Washington state is preparing for a full manual recount of the votes for Governor. Two counties, Snohomish and Yakima, use electronic voting machines on election day. The process for conducting a manual recount of the votes in Snohomish (which uses Sequoia touch screens) requires printing out over 96,000 ballots before the counting can begin.*

County officials estimate that this process will take five printers working off of five different computers for five days just to print the ballots. Each ballot will be printed on a separate sheet of 8-1/2" by 11" paper.

Laid end to end, all those printouts would stretch 16.7 miles. Stacked, they would form a tower about three stories tall.

Only Yakima County, which also uses touch-screen machines, will face a similar, but smaller, printing job, Diepenbrock said.

This exercise in futility is precisely comparable to printing out your Excel spreadsheet and checking that the numbers on the screen match the numbers on the printout.