Why do election experts oppose hand-counting ballots?

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What is the most accurate way to count votes in U.S. elections? Is it by hand, as many Republican lawmakers have been demanding in the aftermath of 2020? Or the traditional way in which machines tally results?

Election experts resoundingly agree that hand-counting ballots takes longer than counting with machines, it’s less reliable, and it’s a logistical nightmare for U.S. elections — including in Pennsylvania.

A sizable number of Republican lawmakers have pushed for switching to hand-counts in recent years, an argument rooted in false conspiracy theories that voting systems were manipulated to steal the 2020 election. Though there is no evidence of widespread fraud or tampering of machines in the 2020 election, some activists and officials across the country, including in Pennsylvania, continue to promote proposals to hand count ballots.

Numerous studies — in voting and other fields such as banking and retail — have shown that people make far more errors counting than do machines, especially when reaching larger and larger numbers. They’re also vastly slower.

“Hand-counting ballots is slower and less accurate than using machines to do that task,” said Marc Meredith, a political science professor at the University of Pennsylvania.

Stephen Ansolabehere, a professor of government at Harvard University who has conducted research on hand-counts, said that in one study in New Hampshire, he found poll workers who counted ballots by hand were off by as much as 8%. The average error rate for machine counting was 0.5%, Ansolabehere said.

Hand counting ballots in Pennsylvania elections would be “impractical” due in part to the number of mail ballots that counties need to process, Meredith said.

“The amount of labor and time you would need to accomplish that task would just not be feasible,” he said.

Just how long can hand-counting delay results? Depending on jurisdiction and staffing, it could be days, weeks or even months.

For instance, in Cobb County, Georgia, after the 2020 election, a hand tally ordered by the state for just presidential votes on about 397,00 ballots took hundreds of people five days. A county election official estimated it would have taken 100 days to count every race on each ballot using the same procedures.

Countries like France use hand counting, but Ansolabehere said they typically have simpler elections with just one race at a time.

In the U.S., ballots are far more complicated, sometimes containing dozens of local, state and federal races at a time.

Hand-counting does happen in some rural areas in the U.S., such as in parts of the Northeast. But in large jurisdictions like Philadelphia or Los Angeles, it would take too long and not be feasible, experts say.

In Pennsylvania, hand tallies are used only in cases of post-election reviews, which use random samples of ballots unless there is a full recount in a tight race. These are done without the time pressure of trying to report results the same night.

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This story is part of an explanatory series focused on Pennsylvania elections produced collaboratively by WITF in Harrisburg and The Associated Press.

This article is part of U.S. Democracy Day, a nationwide collaborative on Sept. 15, the International Day of Democracy, in which news organizations cover how democracy works and the threats it faces. To learn more, visit usdemocracyday.org.