On Handcounts
Ignorance, it turns out, isn't bliss.
The Texas Tribune has a fascinating (although not in a good way) story about the interest of many county-level Republican officials in Texas to hand-count the 2024 primaries: Texas Republicans in one rural county will hand count ballots. Experts say it’s “a recipe for disaster.” While, as the headline notes, it appears that only one county will do so, the piece details how a number of county-level GOP operations were seriously considering the option, including in Dallas and Travis (i.e., Austin) counties.
When Gillespie County Republicans conduct their primary in March, they will count votes in an ill-advised way: by hand, using scores of volunteers, without any machines.
Even if they can pull off their expensive, labor-intensive plan, they risk being sued by losing candidates or reprimanded by the state. And they may run up a huge bill of unnecessary costs.
“Hand-counting is a recipe for disaster,” said Bob Stein, a political science professor at Rice University and election administration expert. He and most other experts agree on this, and studies back them up: The method is time-consuming, costly, less accurate, and less secure than using machines to tally votes.
[…]
Party leadership in larger counties have, so far, resisted a full hand count. In Dallas County, leadership determined it would be impossible with present resources. In Travis County, the local GOP decided on a significantly watered-down hand-counting plan, focusing on a small percentage of primary ballots cast.
Anyone who has dropped a deck of playing cards and then counted to make sure there were 52 knows that it is insanely easy to make a mistake on a hand count. And we are talking about far mroe than 52 ballots.
Gillespie County Republicans, though, must now recruit and train 100 additional election workers to do the election day tasks that normally fall to county election workers.
Then there’s the enormous job of manually tallying the votes in the roughly dozens of races on the more than 3,000 ballots expected to be cast in the primary, racing against the clock to finish before the state’s 24-hour deadline for reporting results.
But party official David Treibs, a precinct chair who’s been leading the hand-count planning, doesn’t think it will be much of a hassle.
“It’s not anything that’s really complicated. If you go ‘1, 2, 3, 4, 5’ then you can do it,” Treibs, who has no experience hand-counting ballots, told Votebeat. “So it’s not like calculus, you know? If you have a good attention span, then I think most people can do it.”
This is a great illustration wherein “common sense” approached by non-experts leads to very poor choices.
Ben Adida, executive director for VotingWorks, a nonprofit voting system vendor, which helped the state of Georgia perform a hand-counted audit of the state’s 2020 presidential results, agreed that hand-counting was nothing like calculus. But, he said, it was also nothing like counting to five.
“Imagine being asked to count the number of sheets in a large ream of paper, the kind you get from Staples,” he said. Mistakes aren’t allowed, nor are programs like Excel. Plus, “You have to do it 80 times, because there are 40 contests with 2 candidates each.”
Adida said he understands why hand-counting sounds easy, but once you’ve done it, you quickly realize it’s a daunting process with dozens of steps.
And, of course, you aren’t just counting the individual sheets, but are tallying multiple marks on the pages. Further, as the story notes, there are legal deadlines that must be met by this process putting additional pressure on human volunteers, which will almost certainly increase error rates.
There is also cost involved (hand-counting is not the fiscally conservative option):
At an Austin gathering of more than 500 local party chairs in September, Christina Adkins, the state’s elections division director, warned the costs might quickly spiral out of control.
“It is entirely possible that your costs may exceed our ability to pay for the primary election,” she said, standing behind a podium inside a large hotel ballroom. For over an hour, Adkins went through slide after slide of a presentation detailing rules, procedures, and logistical requirements of a hand count. “If everybody in the state goes to hand-counting, we may not have the funds to pay for everything.”
[…]
Adkins directed every party chair in the room considering a hand count to take a look at how much a previous similar election cost them and to consider the fact that additional workers, additional hours, and additional supplies would be required.
She also did not waver on one point: No county will get a pass on following the law because of the logistical difficulties of hand-counting.
The entire notion that hand-counting is a good idea stems from poisoned logic that we have an electoral fraud problem in this country (spoiler: we do not) and specifically that voting machines are rigged (ask Fox News’s bank account about that one). It is further exacerbated by (again) “common sense” reasoning that machines can (in theory) be manipulated while good ol’ people can count!
Side note: I guarantee that the scantron machine that I used to grade multiple choice exams did a far more accurate job of grading a stack of exams than had I done them manually. (And that machine was one helluva a lot faster!).
This entire situation is a great illustration of how false narratives (such as the one that we have a serious electoral fraud problem in this country) lead to poor understanding on a mass level and therefore to truly stupid public policy decisions being made. All of this truly is an example of Republican activists making their supporters dumber over time.
Please note that this is not the kind of assessment I tend to like to make, but it is empirically true and not a normative judgment. Organizations like the Heritage Foundation have been very specifically and actively pushing the electoral fraud narrative for some time. I wrote about their “database” here some time ago with a follow-up post that further discussed the “database” and demonstrated how that “information” was used at CPAC (by a writer for the National Review) to bolder the Big Lie narrative about 2020. Beyond those specifics, the reality is that an overwhelming majority of the party has been either directly endorsing the Big Lie or, at a minimum, being utter weasels about it. Consider the obvious signal that was sent on January 6, 2021, when 147 Republicans voted against certifying the election.
You reap what you sow, and the GOP has been sowing distrust in elections and democracy for quite some time. The adage of “garbage in, garbage out” is about programming a computer, but it is supremely true about human beings. Supposed obvious, easy, common sense answers (” If you go ‘1, 2, 3, 4, 5’ then you can do it”) oh so rarely are what they are cracked up to be.
I will conclude by noting that the grandest irony of the whole notion of hand-counting instead of using machines is that it opens the door to a higher probability of massive fraud than sticking with the machines. It unequivocally will introduce more errors into the results.
Yes, humans are very programmable.
I know Forrest Gump said, “Stupid is as stupid does.” “Stupidity is its own reward.” probably predates written language.
And NYT et al keep telling me I should respect these people.
Mexico does hand counts exclusively, but the ballots are far simpler and there are fewer of them. In the typical general election, you get one ballot each for president, senator, and deputy*. There are between four and seven choices for each, and you mark only one. So it’s a simple matter for some people to sort out the presidential ballots by vote and pile them up, and a few others to just count the sheets. It’s even easy to check the count.
There’s no equivalent simple means when a ballot carries dozens of races with multiple options on each. Even if only the duopoly parties matter, candidates for the small fry parties are also listed and some even get votes.
There’s a reason why vote counting has been mechanized for a while now.
*If it coincides with a state and/or local election, you get ballots for mayor, governor, cit council, and state legislature. That’s still very few compared to a republicnotademocracy America where scores of local and state posts are elected. And let’s not forget ballot initiatives, which for some reason are not called plebiscites.
IIRC, a county in AZ ran a test of hand counting ballots in one precinct and then extrapolated the results county wide. They determined that they would need the equivalent of couple of hundred ballot judges working 12 hour shifts for over 6 weeks to produce results and the error rate was about 25%. Needless to say they are sticking with machine tabulation.
There was a movement here to go to “hand counting” and I got thinking about how the county/town/school district elections would go. There are actually 4 ballots, county, budget and officers, town, the warrant (where we voters pretend we’re more knowledgeable about town needs than the professionals and various bodies such as Select Board, Budget Committee and School Board(s), whose members volunteer an inordinate amount of their lives to town business. They don’t need a street light on that block, wherever it is.), and officials. There are actually 2 school elections for the elementary schools that are creatures of the town and the Jr/Sr High that is regional, budget and officials. Last year the the total of the pages that comprised all elections was 20, two-sided. Go count that manually.
This strikes me as an opportunity to “study” this example and maybe use it as a teachable moment about the problems hand counting creates.
All UK votes are hand counted.
OTOH, not that many have the massive multiple voting that’s common in US elections.
IIRC the highest ever level of simultaneous votes was 3 (local, European, and devolved national) and they were dealt with by simply using three separate ballot papers.
First off, “And we are talking about far mroe than 52 ballots.” [Please don’t correct it, makes a point]. Hand counting is silly. Dullards can do hand counts, boring job. I’d like to sentence folks promoting hand counts to actually do hand counts.
“It’s not anything that’s really complicated. If you go ‘1, 2, 3, 4, 5’ then you can do it,” Treibs, who has no experience hand-counting ballots, told Votebeat. “So it’s not like calculus, you know? If you have a good attention span, then I think most people can do it.”
Does this election official actually know anything about calculus? I do, and doubt he does, just using a standard phrase that shows his ignorance. I ‘m guessing he never took calculus that describes the world in math terms. (sorry, I run into touchy-feely environmental folks that have similar ignorance and stupidity, math tough for the stupid).
My state of Washington had systemic issues the 2004 election (Gov – Rossi-Gregoire – decided by under 1000 ballots) brought up and my state has fixed the problems (an entire memory care facility voted, for example — Snohomish) and the ballot boxes found days after the election in King County (Seattle). But we have the NC Congressional election with blatant Republican fraud.
@JohnSF:
Therein lies a major difference.
They hand count in Colombia as well (and in other places). They use separate ballots as well, but more complex ones than in the UK. They also have massive numbers of volunteers (and I will note that when I did electoral observations I noted some simple errors being made-minor ones, but still).
@Richard Gardner:
It really does, doesn’t it?
I had assumed that was the real intent.
@Steven L. Taylor:
Precisely.
The UK, and for that matter most European political systems, is far less democratic and devolved than the American system.
You could try separating the ballots, I suppose: perhaps one for presidential, one for congressional, and another for all state and local votes.
You could then hand-count the first two, and “machine count” the third.
But that remedy might well turn out to worse than the malady.
If you have a system based on “deep” democracy, and simultaneous multiple votes, massive complexity is inevitable.
Could I recommend an un-ellected head of state and second chamber? 🙂
At the first look, handcount, like we do in Portugal, sounds better – even if the machines are correct, there is always the suspicion that they could be wrong (specially if the system does not allow for a handcounting in case of doubt).
In contrat, with handcount (at least if is make in the portuguese way – a team of five counters, each one from one of the main parties) there is more public trust that the results are true