I see some confusion in some of the election integrity community about ballots. Hand marked ballots are considered to be the gold standard, but all of the areas that had the most issues used them. Even when hand marked ballots are used, they are still counted by machine or scanner. When we hear concerns about Dominion machines, it is the ballot scanners that are the concern. At least in this last election. All of the ballots in Maricopa county for instance were hand marked ballots that were then counted by machine. The issues in my mind are; is this a genuine ballot and it is tabulated correctly.

To my knowledge there is no county in Texas that hand counts ballots. All of them use either Direct Recording Equipment (DRE'S), which are truly evil devices in my view that should be banished forever - or scanners. The majority of counties use scanners of some type. I think where the "electronic ballots" get their bad reputation from is the DRE's. They generate the ballot - at least a graphical example of it on a screen. You vote on the machine, that same machine tabulates and stores the vote. It generates no paper ballot and for all practical purposes it can not be audited. There is never a paper ballot with a DRE. DRE's should go yesterday. With a sledge hammer. They are not in currently in use in Tarrant County, but are in several others.

Paper ballots, whether hand marked or machine written are generated in a number of ways.

They are preprinted ala Runbeck and other companies. All mail in ballots have to be generated in this manner and this is true for Tarrant County. This is the way we got our ballots at the local precincts before we started using the Duo's. We have seen issues with commercially preprinted ballots from a number of suppliers.

They can be printed on demand. I believe Denton is doing this and it was done in much of Maricopa. Instead of the devices we use, their voting centers printed the ballot for your precinct, you filled it out by marking the bubbles (with a sharpie?) and then put it in the scanner. There were issues with that and they'd take a few minutes to unpack.

They can be produced by an item such as the Duo that we use. These are Ballot Marking Devices or BMD's. We vote on the machine and it prints our ballots and we then put it into the scanner that tabulates it. FWIW, I'm not aware of any issues that have been identified with these ballots. That doesn't mean there aren't any, just that I don't know of them. I may get my head chopped off now because this isn't a popular view, but I actually like them in some ways.

It is theoretically possible to do a combination of the Duo and print on demand. Garcia has expressed an interest in doing so, but apparently Hart is resistant to the idea. They make more money on the Duo's

Hand marked ballots are in use in all of the jurisdictions where we have extensive problems. We do need to do away with the DRE's because there is no ballot. I believe that we need to improve the ballots so that they can't be easily duplicated and counterfeited. The Duo's kind of do that. The biggest problem with fake ballots would likely come via the mail in ballots, and reducing mail in voting would do much to solve that problem.