DEMOCRACY WATCHPaper Ballots Are Good, but Accurately Hand-Counting Them All Is Next to Impossible
It is easy to see why a hand-count system seems appealing to many people today. Having ballots scrutinized in person by representatives from the parties provides obvious transparency and accountability. But as a scholar of elections, I know that despite the intuitive appeal of people physically counting pieces of paper, there are two good reasons to avoid hand-counting ballots: speed and accuracy.
Among people, mostly Republicans, who remain the most suspicious of the 2020 presidential election results, there’s something of a movement to return to the days when election ballots in the United States were counted by hand. One 67,000-person county in Georgia recently required a hand count of all ballots, for instance. But they, and others seeking similar changes around the country, are likely to find themselves disappointed – either by failure to mandate hand-counting or by how election results are handled if they succeed.
Requiring hand-counting of all ballots would take elections back many decades to practices that were common in the mid-1800s. In that era, political parties produced a variety of paper “tickets” that were counted at polling places on election night. When states started taking responsibility for producing ballots in the late 19th century, automated machines began to be used for both casting and tabulating votes.
In a 1930s review of voting processes, political scientist Joseph Harris concluded that “[p]robably no part of election administration is conducted so poorly as the count of ballots.” Several of the improvements he suggested were in fact adopted after World War II, helped along by new technologies that were faster, more consistent and less prone to error – like optical scanning systems. Today, the overwhelmingly dominant technology uses paper marked ballots that are tabulated by scanner machines.
It is easy to see why a hand-count system seems appealing to many people today. Having ballots scrutinized in person by representatives from the parties provides obvious transparency and accountability. The true result of the infamous 2000 Bush-Gore contest in Florida remains in doubt, in part, because a hand recount of this kind was not ultimately conducted. States such as Georgia and Wisconsin have undergone hand recounts of the votes cast in their presidential elections. And other democracies such as France hand-count ballots. In short, it seems possible.
But as a scholar of elections, I know that despite the intuitive appeal of people physically counting pieces of paper, there are two good reasons to avoid hand-counting ballots: speed and accuracy.
