Voters in at least three rural South Dakota counties are set to decide Tuesday whether to return to manual ballot counting, marking the latest in communities across the nation considering abandoning machine-based counting based on baseless conspiracy theories stemming from the 2020 presidential election.
The three counties, all with populations of fewer than 6,000, will be the first in the U.S. to require old-fashioned hand-counting, a method that has been replaced by ballot-counting machines in most parts of the country.
Many other states and localities have considered banning machine counting since the 2020 election, but most of those efforts have stalled over concerns about the cost, the time it would take to count votes by hand and the difficulty of hiring additional staff to do so.
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Experts say counting votes by hand is less accurate than a machine-generated tally.
Supporters of South Dakota’s initiative aren’t intimidated by such concerns.
“We believe that decentralized elections are much safer and more transparent, and that citizens should be able to monitor their own elections,” said Jessica Pollema, head of SD Canvassing, a civil society group that supports the reform.
As in other states, the push for a manual count in South Dakota stems from false claims made by former President Donald Trump and his allies after the 2020 presidential election. They alleged widespread voter fraud and spread conspiracy theories that voting machines were tampered with to steal the election. There is no evidence to support these claims, but they have taken root in many areas that voted heavily for Trump.
In South Dakota, petitions to ban the machines are set to appear on Tuesday’s primary ballot in Gregory, Haakon and Tripp counties. Pollema said similar petitions are underway in more than 40 counties in the conservative state for upcoming votes. At least four counties have rejected attempts to force a manual count.
Previously, the Fall River County Commission voted in February to manually count ballots for the June election, and Tripp County manually counted ballots for the 2022 general election.
From left, Jessica Pollema speaks at the Military Heritage Alliance in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, on Oct. 19, 2023. She is the co-founder of South Dakota Canvassing and a leading advocate for doing away with the machines and counting ballots by hand in South Dakota. (Stu Whitney/South Dakota News Watch via The Associated Press)
If the bill passes Tuesday, Gregory County Auditor Julie Bartling said the county would have to increase the number of polling places to ease the burden of manual counting. That would force the county to buy more assistive voting devices for voters with disabilities. The county would also face the difficult task of hiring more election staff.
Bartling, who runs elections in the county, opposed the bill, saying he had “full confidence in the automated vote-counting machines.”
Todd and Tripp County Auditor Barb DeCersa also opposes efforts to require all ballots to be counted by hand, saying the method is not accurate. She said manual counting in 2022 has exhausted election staff.
“I know that people who participated last time don’t want to be involved this time around, so I think after we do it once or twice they’ll get bored of it and it’ll be harder to find people to volunteer,” DeCersa said.
DeCersa’s office estimates the cost of manually counting Tripp County’s election will be $17,000 to $25,000. Using machines would cost about $19,000 to $21,000. Haakon County Auditor Stacey Pinney initially estimated the cost of manually counting at $750 to $4,500, but said “overall, it’s difficult to determine the cost of an election at this point.”
According to an analysis by the Haakon County State’s Attorney, it would take two election workers three to four hours to count all the ballots using a tabulating machine, and five to 15 hours for 15 to 20 election workers to count them by hand, depending on the number of contested races.
The three counties have a combined total of 7,725 active registered voters, according to statewide reports.
Republican state Rep. Rocky Blair, a Tripp County resident, said he would vote against the bill.
“They cannot prove to me that there were any issues that would have affected the election in South Dakota,” Blair said.
Republican Secretary of State Monae Johnson expressed confidence in the machines, noting that they have been in use for many years. In a statement, Johnson noted that “safeguards are built into the entire counting process, including post-election audits after each primary and general election to ensure the machines are functioning properly.”
The June election will be the first to undergo a post-election audit, part of a 2023 state law that involves hand-counting all votes in two races in 5% of precincts in each county to ensure the machine tally is accurate. Johnson’s office said there was no evidence of widespread problems in 2020 or 2022. One person voted twice, which is when it was discovered, Johnson said.
Dominion Voting Systems reached a $787 million settlement in a defamation lawsuit last year over false claims repeatedly aired by Fox News after repeated attacks on its machine vote-counting in the 2020 presidential election. The judge in that case found it “absolutely clear” that none of the claims about Dominion’s machines were true, and testimony revealed that many Fox hosts privately doubted the claims the company was airing.
Only a few counties have switched to manual counting since 2020. In California, Shasta County officials voted to eliminate ballot-counting machines, but state lawmakers later limited manual counting to limited circumstances. Officials in Mohave County, Arizona, rejected a proposal to count ballots by hand in 2023, citing the $1.1 million cost.
David Levine, a former local elections official in Idaho and now a senior fellow at the Alliance for Securing Democracy, said studies have shown that counting large numbers of ballots by hand is more costly, less accurate and takes longer than machine tallying.
“If you listen to conspiracy theorists and election skeptics across the country, they’ll say that one of the reasons the 2020 election was rigged was because of algorithms, and therefore removing computers from the voting process will make our elections more secure,” Levine said. “The only problem is that that’s not true.”
Some places still count ballots by hand, mostly in the Northeast, where there are fewer registered voters. Hand counts are common during post-election tests to make sure machines are counting ballots accurately, but only a small percentage of ballots are checked by hand.
Election experts say it’s unrealistic to think officials in large jurisdictions with tens or hundreds of thousands of voters can count all the ballots by hand and quickly report results, because ballots often contain multiple elections.
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“The problem is that humans aren’t very good at large-scale, tedious, repetitive tasks like counting ballots; computers are,” Levine said. “Anyone who thinks otherwise is either unaware of this reality or chooses to ignore it.”
