Voters in at least three rural South Dakota counties will decide Tuesday whether to recount votes by hand, the latest communities across the country to consider ditching mechanical tabulators based on baseless conspiracy theories stemming from the presidential election. 2020.
The three counties, each with fewer than 6,000 residents, would be among the first in the United States to require old-fashioned hand recounts, which have long been replaced by vote tabulators in most of the country.
Several other states and local governments have considered banning automatic counting since the 2020 election, but most of those efforts have failed over concerns about the cost, the time it takes to count by hand and the difficulty of hiring more staff to do it.
Experts say counting votes by hand is less accurate than mechanical tabulation.
Supporters of the South Dakota effort are not deterred by such concerns.
“We believe that a decentralized approach to elections is much safer, much more transparent and that citizens should oversee their elections,” said Jessica Pollema, president of SD Canvassing, a citizen group that supports the change.
Like efforts elsewhere, South Dakota’s push for hand counting has its roots in false claims pushed by former President Donald Trump and his allies after the 2020 presidential election. They claimed widespread voter fraud and spread theories conspiracy that voting machines were manipulated to steal the election. There has been no evidence to support such claims, but they have taken root in many places that voted heavily for Trump.
Citizen initiatives in South Dakota to ban tabulating machines will appear on Tuesday’s primary ballot in Gregory, Haakon and Tripp counties. Similar petition efforts for future measure votes are underway in more than 40 other counties in the conservative state, Pollema said. At least four counties have rejected attempts to force a manual count.
Previously, the Fall River County Commission voted in February to hand-count ballots for the June election, and Tripp County hand-counted its ballots for the general election in 2022.
If the measure passes Tuesday, Gregory County Auditor Julie Bartling said the county will have to increase the number of precincts to reduce the burden of hand counting. That will force him to buy more assisted voting devices for disabled voters. The county will also face the difficult task of hiring more poll workers.
Bartling, who runs elections in the county, opposes the initiative and said he has “full faith in automated tabulators.”
Todd and Tripp County Auditor Barb DeSersa said she also opposes attempts to require manual recounting of all ballots because the process is not as accurate. She said the 2022 hand recount left election workers exhausted.
“I know the guys who did it last time didn’t want anything to do with it this time, so I think once they do it once or twice, they’ll get tired of it and it’ll be harder to do it. finding people to volunteer to do that,” DeSersa said.
DeSersa’s office estimated it would cost between $17,000 and $25,000 to count the Tripp County election by hand, compared to about $19,000 to $21,000 using tabulators. Haakon County Auditor Stacy Pinney said she initially estimated the hand count will cost between $750 and $4,500, but “overall, the election cost is difficult to determine at this time.”
According to a Haakon County state’s attorney’s analysis, it would take two poll workers using a tabulator three to four hours to count all the ballots. It would take between 15 and 20 election workers five to 15 hours to do a manual count, depending on the number of contested elections.
The three counties have a combined total of 7,725 active registered voters, according to a state report.
Republican state Rep. Rocky Blare, who lives in Tripp County, said he will vote against the measure.
“You can’t show me that there’s been any issue that I think affected our election in South Dakota,” Blare said.
Secretary of State Monae Johnson, a Republican, expressed confidence in tabulating machines, noting that they have been used for years. In a statement, she noted “the safeguards built in throughout the process and the post-election audit of the machines after the primary and general elections to ensure they are working properly.”
The June election will be the first with a post-election audit, a process included in a 2023 state law. It involves manually counting all the votes in two races in 5% of the precincts in each county to ensure the automatic tabulation is accurate. Johnson’s office said there was no evidence of widespread problems in 2020 or 2022. One person voted twice, he said, and was caught.
After repeated attacks against automatic vote counting in the 2020 presidential election, Dominion Voting Systems last year reached a $787 million settlement in a defamation case against KeynoteUSA over false claims the network repeatedly aired. The judge in that case determined that it was “crystal clear” that none of the claims about Dominion machines were true, and testimony showed that many Fox hosts quietly doubted the claims their network was airing.
Since 2020, only a few counties have moved to manual counting. In California, Shasta County officials voted to get rid of their ballot tabulators, but state lawmakers later restricted manual counting to limited circumstances. Officials in Mohave County in Arizona rejected a proposal to manually count ballots in 2023, citing the $1.1 million cost.
David Levine, a former local elections official in Idaho who is now a senior fellow at the Alliance to Secure Democracy, said research has shown that manually counting large numbers of ballots is more expensive, less accurate and more time-consuming than tabulators. automatic.
“If you listen to conspiracy theorists and election skeptics across America, one of the reasons the 2020 election was illegitimate was because of an algorithm. Therefore, if you remove computers from the voting process, you will have more secure elections,” Levine said. “The only problem: it’s not true.”
While some areas count ballots by hand, primarily in the Northeast, it typically occurs in places with a small number of registered voters. Manual counts are common during post-election testing to verify that machines are counting ballots correctly, but only a small portion of ballots are verified manually.
Election experts say it is unrealistic to think that workers in large jurisdictions, with tens or hundreds of thousands of voters, can count all of their ballots by hand and report the results quickly, especially since ballots often include multiple races.
“The problem is that people aren’t very good at big, tedious, repetitive tasks like counting ballots, and computers are,” Levine said. “Those who believe otherwise are either unaware of this reality or choose to ignore it.”
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