Georgia Election Board Orders Hand-Counting Of Election Ballots—But Studies Say That’s Less Reliable

Topline

The Georgia State Election Board approved a new rule Friday requiring all counties to hand-count all ballots cast in the upcoming presidential election—a move favored by right-wing officials in the battleground state who claim the rule will prevent miscounts—though multiple studies suggest hand-counting is less reliable than scanners.

Key Facts

An analysis of votes in Wisconsin’s 2011 Supreme Court election, which included a recount of ballots tallied by hand and by machines, found that scanners were closer to the recount totals than the hand-counted ballots, according to a 2018 study by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Charles Stewart, director of MIT’s Election Data and Science Lab, told The Washington Post the study’s findings were likely because computers “are very good at tedious, repetitive tasks” like counting votes, while “humans are bad at them.”

MIT released an earlier study analyzing elections in New Hampshire from 1946 to 2002, finding poll workers who counted ballots by hand were off by 8%, while voting machines had an error rate of about 0.5%.

Another study published in 2008 by Rice University found that hand-counting ballots produces more errors than machine tabulation, indicating people counting by hand were correct less than 58% of the time while estimating a recount of 120 ballots would take one person more than 50 minutes.

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News Peg

The Georgia State Election Board voted 3-2 on Friday in favor of the measure, which requires counties to start hand-counting ballots the night of the November election or the following day, before they are counted by machines. The GOP-led board has adopted other rules for the upcoming election, including a measure in August requiring county election officials to certify results “after reasonable inquiry” that the vote total and election results are “complete and accurate.” Another rule approved by the board allows county election board members to “examine all election related documentation” before they vote to certify results, though they did not specify which documents.

Chief Critic

Elizabeth Young, a senior assistant to Georgia Attorney General Chris Carr, a Republican, wrote a letter to the board arguing officials “very likely” violated state law by requiring counties to hand-count ballots, according to The New York Times. John Fervier, the board’s chair, acknowledged this before the vote Friday and said the board was “going against the advice of our legal counsel” by approving the measure, adding the board does not have the authority to pass the rule, the Times reported.

Surprising Fact

It reportedly took two county commissioners and a few election workers more than seven hours to hand-count all 317 ballots cast in Goldfield, Nevada, for the state’s primary election in 2022. A hand-count audit of 2.1 million ballots in Maricopa County, Arizona, after the 2020 election took more than two months, according to the county.

Key Background

A wave of new ballot measures in Georgia comes after supporters of former President Donald Trump promoted false claims that President Joe Biden stole the state’s election in 2020. Biden won the battleground state by fewer than 12,000 votes—after about 5 million votes were cast—and some right-wing officials claimed the margin was likely caused by errors with voting machine tabulators, calling for votes to be hand-counted. Dominion and Smartmatic, two companies that manufacture voting machines, have been linked to the baseless conspiracy theories and have taken those claims to court. Dominion—which serves all of Georgia’s counties—settled its defamation lawsuit against Fox News in April for nearly $800 million, avoiding a trial that likely would have featured testimony from the network’s top figures. A judge ruled earlier this month a lawsuit filed by Smartmatic against Newsmax would go to trial after Smartmatic accused the network of spreading false claims against the company. Cybersecurity officials and other state election officials have also denied the claims, saying the 2020 elections were the “most secure in American history.”

Further Reading