Election conspiracy theories fueled a push to hand-count votes, but doing so is risky and slow
CHICAGO– Four years of Donald Trump false claims over a stolen 2020 election have created growing distrust voting machines in the midst of conspiracy theorists. One of their solutions is to replace the tabulators that count each vote with people who do it by hand.
Before the 2024 presidential election, controversies over this issue periodically flared up in parts of the country, even though research has shown that counting by hand is more prone to errors, more expensive and likely to delay results.
The few counties that have undertaken this monumental task have found the process to be more time-consuming, expensive and inaccurate than expected.
In Gillespie County, Texas, a manual count of this year’s Republican primary continued into the early morning hours, taking nearly 24 consecutive hours, as 200 people counted ballots. the Texas Tribune and VoteBeat reported. The hand count costs taxpayers about double the payroll costs of the 2020 Republican primaries and solving a series of errorsthe nonprofits reported.
In rural Nye County, Nevada, where volunteers began a unprecedented complete hand count of the midterm votes, mismatches led to recount after recount. After the first day of counting, District Clerk Mark Kampf said estimated a discrepancy of almost 25% between the manual and machine counting, which is attributed to human counting errors. The painstakingly slow process was halted by the state Supreme Court amid concerns that early voting tallies could be leaked publicly.
Shasta County, a conservative rural county in Northern California, abandoned plans to manually count ballots last year after the plan was implemented estimated costs $1.6 million and require more than 1,200 additional employees.
Still, some jurisdictions keep calling for hand counting.
Most recently, Georgia’s State Election Board voted to demand poll workers to manually count the number of paper ballots, but not votes, after voting is completed. The counting should be done by three separate poll workers until all three counts are the same.
The new rule went against the advice of the attorney general, the secretary of state and an association of provincial election officials.
Efforts to replace modern voting machines with more labor-intensive and error-prone manual counting are rooted in a series conspiracy theories about voting machines spread by Trump and its allies. Some Republicans, inspired by election lies claiming that widespread fraud cost Trump re-election 2020have urged manual counting of ballots and banning the electronic tabulators used to scan ballots and record votes, despite no evidence of widespread fraud or major irregularities.
“This movement could have died if it had just been a flash in the pan of the 2020 election,” said Charles Stewart, a professor of political science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. But conspiracy theorists like election denier and MyPillow founder Mike Lindell have been traveling around the country to “create a grassroots social movement around this skepticism,” Stewart said.
While these conspiracy theories are not common nationwide, they have found a tenacious hold in the country’s pockets, “especially in the deepest red parts of the deepest red states,” Stewart said.
Manually counting ballots risks delaying results by days, weeks or even months, depending on the jurisdiction and staffing levels. Switching over machines with hand counts would not only be slower, but also increase the risk of errors and fraud, research has shown.
A study in New Hampshire found that poll workers who counted ballots by hand were wrong by 8%, compared to a 0.5% error rate with machine counting.
“People are really bad at boring things, and counting ballots is one of the most boring things we can do,” Stewart said. “Computers are very good at annoying things. They can count very quickly and very accurately.”
Trump and other Republicans have called for the use of paper ballots in this year’s election. In fact, paper ballots or paper records of each vote are already being produced in almost every state.
The Brennan Center at New York University estimates that 98% of all votes nationwide will be cast on paper in this year’s presidential election.
Paper ballots are also used in manual post-election checks to detect any irregularities in the scanning and counting of ballots and to ensure that machine results are accurate. Election officials also conduct accuracy tests on the machines before each election.
Susannah Goodman, director of election security at Common Cause, said informing voters about the controls already in place can help reduce the fear and mistrust at the heart of calls to count ballots by hand.
“If you show voters the process and all the steps taken to ensure the outcome is correct — and not just tell, show — they gain trust,” she said.
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