Hand-counting ballots? This election worker says, ‘Hell, no’ | The Gazette

Nov. 3, 2024 5:00 am

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this column are those of its author and do not represent the views or opinions of the Linn County Auditor’s Office.

If the headline didn’t make it absolutely clear what I think of the idea of tabulating every voted electoral ballot by hand, I’ll repeat myself:

Hell, no.

I’m biased, of course, having worked on demand for my county elections department for 10 years to operate early voting sites and Election Day polling places.

But one person’s bias is another person’s insight. After 10 wonderful years of this exhausting and engaging work, I can confidently say that if Iowa ever bans the counting of ballots by machine, Iowans can count a lot of good election workers out.

Luckily, it won’t happen in Iowa anytime soon. Aside from recounts in tight races, hand-counting is only permitted in limited scope, and legislation introduced in 2024 to strike that part of Iowa Code suggests lawmakers are more amenable to prohibiting than expanding it.

But we’re still discussing it thanks to conspiracy theories spawned by crackpots who are consumed and spread by followers who believe they’re acting in good faith to protect the integrity and security of elections in their state and the country.

The most well-known of the election conspiracy crackpots is Dr. Douglas Frank, a former math teacher at a school for gifted students in Ohio. Frank is supported by Mike Lindell, the kooky MyPillow guy whose business and personal wealth has more or less collapsed due to his own antics claiming the 2020 election was stolen by manipulated voting machines.

Frank has traveled the county extensively since 2021, regaling audiences with tales about how “just about every county in the country was hacked.” At most of his appearances, including a well-attended stop in Buchanan County in 2022, Frank has presented detailed graphs and explained how an advanced algebraic expression called a sixth-order polynomial — which very few adults can even define — to show stark differences between what he purports to be correct vote totals and actual vote totals.

How do the machines so badly miscount? According to Dr. Frank, by devices using algorithms that provide a “key” to manipulating a machine’s vote totals.

That isn’t just crazy. It’s delusional.

Though the following of election conspiracy theorists like Lindell and Frank is relatively small, some of it is organized. One week after the November 2022 general election, a group called Iowa Canvassing, a number of whose members are followers of Lindell and Frank, held a Zoom meeting to discuss their experiences on Election Day. Several members had served as election workers, some for the first time.

Having already encountered other members of the group whose comments left me feeling alarmed, I joined that Zoom meeting and was shocked to hear some of the participants admit that they recorded the names of some voters in their precincts whom they found suspicious for one reason or another in order to look up those voters in the group’s own database, and even shared those names with the group during the Zoom meeting. Doing so is likely a direct violation of the oath taken by all precinct election officials.

I reported the actions to the appropriate parties later, but believe it or not, they weren’t the most appalling takeaway. After another participant praised his county for their election processes, the group’s leader had a quick response:

“Yeah, well, we know the fraud happens somewhere else, in the computer.”

Another participant chimed in. “Yeah, the little black box, you can’t see what’s going on, you don’t know if you’re being recorded … when they put that device in there, you can reprogram the tabulator, you don’t know what’s going on.”

“In the Internet of Things, floatin’ around!” a third person exclaimed.

It was true tinfoil hat stuff. Until that meeting, I had only read about it.

Currently, one of the main goals of these groups, which bill themselves as “election integrity” groups, is to ban machine tabulation of election ballots.

In early 2023, the county clerk of Osage, a small rural county in Missouri, agreed to an experiment to hand-count all of the ballots in an April 2023 special election with the assistance of Missouri Canvassers, a group that describes itself as “citizen volunteers in Missouri canvassing across the state to collect election evidence.”

After the closing of the polls in Osage County, election workers divided the ballots into batches and scored the election on a series of numbered bubble sheets similar to those for a standardized test. Each candidate and ballot measure was assigned a number column and votes for each batch were recorded by filling a bubble for each vote in the column in numerical order. Out of only 11 polling places, four turned in their results by the projected finish time. Three others finished between 90 minutes and two hours late.

“I fear that if we were to continue hand counting it would cost us more in time, money, losing volunteers, and accuracy of votes,” wrote then-Osage County Clerk Nicci Kammerich. “Our tabulation machines that the county uses for elections are faster, accurate and more efficient to get the job done. With the process of the recount when using tabulation machines, we can ensure there is no fraud and everything is accurate in a timely manner for our citizens. Our office intends to move forward with our tabulation machines for upcoming elections.”

The whole idea of hand-counting centers on the premise that electronic ballot tabulators, which under Iowa law must receive certification before being used in an election, don’t always accurately count votes.

Is it possible for an electronic ballot counting machine be corrupted to the point that it records inaccurate numbers — and declares the wrong winners? Sure.

Any machine can be corrupted inadvertently by human error or random malfunction. That’s why Iowa law requires that every automatic tabulating device used in any election undergo testing before each election in which it is used, with access granted to the public to witness.

And yes, any machine — including ones with no internet connectivity, like Iowa’s electronic ballot tabulators — can be corrupted when physically tampered with. That’s one of a number of reasons why Iowa Administrative Code mandates that each county have a written policy with “detailed plans to protect the election equipment and data from unauthorized access, which must describe who has access to the voting equipment (including computers,) document the entire voting process and explain the methods used to preserve its integrity.”

Non-compliance woes usually motivate county elections commissioners and their deputies to keep their balloting equipment under lock and key and establish procedures to make sure they can’t be tampered with. In the off chance they don’t, scrutiny from an angry public — and from law enforcement — surely would.

Should any of them still be brazen (and stupid) enough to consider tampering with the machines or giving someone else access, the threat of serious prison time might deter them. If not … book ‘em, Danno.

Those standards and measures aren’t enough for election deniers. To them, the mere potential for a machine to be corrupted — however unlikely that is thanks to Iowa’s prescribed security measures — is too great to chance.

They seem to not consider that humans are still corruptible with or without machines. Eliminating them isn’t guaranteed to eliminate fraud or other inaccuracies caused by bad actors.

If bad actors can breach the existing physical, electronic and human security measures and gain access to machines for nefarious purposes, it’s likely they can also breach other barriers such as the conscience of a principled person. Or a whole group of them. Even if they’re election officials.

Yes, it’s crazy to think that whole groups of Iowans who took an oath to be fair and impartial and work to prevent fraud and deceit could all be blackmailed or bribed into fixing the totals — even purely hypothetically.

But if the election conspiracy theorists find it crazy to think that a whole bipartisan group of election workers can be corrupted into skewing their hand-counted ballot totals to throw an election, they should remember that they’re the ones who think elections are being stolen by little black boxes with dirty algorithms that somehow get past layers of human and digital security to be implanted into all the ballot-counting machines.

But a person doesn’t need a corrupt conscience for hand-counting ballots to fail. If counting begins in every precinct at the end of Election Day, when workers had to report at 6 a.m., stay for 14 straight hours and then tackle an already-long list of closing responsibilities, those workers risk being corrupted by their own fatigue.

It exhausts me just thinking about it.

In September 2017, I was one of eight workers for a school board and bond issue election in the Linn-Mar district. We arrived at 5:45 a.m. and served 2,599 voters over 13 hours. How late into the night would it have taken us to count those ballots by hand?

Don’t even get me started on absentee/early ballots, which Iowa law requires be counted in bulk on Election Day.

In Linn County, in-person early voting is poised to exceed 30,000 in-person voters. Without our impressively accurate high-speed tabulator, how many workers would be needed to count a five-figure number of ballots by hand? What would it cost to train and pay them? How much space would be needed to complete the task?

It’s a lot of questions, but only one needs an answer. Should Iowa require hand-counted ballots? Hell, no.

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