A member of the Senate election “audit” team demonstrates how auditors will manually tally each of the 2.1 million votes cast in the 2020 Maricopa County presidential election.Photo: Jerod MacDonald-Evoy Arizona Miller

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Republican lawmakers in Arizona, who are touring the state to persuade county decision makers to hand-count ballots in the upcoming presidential election, have made one point they believe is legal here.

“Once again, you are not required to use machines,” State Senator Sonny Borelli told three Gila County Republican supervisors last week. “Count your hands, paper ballots. We’re open for questions.”

Republicans Mr. Borelli and State Sen. Wendy Rogers told the Mojave County Board of Governors the same thing last month. So far, regulators have been reluctant.In the Mojave, which stretches across the northwest corner of the state and includes Kingman, supervisors Trial started to research the resources needed to count by hand, and in Gila, In a mountainous county east of Phoenix, they politely said they might consider the idea at a future meeting.

It’s the latest in a string of attempts by Republican activists to use the lack of specifics in state laws to challenge proven procedures and call into question the accuracy of elections. Other such efforts that were ultimately blocked by the court included attempts to: To finish voting by mail and stop authenticating of intermediate results.

But the pitch that hand-counting ballots might become legal makes it hard to reject the idea, which is now popular among Republican voters skeptical of the security of the machines. If the county moves forward, there will surely be a legal battle at the taxpayer’s expense.

Meanwhile, the debate over legality has drawn attention from the well-known problems that arise when trying to count ballots by hand. This is a particularly difficult task in a presidential election, with dozens of issues per ballot and high turnout.

“The very idea of ​​handcounting is a total red herring,” said Tom Ryan, a Democratic attorney. “Science has proven time and time again that the idea that hand counts are more accurate than spreadsheets is just a superstition.”

Study after study finds counting ballots by hand is a long way off Poor accuracy and Efficient rather than counting Machines simply outperform humans at tasks such as repetitive aggregation. Arizona’s vote is notoriously long, which adds to the challenge. Counties are already struggling to secure election officials, but it’s unclear how they will find the dozens or hundreds of bipartisan teams needed for the task. Additionally, manual tallying is time consuming and can delay election results.

On the legal side, according to several election lawyers, Mr. Borelli may be correct in pointing out that neither the Arizona election law nor the election procedure manual, which has legal force, requires that ballots cast in all elections must be counted by machine. The Arizona State Legislative Council is the legislative body of law, wrote last year The law “does not specifically require counties to use electronic counting devices or prohibit counties from manually counting all ballots.”

Still, Secretary of State Adrian Fontes, along with many election lawyers, believe it is illegal under other provisions of the law.

Former state elections director and Republican attorney Eric Spencer pointed to a number of provisions, including one in the manual that says counties can only count ballots “manually” if it becomes impossible to count all or part of the ballot using the counting device. Lawyer Tom Ryan said one example of what might not be feasible is when small jurisdictions, such as school districts, are racially restricted and run their own elections with a small number of votes.

As Mr. Fontes, a Democrat, rewrite the election procedure manual This summer, he will have the opportunity to be more specific about when counties must use machines and when they can count ballots by hand. It is unclear whether he will.

Fontes I sent a letter to the Mojave County superintendent last month. In deliberating whether to consider hand tallying, it warned that it believed it would violate both federal and state law if it did, and urged it to “consider the adverse impact on the electoral system, voters, and taxpayers that would result from the introduction of an untested, unsubstantiated electoral process.”

But Borrelli told Mojave regulators not to be discouraged by potential lawsuits. “If they want to sue, sue me. I have an army ready to fight,” he said, standing before residents in a packed boardroom.

Laws on the issue vary by country, and counties in other states are feeling the pressure as well. In Texas, they move around the state with what the Republican group calls “the”.hand count roadshow,” shows a hand-counting method that they believe brings transparency, but this raises a lot of questions about how the results are aggregated and verified.

Borrelli told Hilla’s supervisor that he recently spoke with the county attorney in the state and was told the law specifically doesn’t allow handcounting, nor does it specifically prohibit it.

“The media and other regulators in other provinces want to convince people of the myth,” Borrelli said in the Mojave.

Spencer, a former state elections director, believes that the language of state law and election procedure manuals is fairly clear that machines must be used. Along with the manual’s provision that manual counting should be done only when machine counting is “impossible,” state law implies that all ballots are: “automatically” counted.

of Letter of FontesHe cites case law explaining that county regulators have only powers “expressly conferred by statute” and cannot act beyond those powers. He also wrote that under federal law, states must follow plans set out for the use of secure voting systems under the Help America Vote Act.

Also, there is no process on how to count by hand. That could lead to a lack of proper vote tracking and security, Fontes wrote. And the long turnaround time could threaten the county’s ability to “review election results in a timely manner within 20 days after the election, as required by state law,” he wrote.

But Republican attorney and Scottsdale Rep. Alexander Collodin disagreed, saying that several sections of the statute and manuals suggest that using machines is a choice. one line Some of the rules state that they “apply to all elections where counting devices are used,” while others set rules for all elections “where voting is conducted by electronic voting machines or tallying machines.”

Corrodin believes state law not only allows counties to manually count all ballots at the time of the initial ballot count, but also during a partial hand-count audit of ballots after the initial count, which has specific processes established by state law. At Tuesday’s hearing, he represented an oral argument in an appeal from the trial court’s November ruling that the Cochise County regulator had no right to proceed with a full prosecution audit.

The lawsuit only addresses the number of ballots the county can hand count during an audit, but appeals court judges also wanted to hear Tuesday whether the machine could be scrapped entirely for initial counting. Justice Peter Eckerstrom suggested that the county should provide a clear direction before the presidential election.

“Aren’t elections supposed to reveal the future?” he asked. “And isn’t there ambiguity? And wouldn’t the published opinion from the Court of Appeal, and perhaps ultimately the Supreme Court, provide the clarity it needs, in whatever direction it goes, so that the oversight committees and election commissions going into the next election know exactly what they can and can’t do?”

Judge Michael Kelly said it was unclear how many counties would be interested in hand-counting ballots in 2024.

Rogers told Gila and Mojave directors that they would be considered heroes if they chose to count by hand rather than using machines. compare them to soldiers at war.

Regulators in Cochise and Pinal counties, along with Gila and Mojave counties, said they wanted to investigate what it takes to manually count ballots. Pinal start But then stop the trial.

Others have already tried counting ballots by hand, but have found it takes longer than expected and is difficult to get accurate results. The most significant example was in Arizona, when cyber ninjas attempted to manually count the 2.1 million votes cast in the 2020 Maricopa County election. But it took more than 100 man-months and millions of dollars, and no amount of attempts could give an accurate tally.

Gila County Superintendent Steve Christensen told Votebeat he is interested in efforts to build voter confidence. He said he wasn’t sure he could do it by counting by hand, and that the most important thing for him was getting the right result, not the method.

Jen Fifield is a reporter for Votebeat based in Arizona. Please contact Jen at jfifield@votebeat.org.

This article is first published To vote beata non-profit news agency covering local election administration and vote access.

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