Groups push for hand counting ballots across Arkansas

In Arkansas, machines count votes. But, there’s been a recent statewide push to count votes by hand for each election.

Col. Conrad Reynolds thinks Arkansas voting machines could be flipping votes.

“I believe 100% that we have no way of knowing, the way our current system is, whether our vote counted or not,” he said.

He doesn't know exactly why or exactly how. He doesn't even blame local election officials, but he is suspicious of ES&S, the company that makes the machines. He also thinks voting machines could explain why more members of the far-right Freedom Caucus are not in elected positions in Arkansas.

“We know that people want to be able to make sure that their candidate gets in, whether it's a big corporation or it's a social network,” he said. “There's a lot of reasons why people would want to manipulate our elections.”

Reynolds runs the Arkansas Voter Integrity Initiative. Their main focus: getting rid of voting machines. They want paper ballots.

But technically Arkansas isn't paperless.

When we vote, we make our selection on a touch screen machine, then print the vote out on paper. The voter then puts the paper in a tabulator.

Reynolds thinks this is where something nefarious could be happening. In between the vote and the printing of the ballot, he says, the machine could be "flipping" the votes.

He also leaves open the possibility that the tabulator could be counting them incorrectly.

“I have hundreds of affidavits from people who voted who said ‘I saw it flip on me.’”

Reynolds did not provide Little Rock Public Radio with the affidavits. LRPR has found no evidence that voting machines or tabulators in Arkansas are changing votes without voters' knowledge.

But if true, it's not the only time a person in the United States has claimed their vote switched in the machine. In 2022, the Brennan Center wrote a report about voting machine integrity. The report said older voting machines have calibration issues that could explain some of these claims. But the allegations were all in other states with older machines that are no longer being manufactured. Arkansas has made consistent efforts to update their voting equipment.

Amanda Dickens works for the Pulaski County Election Commission. She has never seen a machine flip votes. The machine asks you to approve your selections before you submit them, and Dickens said you have an opportunity to redo your vote before you put it in the tabulator. And, you can go back and redo your vote before you print it.

“So if you get to the point where you print it out and you're like ‘oh my God, I accidentally selected Bob when I meant Jim,' yes, you can spoil that ballot. We can issue you a new ballot.”

She theorized any vote-flipping allegations could be caused by people voting with long fingernails or people pushing the top of the box containing the candidate they want and then accidentally clicking the name above.

The tabulators and the voting machines are massively regulated. Hundreds of pages of laws oversee state voting machines.

Arkansas election officials have to do several logic and accuracy tests, a public demonstration of the machines, and a test the morning of the election to make sure zero votes have been counted. The results from the test are made public. Election officials who spoke with Little Rock Public Radio say they follow the law down to the letter.

Reynolds acknowledges election commissioners do these things, he doesn't blame them personally, but he also thinks there could be something nefarious in the machine itself beyond what state officials can control.

“You can program that computer to do anything,” he said.

But counties can, and do, a check after the election to see if the paper ballots put in the machine matched what the tabulator counted.

Every election, the state picks out 15 counties at random to do a vote recount audit. They check that the paper votes put into the machine are identical to the votes counted on the electronic tabulator.

In 2022, every county selected received a perfect score except one: Searcy County. This is also the only county in the state still counting votes by hand.

“We were very disturbed by that, because we want every vote to count,” said Lauren Gross with the Searcy County Board of Election Commissioners. “We realized that the paperwork we developed needs to be more thorough.”

The county had a system of counting votes by hand using tally sheets. Two votes from the election went missing. 11 never got counted. This may not sound like a big deal, but in local elections, results sometimes come down to a couple of votes.

Officials from Searcy County are adamant that their count will be fine for the 2024 general election. Gross called the 2022 election where the errors happened a “learning curve.”

Reynolds agrees with that.

“There was one mistake, and it didn't cause any issue in the election,” he said.

But other public officials have expressed concern about the cost of hand-counting.

Pulaski County Election Coordinator Amanda Dickens said if they ditched the machines, it could take at least a month to count votes. That's more time than counties are legally given.

“I couldn't imagine the cost,” she said. “We would have to rent some big, huge facility to house all the people.”

There are proposals to hold all elections without voting machines in at least nine Arkansas counties. If approved by local county clerks, residents across the state would have the chance to vote on whether to go full paper.

Many of the proposals have been struck down. Reynolds and the group Election Integrity Arkansas are challenging some of these decisions in court.

But not every Republican supports hand counting. Last year, state Sen. Kim Hammer, R-Benton, passed a law to require counties opting to ditch voting machines to pay for the cost themselves. The law also mandates that counties be required to have a machine count, even if they have gone to paper only.

During the law's passage, people who want to ax the machines flooded public comment periods to voice their opposition.

Hammer was stunned by the amount of backlash the law got.

“The emails, the text messages, the social media posts,” he said. “I've lost my salvation according to some. I’ve been treated kinder by the pro-abortionists than I have some of my own.”

In closing for the bill, Hammer called the allegations against the machines “conspiracy theories.”

“I lost the first time I ran. I lost by 376 votes,” he said. “I’ll remember that number like I remember my Social Security number. And you know what? I didn't go blaming somebody else. I didn't go casting doubt on my own party or the other party.”

This year, there will be two counties with hand counting proposals on the ballot: Cleburne County and Independence County.