CHICAGO (AP) — Four years of Donald Trump’s false claims about a stolen 2020 election have fueled growing distrust of voting machines among 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 the issue periodically flared up in parts of the country, even though research has shown that manual counting 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, the manual count of this year’s Republican primaries stretched into the early morning hours. It lasted nearly 24 hours straight and 200 people counted ballots, the Texas Tribune and VoteBeat reported. The manual count cost taxpayers about double the payroll costs of the 2020 Republican primary and involved fixing a series of errors, the nonprofits reported.
In rural Nye County, Nevada, where volunteers began an unprecedented manual count of midterm votes in 2022, mismatched numbers led to recount after recount. After the first day of counting, the county clerk, Mark Kampf, estimated a nearly 25% discrepancy between the manual and machine counts, attributing it 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 cost an estimated $1.6 million and required more than 1,200 additional workers.
Still, some jurisdictions continue to call for hand counts.
Most recently, Georgia’s State Election Board voted to require 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.
A ‘grassroots’ movement
Efforts to replace modern voting machines with more laborious, error-prone manual counting are rooted in a series of conspiracy theories about voting machines spread by Trump and his allies. Some Republicans, inspired by election lies claiming that widespread fraud cost Trump’s 2020 reelection, have pushed for hand-counting of ballots and banning the electronic tabulators used to scan ballots and record votes, despite that 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 professor of political science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. But conspiracy theorists like election denier and MyPillow founder Mike Lindell have traveled 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.
Problems with cost, speed and accuracy
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.”
Paper ballots have already been used
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 in this year’s presidential election will be cast on paper.
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.
___
Learn more about how U.S. elections work in Explore Election 2024, a series from The Associated Press aimed at helping you understand American democracy. The AP receives support from several private foundations to improve its explanatory reporting on elections and democracy. See more about AP’s democracy initiative here. The AP is solely responsible for all content.
