Mike Stocker/South Florida Sun-Sentinel via AP
Members of the canvassing board look over a ballot during hand-counting at the Broward County Supervisor of Elections office in Lauderhill, Florida, November 17, 2018.
On Super Tuesday, Gillespie County, Texas, officials conducted a hand count of some 8,000 ballots cast in primary elections. Almost 24 straight hours and 200 workers later, the count ended. Gillespie was the next-to-last jurisdiction in Texas to report its results. Dead last was the largest, Harris County, which includes Houston. “The sad part is this makes us look stupid to the rest of the state,” a Democratic election judge in Gillespie County told Votebeat, an elections and voting nonprofit news outlet. County officials have admitted errors in the count, while the lack of speed has raised questions from at least one election administration authority.
State and Republican Party officials had tried to explain that hand-counting ballots would not ensure the security or accuracy they sought. The process would take election workers additional hours, if not days, to complete. Small communities do conduct hand counts, but as the number of ballots increases in places that once relied on machines, the possibilities for delays, confusion, and extra costs (the state plans to pay for this count) multiply. Travis County (Austin is the county seat) battled over the idea and then dispensed with hand-counting, except for some 2,000 Republican mail-in ballots, when officials could not get the volunteers or the supplies.
Some of the most persistent crash-and-burn scenarios surrounding the November election involve deepfakes propagated by domestic or international bad actors. The possibilities for chaos spawned by malicious use of artificial intelligence should not be underestimated. The federal Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency has provided numerous examples of how election processes, departments, officials, and vendors could be compromised.
But back-to-the-future hand-counting chaos agents could send the post–Election Day period into disarray just as easily. If the 2020 election went into overtime after Georgia, Nevada, and Pennsylvania delivered late results—the Associated Press did not call the presidential race until the Saturday after Election Day—similar, if not worse, delays could be unleashed by states waiting for the hand-counters to finish up.
Far-right activists have descended on conservative and rural communities across the country, campaigning to return to a practice that only white men who wore white wigs, waistcoats, knee breeches, and black shoes with buckles centuries ago would recognize. One of the most pernicious views circulated by far-right conspiracy theorists is that modern voting machines provide biased results. The 2000 election and the hanging chads that delivered the presidency to George W. Bush helped sow such fears and led to the sweeping reforms of the Help America Vote Act (HAVA), which sent billions of dollars to states to modernize their voting equipment and update their administrative processes.
But the demonization of Dominion Voting Systems’ machines and the lies that they flipped votes for Donald Trump to Joe Biden have undermined how the country conducts its elections. Broadcasting those lies cost Fox News upwards of $800 million, but it did little to shut down election-denier chatter that the machines led to President Trump’s defeat in 2020. Some people, for example, believe that tabulation machines can be hacked, even though the machines are not connected to the internet.
One of the hubs for the hand-counting ballots movement is the Dakotas. Nearly one-third of South Dakota’s 66 counties are in various stages of petition drives that ask voters to weigh in on hand-counting ballots. Two counties already have voted to move forward this year. Local election officials repeatedly point out that the move would be neither as accurate or as secure as its proponents claim. One South Dakota election lawyer warns that hand-counting would violate not only state, but federal laws—for example, if communities fail to offer electronic accommodations for people with disabilities, as required by HAVA.
Rich Pedroncelli/AP Photo
Shasta County Supervisor Kevin Crye poses for a photo on the Sundial Bridge in Redding, California, February 21, 2024. Crye is one of the supervisors who voted to get rid of the county’s ballot-counting machines in favor of hand-counting.
A statewide ballot initiative drive is in progress in North Dakota that, if passed, would put a hand-counting ballot question before voters in November. It would also disallow voting by mail, early voting, drop boxes, and ranked-choice voting, and complicate a host of other procedures. The North Dakota secretary of state, Republican Michael Howe, opposes the proposal.
After nearly eight years of political perversities, a close Electoral College contest riding on delayed vote counting or some other twist is not to be taken lightly, whether it comes from Texas or South Dakota.
Some states peered into the abyss and stepped way back. After Shasta County, California’s conservative board of supervisors voted to experiment with hand-counting ballots, California lawmakers passed a law that allowed hand counts only in smaller locales with less than 1,000 voters and special elections with 5,000 voters, and prohibited counties from canceling contracts with voting system companies without consultation with the state, as Shasta County did. That decision cost the county over $1 million.
Arkansas attorney general Tim Griffin rejected a hand-counted paper ballot constitutional amendment, not allowing it to move forward. In Kansas, Republican state Senate president Ty Masterson urged his colleagues to vote down a proposal to do away with electronic voting, which he noted would throw the state back into the pre-digital era and invite a veto threat from Democratic Gov. Laura Kelly. A hand-counting bill sponsored by two Florida House Republicans, Reps. Berny Jacques and Taylor Yarkosky, never made it out of a legislative committee in Florida’s bright-red legislature.
In Arizona, another hand-counting hotbed, last summer one county actually gamed out how a no-tech approach might play out. Mohave County, Arizona, did a test-run count of 850 ballots. It took seven election staffers with more than ten years of experience three eight-hour days to finalize the count. They made 46 errors, some due to staff observers’ fatigue or boredom, or talliers marking votes for the wrong candidate and staff observing the count failing to notice.
For a November general election, Allen Tempert, Mohave County’s elections director, estimated that he would need 245 people eight hours a day, seven days a week to count 105,000 ballots (the number counted in 2020). The count would take more than 600 days and cost $1.1 million—for a county already running a deficit of roughly $20 million—and would not include the cost of possible recounts. Nor does it take into account probable errors, in a state decided by a razor-thin margin for Biden in 2020.
“It just isn’t going to work,” Tempert told an August board of supervisors meeting. Nor could the county ensure confidentiality. “It’s obviously impossible to get hundreds of people together to do hand-tallying and for them not to go home and tell their husband or their wife or their best friend what they have seen, what’s been going on all day long,” he said.
Conducting elections demands the mastery of a battery of arcane regulations and obscure processes that allow tens of millions of people to weigh in on decisions, from the president to local school board members. Election administration has long been one of the success stories of American democracy. But it has been left in tatters by the lies that have flourished since 2020, and now Luddites’ push for an anachronism like hand-counting ballots.
