The article is titled "One big flaw in how Americans run elections" but lists so many flaws and examples it's difficult to count. States charge steep filing fe

The article is titled "One big flaw in how Americans run elections" but lists so many flaws and examples it's difficult to count. States charge steep filing fees for recounts. Recount laws are so confusing, lawyers struggle with basic questions, such as in which court to file their petitions, and who could seek a recount. Software code for voting machines cannot be inspected. Most democratic systems in the world have uniform, nationwide election procedures; a central, independent election commission to oversee them and conduct investigations; a single, national election system; and an unvarying system for resolving disputes. “Whereas in the United States, there [are] 50 different election processes, 50 different sets of state laws. Investigations into irregularities that disenfranchise voters seldom occur. Deadlines for recount requests fall just days after votes are tallied in some states. In presidential elections, vote certification and Electoral College deadlines restrict the time available for recounts, making the likelihood of an efficiently-administered and properly-litigated recount effectively impossible in most states. Voting machines vendors resist efforts by candidates and others to examine their systems. The vendors usually investigate their own machines, often blaming voters, poll workers or election staff for whatever went wrong. Some examples cited in the article: In 2006 18,000 ballots in Sarasota County Florida were tabulated as blank. An audit wasn't possible because no paper trail existed. In 2000, Precinct 216 in Volusia County lost 16,022 votes from Diebold voting machines. In 2004, in Maricopa County, Arizona, 489 previously uncounted votes appeared during a recount. University tests showed ballot-scanning machines tabulate votes differently depending on whether they were marked with black pen or pencil. No analysis was conducted on actual votes because the FBI seized them and dismissed the investigation. Less than a year after the 2016 election, Georgia election officials wiped a server clean, destroying data that was central to a lawsuit filed by an election integrity group. 12 months after a 2016 congressional primary in Broward County in South Florida, election supervisor Brenda Snipes destroyed optical-scan ballots that were part of a lawsuit filed by losing Democratic candidate and law professor Tim Canova. In Humboldt County, Calif., during the 2008 presidential election, a Diebold tabulator inexplicably dropped 197 ballots from the tallies of the county’s scanned-in paper ballots. County officials discovered that the system’s logs had failed to record critical information that could have explained when and why the ballots disappeared — a lapse that violated the federal voting system guidelines that systems used in California are supposed to meet. In 2006 in Ohio, a Franklin County programmer disabled a voting machine logging function that was supposed to track any changes made to software on the machines. He said the voting machine vendor, Election Systems and Software, advised him to do this because it would speed up the process of programming the machines before elections.