Voters in three small South Dakota counties on Tuesday rejected a measure that would have required manual vote counting in future elections.
The votes in Gregory, Haakon and Tripp counties were an unusual step as other parts of the U.S. consider moving to manual counting in the wake of former President Donald Trump’s claims of fraud in the 2020 election.
The measure sought to ban the use of tabulating machines and require a manual count, which local election officials say would be more expensive and require more election staff that may be hard to find. Election experts say manual vote tallying is not as accurate as machine tallying.
Three South Dakota counties vote to resume manual ballot counting
The measure may not be the only one on the ballot in South Dakota. Residents in dozens of other counties are circulating petitions calling for hand-count measures, according to Jessica Pollema, president of SD Canvassing, a group supporting the effort. Other hand-count proposals “probably” could appear on the November ballot, she said. Pollema did not immediately respond to phone and email messages seeking comment on the election results.
Voters in three small South Dakota counties have rejected a proposal that would have required all ballots to be counted by hand in upcoming elections.
“Obviously the voters have spoken, but it seems like the voters believe we’re going to go back to the past. And there’s trust in this system. There’s no reason not to trust it,” said Todd and Tripp County Auditor Barb DeCersa, who opposed the bill.
Voter turnout in Tripp County was 37%, which she said is typical for a primary election. The three rural counties have a combined 7,744 registered voters, according to online reports.
South Dakota’s primary election will be the first to undergo a post-election audit, a new process that requires all counties in 2023 to manually count the results of two elections in 5% of precincts and compare them to the official results. But Tripp County will follow the direction of the county commission and manually count the entire election for the audit, DeCersa said. In 2022, Tripp County hand-counted ballots for the general election.
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Fall River County’s county commissioners voted earlier this year to hand-count the ballots in the primary election. County Auditor Sue Ganje said it took about 40 election workers more than six hours to manually count 1,913 votes.
