Topline
A judge on Monday blocked a rural Arizona county from moving forward with a plan by Republican officials to hand-count every ballot cast in Tuesday’s midterm, shutting down the latest attempt by swing-state officials to pore through votes by hand this year—a push driven in part by evidence-free allegations that voting machines are rife with fraud.
A election worker recounts ballots in Madison, Wisconsin, November 20.
Key Facts
Judge Casey McGinley ruled that Cochise County—a sparsely populated area on the U.S.-Mexico border—can’t tally its votes using both machines and a manual count, arguing this process violates state election rules that only allow counties to hand-count a small number of randomly selected ballots in order to check for accuracy.
The county’s board of supervisors voted 2-1 last month to order a hand count, citing voters’ concerns about election integrity, with the county’s two Republican supervisors voting yes while the body’s lone Democrat voted no, according to the Associated Press.
A group of retirees represented by prominent Democratic attorney Marc Elias’ law firm sued the county, arguing a manual count “will sow confusion among voters and undermine the public’s confidence in Arizona’s elections.”
Secretary of State and gubernatorial candidate Katie Hobbs (D) argued in a brief that Cochise County’s hand-counting plan could raise ballot security concerns, lead to inaccuracies and “threaten the County’s ability to timely canvass its election.”
Meanwhile, an attorney for County Recorder David Stevens, who handles voter registration and was tasked with helping to oversee the hand count, has said there’s no harm in checking for accuracy by counting ballots twice—once by machine and once by hand—and stated he had a plan to finish the count before a state-imposed deadline.
Stevens’ lawyer also argued the county is protected by a provision in Arizona’s election rules that give counties the discretion to hand-count more ballots than the minimum required to check for accuracy (Judge McGinley said Monday this policy doesn’t give officials the power to count every single vote from every precinct).
Chief Critic
“Allowing Cochise County to proceed with an unlawful full hand count – motivated by baseless conspiracy theories – would set a dangerous precedent and inject chaos, disruption, and insecurity in the middle of an election,” Hobbs’ office said in its amicus brief.
Contra
“No voter will be negatively impacted by this decision [to hand-count ballots],” Stevens’ attorney argued in court papers. “The expanded hand count will merely serve as an additional confirmation of the accuracy of that process.”
Surprising Fact
Cochise County isn’t the only place where courts have scuttled plans to hand-count every ballot. Officials in rural Nye County, Nevada, began counting early ballots by hand over a week ago, citing suspicion about voting machines, but the state Supreme Court ruled the process was illegal, forcing it to grind to a halt after just two days. And Arizona gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake (R) and Secretary of State candidate Mark Finchem (R)—both of whom have promoted false voter fraud allegations—filed an unsuccessful lawsuit against Hobbs seeking to bar the use of voting machines and require hand counts statewide.
Tangent
If the goal of hand-counting ballots is to make elections more reliable, many experts think this approach could backfire. Hand counts are prone to human error and can lead to mistakes in vote tallies, according to some research. Manually counting ballots is also slow: On the first day of Nye County’s hand count last month, some groups of volunteers took three hours to count just 50 ballots, and mistakes led to time-consuming recounts, the AP reported.
Key Background
This week’s midterms are the first nationwide elections since the 2020 presidential race, which former President Donald Trump falsely claimed was ridden by fraud. Since then, many Republican voters and elected officials have echoed Trump’s unproven voter fraud allegations and called for wide-ranging changes to how elections are conducted, often fixating on unsubstantiated claims that voting machines are rigged. Last year, Arizona’s GOP-controlled state Senate commissioned an “audit” of ballots cast in 2020 in Maricopa County to look for evidence of fraud, kicking off an often-bizarre process that reportedly included inspecting some ballots for traces of bamboo to assuage conspiracy theorists who believed phony votes were shipped in from Asia. The audit—led by an obscure company called Cyber Ninjas—confirmed President Joe Biden’s win in the county. And earlier this year, officials in a small New Mexico county briefly refused to certify the results of a midterm election due to vague and unfounded concerns about voting machines, though they eventually signed off on the election results due to an order from the state Supreme Court.
Source: https://www.forbes.com/sites/joewalsh/2022/11/07/some-gop-counties-want-to-hand-count-all-ballots-but-judges-say-thats-illegal/