By NICHOLAS RICCARDI, Associated Press
The overwhelming majority of candidates running to turn into their states’ chief election officers oppose hand counting ballots, a laborious and error-prone process that has gained favor amongst some Republicans embracing conspiracy theories about voting machines.
An Associated Press survey of major party secretary of state candidates within the 24 states found broad skepticism about hand counting amongst election professionals of all ideological stripes. Of 23 Republicans who responded to the survey, 13 clearly said they opposed implementing a statewide hand count of ballots as a substitute of a machine count.
GOP candidates in Arizona and Recent Mexico have previously endorsed the concept of a hand count. But others cautioned it was a dangerous road to follow.
“Hand counting ballots is a process that requires time, manpower, and is susceptible to inaccuracies,” Kansas Secretary of State Scott Schwab, a Republican who’s searching for re-election this yr, wrote in response to the AP survey.
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The will at hand count ballots stems from conspiracy theories spread by former President Donald Trump and his allies that the electronic machines that tabulated the outcomes of the 2020 presidential election were rigged. Now some Republicans inspired by his election lies seek to expand or require hand counting of all ballots.
Counting by hand takes longer, requires large groups of individuals to look at ballots, and has been found by multiple studies to be less reliable than using voting machines.
“The explanation the U.S. moved to counting machines is as a consequence of each human error and fraud with hand counts, so we searched for a greater option to count the vote,” said Kim Crockett, the Republican nominee for secretary of state in Minnesota, in an email. “The error rate for hand counts is higher than the error rate for ballot counters most often.”
Crockett, who has called the 2020 election “rigged” and echoed a few of Trump’s other election falsehoods, also stressed that she thinks her state’s voting machines still need further inspection.
The method got here under scrutiny last week when rural Nye County in Nevada launched into an unprecedented full hand count of this yr’s midterm votes, starting with mailed ballots and people forged early in-person. The method was painstakingly slow until it was halted by the state’s supreme court over concerns that early vote tallies could possibly be leaked publicly.
While the AP survey found most candidates strongly favor machine tabulators, two GOP secretary of state candidates in politically pivotal states — Arizona and Recent Mexico — need to shift to the unreliable approach to counting ballots. A 3rd in one more swing state, Nevada, has backed Nye County’s effort and voiced support for making that kind of procedure standard statewide.
In Arizona, Republican State Rep. Mark Finchem, who’s running for secretary of state, joined his party’s nominee for governor, Kari Lake, in filing a lawsuit searching for to outlaw using any machine to record or tabulate votes. The case was dismissed by a judge who levied sanctions against the Republicans.
In Recent Mexico, GOP secretary of state nominee Audrey Trujillo has said she wants widespread hand counting of votes.
“Hand count my ballot. We have already got paper ballots,” she said in an interview on the video platform Rumble. “If we had that, I guarantee you tons more people would exit and vote.”
Neither Finchem nor Trujillo responded to the AP’s survey.
Nevada’s Republican secretary of state candidate has offered conflicting responses. A campaign spokesman for Republican nominee Jim Marchant told the AP that Marchant could be high quality with a machine count so long as there are also paper ballots, that are universally utilized in Nevada. However the prior month, Marchant told the AP in a separate interview, “My goal is to go to a hand count paper ballot system.”
Nevada’s current secretary of state, Republican Barbara Cegavske, told interim Nye County Clerk Mark Kampf to halt the hand count of early arriving mailed ballots and early in-person votes until after polls close Nov. 8 following a ruling late last week from the state’s high court. The state chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union had sought to halt the hand count over concerns that observers could hear the outcomes as they were announced, risking a possible public leak of early returns.
The nascent hand-count had been riddled with problems on its first day, with repeated delays and errors among the many volunteer staff of 12 teams of 5 split into two different shifts. They got through 900 of 1,950 ballots on the primary day, with one volunteer lamenting the slow pace: “I can’t imagine it’s two hours to get through 25.”
An AP reporter observed two teams of 5 taking so long as three hours to count 50 ballots. When teams realized that they had mismatched tallies for certain candidates, they’d stop and recount the ballots for those candidates again. That effort followed a hand count in one other rural Nevada county, Esmeralda, where election employees in June spent greater than seven hours hand-tallying the 317 primary ballots.
Kampf said the teams improved throughout the second day.
Eleven candidates, mostly Republicans, didn’t reply to the AP’s survey, including one of the vital outstanding election conspiracy theorists running for the position — Republican Kristina Karamo in Michigan, a community college instructor who has spreading the lie that voting machines in 2020 were rigged.
“Election deniers are using the language of election integrity to dismantle the actual infrastructure of election integrity,” said David Becker, the co-author of “The Big Truth,” a book concerning the risks of Trump’s voting lies, and executive director of the Center for Election Innovation & Research. “Should you want inaccurate results that take a very very long time and value rather a lot, then hand counting is your solution.”
Voting machines are routinely checked before and after voting to be sure they count accurately. The post-election test often involves pulling a sample of random ballots and counting them by hand to see if the automated tally differs.
But repeated studies — in voting and other fields equivalent to banking and retail — have shown that folks make much more errors counting than do machines, especially when reaching larger and bigger numbers. They’re also vastly slower.
Jennifer Morrell, a former local election official in Colorado and Utah, noted that hand counts are enormously labor-intensive. The election consulting firm where she works estimated that in a typical-sized jurisdiction of 270,000 voters, it could take 1,300 people to count the ballots inside seven days.
That’s because the standard ballot has dozens of races on it, which machines tabulate mechanically but humans would should count line by line, page by page.
“Voting equipment is uniform and efficient in a way that humans won’t ever be,” Morrell said.
Associated Press statehouse reporters from across the U.S. contributed to this report.
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