The idea of paper election ballots counted by hand making a comeback in U.S.

Paper election ballots that are counted by hand went out of style in Kansas in the early 1990s and were replaced by vote counting machines.

Now, in different parts of the country, paper election ballots that are counted by hand are starting to make a comeback.

Americans don’t want to wonder whether election fraud is occurring. That is the main reason that paper election ballots that are be counted by hand are making a comeback.

Today, there are at least two kinds of vote counting machines - paperless touch-screen machines and machines that scan the votes from special paper ballots.

These days it’s unbelievable that often we don’t know election results for several days after elections.

When we owned and operated The Yates Center News newspaper from 1984-1995, it was not only a community weekly newspaper business but a commercial printing business as well and we printed all the paper election ballots that were counted by hand for Yates Center and Woodson County.

Printing the local election ballots was a big job for us and a very important job for us. We spent a lot of time proof-reading the paper ballot text before we ever printed any.

Dick Fouts, our print shop employee, was an accomplished Linotype operator and he printed the paper election ballots on a Heidelberg Windmill letterpress. Watching and listening to the windmill press operate was a fascinating experience in itself that will be the topic of another commentary someday. 

But sometime in the early 1990s, we lost the paper ballot printing business when the county switched over to vote counting machines. No longer were the paper election ballots counted by hand desired.

I remember editorializing at the time that I did not like - or trust - the vote counting machines and probably never would trust them. That is a sentiment that has not changed.

Back then, the fear was that the vote counting machines would just not count the votes as accurately as counting them by hand.

The first vote counting machines were not perfect but as the computer technology improved, so did the vote counting machines, I suppose. Still, many people wonder if machines counting votes is the way to go.

In Woodson County, prior to vote counting machines, when the votes were counted by hand, sometimes it would be midnight before the final, unofficial vote count was known but never much later than that. The vote count for primary elections usually did not take that long.

Proponents of the vote counting machines argued that the machines were needed because it was starting to get difficult to get volunteer election workers to work the hours needed to get the votes counted. 

Of course, the cost of the vote counting machines these days is a lot more expensive than they were in the early 1990s.

Critics continue to argue that vote counting machines cannot be trusted and that if the vote counting machines are connected to the Internet then there’s even more of a chance the vote counts could be sabotaged or otherwise manipulated or compromised to give desired results to some candidates over others.

I wish we voted on one day, in person, with paper election ballots and that all votes were counted by hand.

I think advance voting is ok and should be allowed but somehow, it does not seem right to me to allow any mail-in votes to be counted after Election Day.  Who is to say that postmarks can’t be manipulated or otherwise changed?

Today, vote counting machines are a big industry controlled in the U.S. by just three companies - Dominion Voting Systems, Hart Intercivic and Election Systems and Software. It’s such a big business that those companies employ their own lobbyists and public relations experts to constantly work at discrediting vote counting by hand.