Why counting ballots by hand could lead to an election disaster

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Mark Kampf was determined to count the ballots by hand, condemning one lawsuit after another against him. The year was 2022, and Kampf was the newly elected county clerk for Nye County, Nevada, after campaigning on a platform that included, among other things, perpetuating the lie that the last presidential election was stolen from Donald Trump. For Kampf, conducting a clean election meant that the process used in 2020 could not be trusted. So instead of using machines, Kampf would count 20,000 ballots by hand in a week.

After two weeks of court hearings that extended beyond Election Day, Kampf finally had the green light to assemble his team of hundreds of volunteers — mostly elderly residents who had the time to devote to the arduous task of tabulating the results. They cast 2,500 ballots that first day. But despite working in groups of three, up to a quarter of the ballot papers had to be read a second time due to obvious errors.

Finally, Kampf resorted to machines to complete the official count. Nye County’s folly is just one example of a remarkably consistent pattern: Outside the smallest jurisdictions, counting by hand is difficult, slow, expensive and extremely unreliable. And if Kampf’s count of one in four ballots being misread is correct, he actually did better than most. A Rice University study estimated that hand counts produced accurate results only 58% of the time. According to two decades of research, machine voting has an error rate of less than 1%.

And yet, if this election results in chaos similar to what we saw after Election Day 2020, hand counting could be a primary cause. Despite evidence against the practice, Georgia’s top election authority is moving forward with a plan to hand-count every ballot in a state with more than 8 million registered voters.

The frankly ridiculous decision came after the five-member board was overrun by election deniers. The sober move has drawn bipartisan criticism, including Vice President Kamala Harris and Republican Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp.

That’s exactly why Democrats filed a lawsuit on September 30 to prevent this potential folly. There’s a good chance it will continue, as even Georgia’s Republican secretary of state says the elections board waited too long to implement such a dramatic change to the rules.

While stopping Georgia’s hand-counting plan could fuel conspiracy theories that the vote was rigged, keeping the plan in place could further damage trust in the state’s elections. Despite right-wing conspiracy theories about inaccurate voting machines and a desire to return to paper-and-ink ballots, the dangers of hacking or tinkering are simply not justified. Fueled by disinformation and pure cynicism, Trump’s belief that the 2020 election was stolen is simply baseless.

These inconvenient facts have not stopped the urge at all levels of government to return to the past. Aware that their jobs are always at risk when they appear to ignore voters, lawmakers and elected officials have tolerated this camp to varying degrees. But they have typically found ways to illustrate why machines are a faster, cheaper, and more accurate way to get the right results in the right time frame.

To be fair, counting by hand still works in small jurisdictions. In New Hampshire, 114 cities are still counting by hand – that’s about 10% of the state’s voters. These are typical of smaller places where this style is popular: mostly single-district communities. Nationally, fewer than 0.2% of Americans live in such places, because most voters live in communities where such small efforts make no practical sense.

But consider the volume required on ballots with many questions and races. In 2020, Cobb County, Georgia ordered a hand count of only the presidential votes. It took hundreds of people five full days to cast just under 400,000 ballots. What Georgia is now demanding is a count of every single voting line — candidates for the White House, state races, questions about taxes, the creation of a state fiscal court, even who would sit on the local land and water committee. In Fulton County alone, a sample election this year includes more than 50 possible races. More than half a million votes were cast there in 2020. Nationwide we are now talking about a total of around 5 million expected ballot papers.

“To pull something like this off at the last minute seems like a really terrible idea,” said Gowri Ramachandran, director of elections and security for the Brennan Center’s elections and government division, which focuses on improving elections. “It’s really hard for me to understand what benefit anyone thinks this is.”

We have to go back to 2004 to find an election year in which even 1% of the country’s votes were counted by hand, MIT’s Election Lab reports. Two decades later, more than 90% of jurisdictions use electronic counting only. There’s a reason this method has been shelved everywhere except in single-light cities.

Be aware of these warning signs from other states:

Social psychologists, election experts and mathematicians all agree that machines still perform better than humans at repetitive tasks like counting ballots. Machines are not only much cheaper, they are also faster and simply better at it.

Back in Nye County, Nevada, after Kampf, the elections official, resorted to machine counting of ballots in 2022, he told reporters that counting by hand was merely a test and a safeguard. As preparations for this year’s count began, he chose another option: He resigned, effective March 31.

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