I have spent years asking Florida counties for the records that prove they counted your vote correctly. What I got back was fee estimates, exemption letters, a script written by a private lobbying corporation, and, in one hearing, a claim that it would take 18,000 hours to hand over a file that takes under a minute to export.
This is a long one. It has to be, because the officials who run our elections are counting on you not reading the manuals. I read them. Here is what they say, with the receipts.
Your vote is counted from a picture. Not from the paper.
Start with what the vendors say about their own machines, because the whole argument ends right there.
There is not one scanner in use in Florida or California today that reads a mark off the paper. The old machines did. The ES&S Model 100 and the old Diebold and Sequoia units shined infrared light at fixed spots on the sheet and registered whether it bounced back. No picture was ever made. The U.S. Election Assistance Commission’s own glossary draws the line: “Most older optical scan systems use Infrared (IR) scanning technology and ballots with timing marks to accurately scan the ballot. Newer (digital) optical scan systems can also capture images of ballots as they are tabulated.”
Every machine in both states is the newer kind. Florida’s 67 counties run two vendors. The Division of Elections’ own December 2025 map shows 49 counties on ES&S and 18 on Democracy Suite, whose maker the map now lists as “Liberty Vote USA” with a footnote: “formerly Dominion Voting Systems, Inc.” California’s 58 counties, per the Secretary of State’s April 30, 2026 list, run 39 on Liberty Vote (Dominion) ImageCast Central, 13 on Hart Verity, 5 on ES&S, and Los Angeles on its own VSAP Tally system. Every single one is a digital image scanner.
Here is the sequence, and it is the same on all of them. The read head is a contact image sensor, or on Dominion’s central scanner an off-the-shelf Canon document scanner. It photographs both sides of your ballot as the paper moves through. The software then goes to work on the photograph. It finds the timing marks, locates every oval from the election definition, counts the dark pixels inside each oval, and records a vote when the count crosses a threshold that the county set for that election. The vote is derived from the image. There is no second sensor reading the paper.
