Voters in at least three rural South Dakota counties are expected to decide Tuesday whether to return to hand-counting votes, the latest communities across the country to consider abandoning automatic tabulators based on unfounded 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fewer than 6,000 residents, would be among the first in the U.S. to require traditional hand counting, which has long been replaced by vote counters in most of the country.
A number of other states and local governments have considered banning automatic counting since the 2020 election, but most of those efforts have failed due to concerns about costs, the time it takes to count manually, and the difficulty of hiring more staff to do it.
Experts say counting votes manually it is less accurate than machine tabulation.
Supporters of South Dakota’s 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 citizens group that supports the change.
Like efforts elsewhere, South Dakota’s push for hand counting has its origins False allegations pressured by the former president donald trump and its allies after the 2020 presidential election. They did claims of widespread voter fraud and spread conspiracy theories what voting machines were manipulated to steal the election. There was no evidence to support such claims, but they have become entrenched in many places that voted heavily for Trump.
Citizen initiatives in South Dakota to ban tabulating machines are expected to appear in Tuesday’s primary elections in Gregory, Haakon and Tripp counties. Similar petition efforts for votes on future measures are underway in more than 40 other counties in the conservative state, Pollema said. At least four counties have rejected attempts to force hand counts.
Previously, the Fall River County Commission voted in February to manually count votes for the June election, and Tripp County manually counted votes for the 2022 general election.
If the measure passes Tuesday, Gregory County Auditor Julie Bartling said the county will have to increase the number of precincts to lessen the burden of manual counting. This will force you to buy more assisted voting devices for voters with disabilities. 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 “complete faith in automated tabulators.”
Todd and Tripp County Auditor Barb DeSersa said she also opposes attempts to require manual counting of all ballots because the process is not as accurate. She said the 2022 hand count has left election workers exhausted.
“I know those who did it last time didn’t want anything to do with it this time, so I think when they do it once or twice, they’ll get tired of it and it’ll be harder to do. find people who will volunteer to do it,” DeSersa said.
DeSersa’s office estimated it would cost between $17,000 and $25,000 to have Tripp County elections counted by hand, compared to about $19,000 to $21,000 using tabulators. Haakon County Auditor Stacy Pinney said she initially estimated the hand count would cost between $750 and $4,500, but “overall, it is difficult to determine the election cost at this time.”
According to a Haakon County state’s attorney’s analysis, it would take two election workers using a tabulator three to four hours to count all the ballots. It would take 15 to 20 election workers between five and 15 hours to do a manual count, depending on the number of election contests.
The three counties have a 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.
“They can’t prove to me that there were any issues that I think affected our election in South Dakota,” Blare said.
Secretary of State Monae Johnson, a Republican, expressed confidence in the tabulation machines, noting that they have been used for years. In a statement, she highlighted “built-in safeguards throughout the process and the post-election audit of machines following the primary and general elections to ensure they are functioning properly.”
The June elections will be the first with post-election auditing, a process included in a 2023 state law. It involves manually counting all votes in two contests from 5% of precincts in each county to ensure the automatic tabulation is accurate. . Johnson’s office said there is no evidence of widespread problems in 2020 or 2022. One person voted twice, she said, and was caught.
After repeated attacks on automatic vote counting in the 2020 presidential election, Dominion Voting Systems last year achieved an $787 million settlement in defamation case against Fox News about false allegations that the network has repeatedly aired. The judge in that case concluded that it was “Clear as crystal” none of the claims about Dominion machines were true, and testimony showed that many Fox hosts silently doubted the statements your network was broadcasting.
Since 2020, only a few counties have switched to manual counting. In California, authorities Shasta County voted to get rid of their vote tabulators, but state legislators later restricted hand count to limited circumstances. Authorities in Mohave County, Arizona rejected a proposal for manual vote counting in 2023, citing a cost of $1.1 million.
David Levine, a former local election official in Idaho who is now a senior fellow at the Alliance for Securing Democracy, said research has shown that manually counting large numbers of ballots is more expensive, less accurate and takes longer than counting. automatic tabulators.
“If you listen to conspiracy theorists and election skeptics across the US, one of the reasons the 2020 election was illegitimate was because of an algorithm. So if you take computers out of the voting process, you will have a more secure election,” Levine said. “The only problem: it’s not true.”
Although some areas count votes manually, particularly in the Northeast, this typically happens in places with a small number of registered voters. Manual counting is common during post-election testing to verify that machines are counting votes correctly, but only a small portion of votes 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 their ballots by hand and report the results quickly, especially since ballots often include multiple races.
“The issue is that people are not very good at tedious, repetitive tasks like counting votes, and computers are,” Levine said. “Those who believe otherwise are either unaware of this reality or choose to ignore it.”
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Dura reported from Bismarck, North Dakota. Associated Press writer Christina A. Cassidy in Atlanta contributed to this story.
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