Election conspiracy theories have led to efforts to count votes by hand, but this is risky and slow

CHICAGO— For four years, Donald Trump’s false claims of a stolen 2020 election have raised growing suspicions about voting machines among conspiracy theorists. One of their solutions is to replace the tabulators who count each vote with people who do it by hand.

Controversy over the issue continues to emerge in certain parts of the country ahead of the 2024 presidential election, even though research has shown that hand counting is more error-prone, more costly and more likely to delay results.

The few districts that have attempted this daunting task have found the process to be more time-consuming, expensive and inaccurate than expected.

In Gillespie County, Texas, the hand count of Republican primary votes this year stretched into the early morning hours and lasted nearly 24 consecutive hours, with 200 people counting their ballots, Texas Tribune and VoteBeat reported. The manual count cost taxpayers about twice the labor costs of the 2020 Republican primary and required fixing a number of errors, the news organizations reported.

In rural Nye County, Nevada, where volunteers conducted an unprecedented full hand count of midterm votes in 2022, mismatched counts led to recount after recount. After the first day of counting, county clerk Mark Kampf estimated a nearly 25% discrepancy between the manual and machine counts and attributed it to human counting error. The painfully slow process was halted by the state Supreme Court over concerns that early voting results could be publicly leaked.

Shasta County, a conservative rural county in Northern California, abandoned plans to hand-count ballots last year after the plan was estimated to cost $1.6 million and require more than 1,200 additional employees.

Still, some jurisdictions continue to require a hand count.

Most recently, the Georgia State Board of Elections voted to require poll workers to hand-count the number of ballots, but not the votes, after voting is complete. The count would have to be carried out by three different poll workers until all three counts are equal.

The new rule contradicted the advice of the attorney general, the secretary of state and an association of county election officials.

The effort to replace modern voting machines with more complex and error-prone hand counting is based on a series of conspiracy theories about voting machines spread by Trump and his allies. Some Republicans, inspired by election lies that claim widespread fraud cost Trump’s re-election in 2020, are pushing for hand-counting ballots and banning the electronic tabulators used to scan ballots and record votes, even though it is There is 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 political science professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. But conspiracy theorists like election denier and MyPillow founder Mike Lindell have traveled the country “creating a grassroots social movement around this skepticism,” Stewart said.

Although these conspiracy theories are not widespread nationwide, they have found a persistent hold in parts of the country, “mainly in the deep red parts of the deep red states,” Stewart said.

Counting ballots manually risks delaying results by days, weeks or even months, depending on jurisdiction and staffing levels. Research has shown that swapping machines for hand counts would not only be slower, but also increase the likelihood of errors and fraud.

In a New Hampshire study, poll workers who counted ballots by hand were off by 8%, compared to a 0.5% error rate for machine counting.

“Humans 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 doing tedious 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, almost every state already produces paper ballots or paper records of every vote.

The Brennan Center at New York University estimates that 98% of all votes nationwide in this year’s presidential election will be cast on paper.

Paper ballots are also used in post-election hand-count audits to detect irregularities in the scanning and counting of ballots and to ensure that machine results are accurate. Before each election, election officials also conduct accuracy tests on the machines.

Susannah Goodman, director of election security at Common Cause, said informing voters about the controls already in place could help reduce the fear and mistrust that is at the heart of calls to hand-count ballots.

“When you show voters the process and all the steps that are taken to make sure the result is correct — and not just tell, but show — they gain confidence,” she said.

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