Trump backers push election change that would make counting slower, costlier and less accurate

The push gained some traction in the last month. In Arizona, a bill that would require hand counts of ballots for all elections passed out of a legislative committee. In Nevada, a deep-red county's board of Commissioners, spurred on by a Trump-aligned candidate to be the state's top election officer, formally urged its election clerk to abandon machine counting.

The push is spreading across Nevada.

The Nye County board passed a resolution urging the clerk to hand count the ballots after the county attorney told them they couldn't demand the clerk switch to hand counting.

She told the board that it wouldn't be feasible to consider before the June primary, but she would discuss the practicality with the board in November. She said she had serious concerns.

I don't know how long it would take to hand count 31,000 ballots. I think we would miss the deadline for canvassing our votes.

Jim Marchant, a former Republican state lawmaker who is running for Nevada secretary of state, encouraged the actions in Nye. Marchant is part of a national coalition of pro-Trump candidates running for election offices on a platform that includes false assertions that the 2020 election was stolen from the former president.

He told Steve Bannon that they were going to go to other counties in Nevada to get rid of the voting machines.

Marchant wanted to get voting machines out of all the counties in Nevada, but he didn't expect Washoe and Clark to do so. The Washoe County board voted 4-1 on Tuesday to reject a motion calling for hand counting ballots.

Every active voter in Nevada gets a ballot in the mail and the votes are counted via machine tabulators. A direct-recording electronic voting machine is used for in-person votes in most of the state.

The push to move to hand counting by prominent election conspiracy theorists has gotten louder, but it remains to be seen where it will be implemented. The sponsor of the Arizona bill said he would consider amendments to allow for some machine counting after the committee hearing, the Arizona Republic reported. Even if it were to pass the state Senate, it faces long odds in the state House.

In New Hampshire, where some small jurisdictions already count ballots by hand, a recent push fell flat. New Hampshire Public Radio reported that at least 10 towns had questions about hand-counting votes on the ballot during the March elections.

‘It would be an abject disaster’

In-person voters use a paper ballot of some form, but hand counting of ballots is very rare.

Warren Stewart, a data analyst at the Verified Voting Foundation, said that there are more than 800 jurisdictions nationwide that mostly count in-person or mail ballots by hand.

There is a good reason for that.

Hundreds, not thousands, of voters are present in many of the jurisdictions that hand count ballots. The cost of elections would be greatly increased if hand counting were to be used in Nye County, Nevada, where more than 2 million people cast ballots in the 2020 election.

Adrian Fontes, the former recorder of Maricopa County, is running in the Democratic primary for secretary of state in Arizona.

Fontes pointed to the GOP-led review of the 2020 election in Maricopa, where volunteers tried to tally ballots by hand and went months behind schedule. He said that the review was not a perfect analogy, as he and many other election administrators were critical of its chaotic processes and winks toward conspiracy theories.

If we got 80 percent turnout, you could expect a hand count to take two to three months.

Election officials say that hiring ballot counters would drive up the cost. Typically, election workers work in bipartisan pairs, and election offices would need more workers to count the ballots than to oversee the machine tabulation process. It would require more space for the counting teams.

Election tabulation machinery goes through a lot of testing, including pre election logic and accuracy testing, in order to make sure they produce the expected result. States around the country are increasingly using post- election risk-limiting audits in which a sample of actual ballots are examined by hand to make sure the machine counts are accurate.

If you machine count, you can do an audit. You have to hand count three or four times until you come up with a consensus on the votes.

Election experts say that hand-counting large numbers of ballots is less reliable than a machine count.

The director of the elections project at the Bipartisan Policy said that computers are better at counting than humans. There are going to be errors.