The GOP nominees for Arizona governor and secretary of state, both of whom baselessly claim the 2020 election was stolen, and face uphill battles to win in November, lost their federal lawsuit to compel Arizona to count ballots by hand. (See story here.)
What they tried to do in court, Republicans in other states are attempting with legislation (see story here). In general, those efforts aren’t going anywhere, in part because hand-counting votes isn’t feasible except in small rural counties. There are just too many votes to count.
In Arizona, Republican legislators commissioned an unofficial hand-counted “audit” of Maricopa County, which has about two-thirds of the state’s population and voters. It cost $5.7 million, required hundreds of workers, and took months to complete — just to count the votes for president. That “audit” came up with 99 more votes for Biden and 261 fewer votes for Trump than the official tally. The latter almost certainly was more accurate.
Using machines to scan ballots and computers to tally them isn’t just much faster and less expensive, it’s far less prone to human error. They’re not 100.00000% foolproof. When hand recounts are done in close elections, they usually pick up a few more votes for both candidates from ballots that were overlooked or the machines couldn’t read. The potential swing in a statewide race is typically a few dozen votes.
A very high percentage of grassroots Republicans still don’t believe the 2020 election results, although there’s no evidence to support their belief that Biden won because of massive fraud. Where scattered recounts were done, for example those paid for by the Trump campaign of two Wisconsin Democratic stronghold counties, they verified the results.
Since then, the GOP has pushed to recruit supporters to work elections. But after looking, I don’t find any evidence their efforts to replace voting machines with hand counting of ballots is part of a scheme to control vote counting to tilt outcomes to their favor. They’ve been told voting machines can’t be trusted, and I think they just don’t trust that method of counting votes.
Interestingly, Republicans currently control Arizona’s legislature and governorship, so if they really wanted to count votes by hand, they could require it by legislation. Of course, they would have to come up with huge sums of taxpayer money to pay for it, which I would guess is what’s holding them back.
It’s much cheaper to simply sow distrust of the voting process, then use that as an excuse to dispute the results if they lose.