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How Trump allies are pushing to hand-count ballots around the U.S.

cigaretteman

HR King
May 29, 2001
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Some of the key architects and amplifiers of the false claim that voting machines were rigged to steal the 2020 election from Donald Trump traveled to the Nevada desert last month with a new pitch.
Speaking at a commissioners meeting in deeply conservative, mostly rural Nye County, they argued the county should ditch all its voting machines.

“The electronic voting machines are so vulnerable and so uncertifiable, I don’t see how we can trust them,” Jim Marchant, a Trump-supporting Nevada secretary of state candidate, told Nye County commissioners.
Instead, they insisted, the county should adopt an old-fashioned and largely obsolete method: tallying the results by hand.

Also presenting to the commission were retired Army Col. Phil Waldron and businessman Russell J. Ramsland Jr., who had worked with Trump’s legal team to raise doubts about the machines in 2020. Now they’re part of a network of Trump allies traveling the country to press for hand-counted paper ballots. The message is connecting: In recent weeks, officials have discussed the idea in public meetings in Colorado, Louisiana, Kansas and New Hampshire, and bills to require hand-counting have been proposed in at least six states.






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None of the statewide bills have passed, nor have the proposals gotten traction in large jurisdictions. But there has been increasing pressure placed on Republicans to endorse the idea, and a number of smaller towns and counties are now seriously considering it.
Top backers of Trump’s election fraud claims, meanwhile, are investing heavily in the effort to promote hand-counting — and using the pitch to raise money from energized supporters.
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Experts say hand-counting ballots is so impractical that, if adopted, election results would be thrown into unimaginable chaos, inviting mass human error and delaying results — and potentially giving bad actors more time to slow or even block certification. Time and again, post-election audits have confirmed that machine counts are extremely accurate, and experts have said that there is no proof machines were hacked in 2020.







“It’s a recipe for some chaos,” said Pam Smith, president of Verified Voting, a nonprofit that promotes secure election practices such as post-election audits. “And I do think that’s potentially very damaging to public trust in the process.”
But the proposal is a nostalgic throwback that holds appeal for many Trump supporters convinced that his loss can be blamed on complicated computers controlled by shadowy forces.
What began as a rhetorical talking point on the fringe right is now an article of faith for some in the Republican grass roots, and a tool to stoke outrage and boost fundraising. The continued attacks on the vulnerability of machines have also helped harden beliefs on the right that the 2020 election was illegitimate.

In Nye County, commissioner Debra Strickland said she proposed the idea after listening to a presentation at a local Republican committee meeting. “The people have been concerned for some time about whether or not our votes are being processed,” she said. On March 15, Strickland and her fellow commissioners in Nye County, population 45,000, voted 5 to 0 to urge their county clerk to adopt hand-counting.



Around the country, only a handful of jurisdictions still count ballots by hand, mostly counties and towns with very small populations concentrated in New England and Wisconsin, according to data provided by Verified Voting. Together, voters living in these communities represent just 0.2 percent of registered voters nationwide.
The vast majority of Americans now vote with hand-marked paper ballots or on touch-screen machines that print one — a security feature that most Republicans and Democrats support and that allows ballots to be hand-counted in post-election audits or in the event of alleged discrepancies or very close races. Current proposals to nix machines call for the elimination of all touch-screen devices and computer tabulators that scan and tally ballots.

Though supporters often claim their goal is to restore the techniques they remember from their youth, in fact, early iterations of voting machines that eliminated the need for hand-counted paper ballots were introduced in the late 19th century and were in widespread use in most American cities by the 1920s, said Doug Jones, a professor at the University of Iowa who specializes in the history of voting technology. Mechanical devices, like pull-lever machines that tallied votes as they were cast, were originally introduced to help eliminate both errors and incidents of fraud that cropped up when partisans controlled counting at the precinct level. Computer-assisted tabulation emerged in the 1960s, he said.

 
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