Denmark [8, 9], Italy [10], United Kingdom [11], Ireland [11], Spain [11], Portugal [11], Sweden [11], Finland [11], and most other countries [11], protect the integrity and trust of their elections with publicly observable hand-counting of paper ballots.
[1] According to a 2020 Gallup World Poll, only 40% of Americans say they are confident in the honesty of U.S. elections. Finland and Norway with 89% of their citizens expressing confidence in the honesty of their elections along with the citizens of 25 other countries have greater confidence in their elections than do Americans.
[3] “Norwegian votes to be counted manually in fear of election hacking“
[4] “Fearful of Hacking, Dutch Will Count Ballots by Hand“
[5] “Voting in France: Paper ballots, in person, hand-counted“
[6] French Senate: Making the moratorium on use of voting machines permanent. CONTINUE, AS IS, THE MORATORIUM
[7] Canada Elections Act (S.C. 2000, c. 9). Part 12. Counting Votes. Election officer to count votes in the presence of others
[8] Denmark’s election law does “not permit electronic voting technologies to be used during voting”
[9] Folketing (Parliamentary) Elections Act, Translation (Consolidated Act No. 1260 of 27 August 2020) CHAPTER I: GENERAL ELECTIONS AND REFERENDUMS. Counting of the Votes Cast at the Polling Station, Part 9 “[T]he polling supervisors and the appointed electors, … shall count the votes cast at the polling station. The counting is public.”
[10] Election of House of Representatives and the Senate of the Republic September 25, 2022. Chapter 23. Ballots counted by officials.
[11] The ACE Electoral Knowledge Network. Vote Counting. Country List. See “Count votes by hand”
This entry was posted in Election Integrity by Theodore de Macedo Soares.