Why hand-counting is a good thing

The Maricopa Republican party had its annual meeting on January 13, 2024. The purpose of that meeting is to elect officers, amend by-laws, and pass resolutions. About 2500 delegates were present, either in person or by proxy. This year, for the first time ever, we performed a hand count of the ballots. It took a little over an hour to count the first contest, with 10 candidates.

I can testify that it was fun. Here is a short (3:45) video of the tally.

The size of the electorate was comparable to the number of voters in a typical precinct. Ten contests is much simpler than a typical general election ballot, with perhaps 70 contests, but the same principle that makes the hand-count work — division into small problems — would permit us to divide a general election ballot into sections. Counters would count and announce the national and state contests first, then count the county and municipal contests, then count the judges, and then count the propositions.* With enough thought we might even figure out better ways of selecting judges, and I believe the citizen ballot initiatives are just plain wrong. All legislation should pass through the Legislature. Maybe we can simplify our ballots.

I believe people will enjoy doing this, as I did. Most of the work will be done by volunteers. Neighborhoods are starved for this kind of social activity. The real benefit of the hand count will be, not faster results, saving money, or election integrity (although those are all benefits), but the encouragement of neighborhood civics.

*On March 27, I helped tally a hand-counted election for 105 candidates, more contests than a typical general election. We divided the candidates into numerical groups of 25. Reporting a result took 3 hours for only about 140 ballots. There were some special circumstances that would not be true in a general election: over-voting was fatal and we took steps to exclude ballots which contained more than the maximum votes, and the results had to be rank-ordered. Most important, though, was that we had only 4 tally teams, proportional to the size of the electorate. A precinct of 2500 voters would probably want to field something like 30 teams. The speed of tally should be a linear function of the number of teams.

Go here to register for hand count training.