Chaos, errors, conspiracies, and a potential presidential power grab.
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If Americans are lucky, the country won’t have to wait for the results in Georgia to know the winner of the 2024 presidential election.
That’s because the new hand-count rule adopted last Friday by the Georgia State Election Board is going to delay and complicate the counting of votes. The rule requires local election workers to hand count the number of ballots to ensure they match the number of legal voters. Superficially, and from afar, that inventory measure — not to be confused with the counting of votes — might appear reasonable.
Making sure that the number of ballots equals the number of voters is a routine step in the inventory control process that’s behind the scenes in running an election. It’s simpler and comes before counting votes on those ballots, which can contain numerous contests. Nonetheless, this step is usually done by electronic scanners, as they have repeatedly been shown to be more accurate and faster than hand counts.
In the real world of running elections, Georgia’s new hand-count rule is likely to fuel all kinds of conspiratorial claims — before any votes are even counted.
Academics and elections officials have documented that repetitive hand counts involving thousands of sheets of paper — ballots — are not as accurate as machine counts. Hand counts are also more costly and time-consuming, as this video from the Illinois State Board of Elections explains. It cites recent hand counts in Wisconsin, New Hampshire, Nevada, California, and Pennsylvania. Academics at Rice University and MIT reached the same conclusion.
Fueling Conspiracies
In the real world of running elections, Georgia’s new hand-count rule is likely to fuel all kinds of conspiratorial claims — before any votes are even counted. That’s because election workers will err. They may think they just hand-counted and put rubber bands around 50 ballots, for example, when they may actually have bundled 49 or 51 ballots. Scale that scenario in a state where 5 million ballots were cast in 2020, and an eruption of delays and partisan accusations is likely.
Georgia’s own experience with hand counts shows that errors will occur. In the wake of its close 2020 presidential election, every county recounted — by hand — its presidential vote as part of a process known as a “risk limiting audit.” The audit confirmed that Joe Biden won, but the secretary of state’s report also documented the errors associated with the hand count.
The report said that “prior research indicates that the expected variance between hand and machine counts, assuming no issues beyond normal human error (my emphasis) in the counting process, ranges anywhere from 1.0 – 1.5% across all ballot types.”
In other words, miscounting even mere sheets of paper — the volume of ballots — is to be expected, the report said. The secretary of state’s office then went on to boast that Georgia’s error rate was below what was expected: “Georgia shows a 0.1053% (0.001053) variation in statewide total vote count, and a 0.0099% (0.000099) variation in the overall [presidential] margin.”
But there still were hand-count mistakes. With 5,000,585 presidential ballots tallied in Georgia’s 2020 audit, that error rate means that 5,266 ballots were missed by election workers. Or, more precisely, 5,266 more ballots were detected earlier in the process by electronic scanners. In the final analysis, that discrepancy didn’t affect the state’s presidential outcome because the “audit” reported that Joe Biden defeated Trump by 12,284 votes — a larger margin than both the missed ballots and Biden’s margin in the initial count.
Hands-On Experience
Before considering the political implications of Georgia’s Trump-allied state election board inserting a last-minute hand-count requirement, it’s worth understanding how hand-count errors occur. In short, when people do repetitive tasks, some mistakes are inevitable. This includes counting and batching ballots as part of an election’s inventory control process.
How do I know this? In March 2024, I was a Marin County election official during California’s presidential primary. I hand-counted more than 10,000 ballots and put them in rubber band- wrapped batches of 50 each, as they were extracted from mailed-in ballot envelopes. I also counted thousands of ballots during a pre-certification audit that came later in the process.
Guess what? Despite my deliberate and conscious efforts to be accurate — by separating 10 ballots at a time before bundling them in batches of 50 (to fill storage boxes of 500) — scanners found the number of ballots in my batches were occasionally off. At that point in the process, such small mistakes didn’t matter because the scanners were used to verify or adjust the number of ballots in a batch. That machine count happened before the tabulation system software started detecting votes on every ballot and compiling vote totals.
Marin County has the same scanning technology that is used statewide in Georgia.
Later in the process, in the pre-certification audit, I hand-counted ballots to confirm that the ballot inventory totals and vote-count totals produced by scanners were correct. The team of people I was working with would occasionally make mistakes with our hand counts of the number of ballots and the vote totals. We’d have to go back and start again. (We found that the tabulation system made no mistakes.)
This is the hands-on reality behind election officials and experts saying that hand counts are less precise than electronic counts.
Practical and Political Consequences
It’s not difficult to see the political implications of the George State Election Board’s new hand-count rule — if it is not reversed in court. The requirement will create delays and disparities that could become a pretext for Donald Trump-supporting Republicans to challenge Georgia’s results and Electoral College votes — if Trump loses.
Under Georgia’s current election law, counties have only seven days — until 5 p.m. on the Monday after Election Day — to compile and certify their official results. In 2020, Georgia’s presidential statewide hand count took eight days to conduct. Not only is the new rule’s time frame slightly shorter, but Georgia’s county officials have many other tasks associated with wrapping up an election and compiling the official results after Election Day.
If Georgia’s hand-count rule stands, Americans better hope the 2024 presidential election does not come down to the Peach State’s 16 Electoral College votes.
It is foreseeable that there will be delays attributable to adding the hand-count requirement. It is foreseeable that the number of ballots in the hand count will differ from the volume reported by electronic scanners — (which will also tally votes). It is foreseeable that those disparities will add fuel to conspiratorial fires and power plays. It also is possible that some counties may not meet the state’s Monday (Nov. 11) certification deadline.
If Georgia’s hand-count rule stands, Americans better hope the 2024 presidential election does not come down to the Peach State’s 16 Electoral College votes. On the other hand, one can expect that Trump Republicans will seek to exploit any election administration snafu or discrepancy — even if, as in 2020, the presidency also hinges on outcomes in other states.
It’s hard to imagine scenarios where the Georgia State Election Board’s new hand-count requirement will not fuel partisan distrust — especially if Trump is defeated.
Steven Rosenfeld is a longtime national political reporter. Most recently, he has specialized in election administration and disinformation. He has covered those topics for Washington Monthly, The New Republic, L.A. Progressive, AlterNet and others. Previously, he covered money and politics for National Public Radio, Monitor Radio, and Marketplace.
