States using electronic ballot tabulation machines “require hand-counting of some sort afterwards to prove the machines are accurate,” Linda Rantz said.
By Natalia Mittelstadt JustTheNews.com
ounties across the U.S. are switching to hand-counting election ballots instead of using electronic tabulation machines over concerns about the accuracy and security of the devices.
At the forefront of the transition is election integrity advocate Linda Rantz, who says her model, now being used in a Missouri county, is less expensive than critics continue to say it is.
While the security of the country’s election system has always been a concern, the matter burst into the public eye in the 2020 presidential election, amid the concerns of then-President Trump and others about the reliability and transparency of voting machines.
Early this year, the board of supervisors in California’s Shasta County, with over 110,000 registered voters, decided to move to hand-counting for all of its elections, after voting in January to terminate its contract with Dominion Voting Systems over concerns about its voting machines.
“There is a great sense they would like to return to something simpler and safer and more secure from outside hacking,” said county Board of Supervisors Chairman Patrick Jones.
Dominion in more recent months became the center of attention over the security of its and similar voting machines.
In April, the Fox News Channel agreed to pay Dominion $787.5 million in a defamation lawsuit in connection with the cable network airing claims the company “committed election fraud by rigging the 2020 presidential election” and that its software and algorithms “manipulated vote counts” in the election.
According to Shasta County’s estimate, shifting to hand-counting would increase the net county cost from $2.94 million to $3.14 million.
And county Registrar of Voters Cathy Darling Allen, a Democrat, says 1,300 additional workers also would be needed.
Allen also recently said she has concerns about switching to hand-counting because of the cost and “issues regarding accuracy.”
“We use hand counting at scale across the United States to verify election returns and audit mechanical election processes, and it works really well for that – in small batches,” she said. “But humans are not great at doing repetitive tasks over and over for long periods of time. Machines are.”
Meanwhile, Missouri’s Osage County transitioned to hand-counting ballots in its April election, and the state’s Worth County has been hand-counting elections for the past decade.
Byron Keelin, president of the Freedom Principle MO, told Just the News on Thursday that Missouri allows counties to hand count ballots for elections but it is not a requirement.