By CHRISTINE FERNANDO
CHICAGO (AP) — Four years of Donald Trump’s false claims about a stolen 2020 election have kindled growing suspicion of voting machines among conspiracy theorists. One of their solutions is to replace the tabulators that count every vote with people who will do that by hand.
Controversies over the issue have flared periodically in pockets of the country before the 2024 presidential election even though research has shown that hand-counting is more prone to error, costlier and likely to delay results.
The few counties that have attempted the massive task have found the process more time-consuming, expensive and inaccurate than expected.
In Texas’ Gillespie County, a hand-count of Republican primary election ballots this year stretched into the early morning hours, taking almost 24 consecutive hours with 200 people counting ballots, the Texas Tribune and VoteBeat reported. The hand-count cost taxpayers about double the wage costs of the 2020 Republican primary and involved fixing a series of errors, the news nonprofits reported.
In rural Nye County in Nevada, where volunteers in 2022 embarked on an unprecedented full hand-count of midterm votes, mismatched tallies led to recount after recount. After the first day of counting, the county clerk, Mark Kampf, estimated a discrepancy of nearly 25% between the hand and machine count, attributing it to human counting error. The painstakingly slow process was halted by the state’s Supreme Court over concerns that early vote tallies could be leaked publicly.
Shasta County, a conservative rural county in northern California, last year abandoned plans to hand-count ballots after the plan was estimated to cost $1.6 million and require more than 1,200 additional employees.
Still, some jurisdictions continue to call for hand-counting.
Most recently, Georgia’s State Election Board voted to require poll workers to count the number of paper ballots, but not the votes, by hand after voting is completed. The counting would have to be done by three separate poll workers until all three counts are the same.
The new rule went against the advice of the state attorney general, the secretary of state and an association of county election officials.
A ‘grassroots’ movement
Efforts to replace modern voting machines with more laborious, error-prone hand-counting are rooted in a set of conspiracy theories about voting machines that have been spread by Trump and his allies. Some Republicans, inspired by election lies claiming that widespread fraud cost Trump reelection in 2020, have pushed for hand-counting ballots and banning the electronic tabulators used to scan ballots and record votes, despite no evidence of widespread fraud or major irregularities.
“This movement could have died if it had just been a flash in the pan from the 2020 election,” said Charles Stewart, a political science professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. But conspiracy theorists such …read more
Source:: The Mercury News – Entertainment
