In most voting precincts, no-tech ballot counting is a nonstarter

Today we’re talking about voting tech and the push in some areas to move away from machines and go back to hand counting ballots.

A legal battle is brewing in Georgia over a new rule requiring that ballots be hand counted on election night to ensure that the tally matches electronic records. Arizona added a similar requirement.

The issue has become particularly mired in misinformation, with some election deniers questioning the security of the technology used in our elections. While some may believe hand counts are more accurate, the number of jurisdictions in the U.S. that rely on them has been steadily dropping.

Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke with Pam Smith, president and CEO of the nonpartisan organization Verified Voting, about why the practice of counting ballots by hand has waned.

The following is an edited transcript of their conversation.

Pam Smith: In 2020, there were about 1.3 million registered voters living in jurisdictions that were doing hand counts, and that’s about a half of 1% of the registered voters in the country, or just over that. And in 2024 we’re looking at one-fifth of a percent, less than one-fifth of a percent of all voters. So that’s gone down significantly. We’re looking at only 365,000 registered voters living in those jurisdictions now. So it’s been quite a decline.

Meghan McCarty Carino: What do you think accounts for that kind of decline?

Smith: You know, it has been going on over time. Technology is available, it’s improved, it’s quick. You get a rapid election night count if you’re using voting technology that counts ballots automatically. And it’s important that you can use hand counts to supplement that and get the best of both worlds by checking to make sure the machines did it right. And that’s a hand count audit, or perhaps in some cases, a hand count recount, and that is really kind of the best way to do it. And I think jurisdictions have just been shifting to that to make life easier for themselves.

McCarty Carino: Yeah, tell me more about some of the costs of doing a hand ballot count.

Smith: Well, the thing to remember is it requires people, right? You have a team of people staffing a polling place, starting early in the morning and going into the evening, and by that time, they’ve been there a really long time. They’re exhausted. If you need to start hand counting ballots at that point, you’re probably going to need more teams, and in anything but the smallest jurisdictions, it really doesn’t work. It takes too long. Remember, you’re not just counting one contest, right? There are maybe 10, 12, 20, 40 contests on a ballot, depending where you live and what election it is. And so it becomes exponentially harder to do the more voters you have. So all of these jurisdictions that still do hand counts tend to be very small. They have 1,000 registered voters or fewer in that jurisdiction. And so that’s the only thing that really makes it feasible for getting a count quickly enough to be able to report that out and let people out of their suspense of wondering who won in our jurisdiction.

McCarty Carino: And what do we know about the accuracy of hand counting versus machine counting or other methods?

Smith: If there’s no pressure on you, the way there would be on an election night hand count, if you have a set-aside time to do a postelection audit, for example, and you’re checking one contest or a couple of contests, you have the time to do it and do it right. It can be correct. It can be very accurate, as long as it’s done carefully, and that’s the purpose of the audit. Doing a postelection audit means you’re checking a percentage of the ballots. You’re not counting all of the ballots, typically. And so that makes it a much more manageable process and easier to get right, and people can observe it and see that it’s being done right. Usually you have teams of two, three, four people, somebody to note what the vote is, someone to mark it down, someone to see that they both did that right. And that’s possible to do after the pressure of election night is over, but on election night, it can be very difficult to get it right.

McCarty Carino: And as you said, you know, often these teams are working very long hours. What happens to humans? They get tired.

Smith: Indeed, and the votes start to blur together. Yeah, it’s challenging, and it really is a kind of a time and money proposition, and sometimes a space issue, right? You know, how much space do you have to lay out all the ballots and be counting them carefully and have room for people to observe, and so on? There was a county in California recently that said we’re going to switch to hand counting, and they have 111,000 registered voters, so really [it’s] massively infeasible. And the election official there said we’re going to need an entire new warehouse just to be able to carry this off, and it will cost us, you know, millions to be able to hire enough people and get new space to be able to do this. That’s why I say it’s really only feasible in smaller jurisdictions.

McCarty Carino: So we have been seeing this push generally on the right to go to hand counting of ballots. Georgia’s election board recently passed this new rule requiring hand counting of ballots — the number of ballots, not the votes on the ballots — but hand counting the number of ballots to check if it matches against machine counting numbers. How do you see this affecting the election in Georgia, if this change does go through?

Smith: Well, I think it’s problematic because it adds a new task and a burdensome task that’s really not needed. One thing that a lot of folks don’t know about the scanners that count the ballots is that they count the pieces of paper as well as how many votes for this candidate and for that candidate. There’s something called a public counter, and it increments by one and it’s on the surface of the equipment and people can see that as they feed their ballot in — it goes up by one. And it, you know, records how many votes for each candidate in each contest. But they all serve the same purpose, and they all work pretty much the same, so that’s why that Georgia issue is really not necessary. And adding that into all the tasks that election officials have to do, you know, it really is disruptive. They have a very tight schedule, and to throw something like this in there where you’re going to need more people, you’re going to need to train people. These are things you just don’t really have time for right now. It could take them significantly longer if they have to do this additional process of counting ballots as well.

McCarty Carino: The implication of this, of course, is that there is something questionable or untrustworthy about the alternative technology that is used to count ballots. Of course, there has been misinformation about the Dominion vote system in the previous election. Can you sort of tell me about the technology that is used to count ballots and what kinds of transparency features, why should people trust it?

Smith: Well, there are different makes and models, they all pretty much do the same thing. I think it’s important to know that there’s no single system that, by itself, is totally secure. Before the election, voting equipment, including these ballot scanners, get tested so that we can make sure that they’ve been programmed correctly, they have all the right contests and all the right names, and that they’re behaving as expected. So they feed votes through the system just as if it were an election, and that’s open to public observation across the country. You can go to your local jurisdiction, find out when they’re testing the machines, and you can watch them do it. So after the ballots have been counted, starting on election night, and preliminary results get published, then there’s that audit to check the voters’ choices against the machine results to make sure that you’ve caught any errors, and if need be the amount of the ballots to be audited can be increased, or there can even be a full recount.

More on this

Verified Voting has resources on how much hand counting has dropped in the last few years as well as an overview of all the tech being used in this election.

And more on the situation in Georgia. Democrats this week sued to block the state election board’s recent hand count requirement for the entire state. They’re hoping a Georgia court will stop the requirement as soon as possible, arguing that it would increase uncertainty and delay certified election results from the battleground state. Supporters continue to argue that hand counts will increase public trust in the election.

But, as Pam Smith noted, vote tabulation machines go through what’s called logic and accuracy testing, which the public can observe ahead of elections. Multiple studies conducted in jurisdictions across the country have shown hand counts to be significantly more prone to error than machine tabulation.