They have no idea how to count anything
Jennifer Morrell, a former local election official and national expert on post-election audits, is a partner at The Elections Group.
Writing in the Washington Post:
I watched the GOP’s Arizona election audit. It was worse than you think.
I was stunned to see spinning conveyor wheels, whizzing hundreds of ballots past “counters,” who struggled to mark, on a tally sheet, each voter’s selection for the presidential and Senate races. They had only a few seconds to record what they saw. Occasionally, I saw a counter look up, realize they missed a ballot and then grab the wheel to stop it. This process sets them up to make so many mistakes, I kept thinking. Humans are terrible at tedious, repetitive tasks; we’re especially bad at counting. That’s why, in all the other audits I’ve seen, bipartisan teams follow a tallying method that allows for careful review and inspection of each ballot, followed by a verification process. I’d never seen an audit use contraptions to speed things up.
This is important, and I want to emphasize, many people are terrible at counting. I have no experience at vote counting or recounting, but I’ve done innumerable retail store inventories using human counters.
Some of the smartest nicest people you’d ever be able to meet couldn’t accurately count to 25 if their lives depended on it.
That’s why an accurate process builds in checks and redundancies to catch and minimize the inevitable human errors.
Each table had three volunteers tallying the ballots, and their tally sheets were considered “done” as long as two of the three tallies matched, and the third was off by no more than two ballots. The volunteers recounted only if their tally sheets had three or more errors — a threshold they stuck to, no matter how many ballots a stack contained, whether 50 or 100. This allowed for a shocking amount of error. Some table managers told the counters to recount when there were too many errors; other table managers just instructed the counters to fix their “math mistakes.” At no point did anyone track how many ballots they were processing at their station, to ensure that none got added or lost during handling.
Seems likely a lot of these Ninja vote counters are Trumpista believers in the Big Lie, so who really knows what they’d do if a supervisor told them to fix their “math mistakes”?
Jennifer Morrell goes on to talk about bamboo, and cheese dust, and concludes: “This is not an audit, and I don’t see how this can have a good outcome.”
With any reliable counting system, you have a detailed and rigorous set of procedures in place, to be scrupulously followed from the count of the first ballot or piece of retail merchandise. Morrell reports that the supervisors were changing and modifying procedures as they went along with this travesty.
The process Morrell describes is inaccurate and fatally flawed. But it doesn’t appear to be an effort to outright change the Maricopa County election results. Rather, the GOP sponsors and the incompetent Ninjas are believers in the Big Lie, and thought just inspecting the ballots would reveal the fraud that allowed Democrats to steal the election.
It’s not going to make any difference to the GOP what the recount total is. If an inaccurate recount reveals a Biden victory, they’ll just believe it means the election thieves were more devious and tricky with their cheating than previously thought. So it goes with conspiracy theorists.
