GOP Officials in Arizona County Shoot Down Hand Counting Ballots

Even as the GOP base continues to prioritize election integrity, especially with a contentious presidential election coming up, the party establishment is making it clear it isn’t interested.

In Mohave County, Arizona, Republican officials shot down proposals to enact the hand-counting of ballots, which the measure’s proponents say would add another layer of protection against voter fraud. But the county Board of Supervisors — composed entirely of Republicans — said hand-counting would cost too much money.

Supervisor Travis Lingenfelter told CNBC that he rejected the measure because the higher priority is to “balance the budget.”

“You can’t talk about any other spending when you have [an] 18-20 million dollar deficit,” he said to the outlet, adding that passing the hand-counting proposal would have been “irresponsible.”

Mohave, which has a population of approximately 220,000, is one of a handful of counties nationwide that have considered hand-counting, which has been pushed by voters (largely pro-Trump Republicans) who believe modern voting machines are vulnerable to tampering, a concern spurred by the belief that Joe Biden beat Donald Trump in 2020 thanks to widespread voter fraud.

Arizona is a state that pro-Trump Republicans have continued to contest, asserting that Biden carried the once solidly Republican state with the help of electoral fraud. The election integrity movement in the Grand Canyon State has gained such traction that, earlier this year, the GOP-dominated state Legislature passed a bill authorizing hand-counts, although it was vetoed by Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs.

CNBC further detailed the attempt to enact hand-counting in Mohave County:

In June, … Mohave County’s Board of Supervisors asked the county elections office to develop a plan for tabulating 2024 results by hand. Secretary of State Adrian Fontes, a Democrat, warned Mohave’s county supervisors in a June letter that they risked breaking the law if they chose to opt for hand-counting in a future election. A lawyer for the county told supervisors before they voted that the county’s legal team wasn’t sure it was legal, either.

The test run took place in late June, when elections workers spent three days hand-counting a batch of 850 test ballots from the 2022 election, bringing in seven part-time staffers [for] eight-hour days of counting and four full-time staffers who monitored the process.

Elections Director Allen Tempert told the Board of Supervisors at a Tuesday meeting that the group was a “dream team” of experienced staffers, but the feasibility study nonetheless went poorly.

The test run reportedly resulted in “counting errors in 46 of 30,600 races on the ballots.” These errors included messy handwriting in tallies, fast talkers, staff hearing the wrong candidate’s name, and bored or tired staffers who stopped watching the process.

Per the results, each ballot took three minutes to count, which means a group of seven staffers would need at least 657 eight-hour days to count 105,000 ballots, which is the number of ballots that were cast in 2020.

At that rate, Mohave County would have to hire at least 245 people for the counting and keep them all working for seven days a week for three weeks, according to the estimates.

But not everyone was convinced by the results of the test. Jack Montgomery of The National Pulse wrote that it is suspicious that the process was so slow and impractical in Mohave when other countries have hand-counting processes that run smoothly.

“Looking to countries like the United Kingdom, where paper ballots counted by hand are near-universal and counts are typically completed over the course of election night, the Mohave County test seems to have been so slow that some would question whether it was designed to fail,” asserted Montgomery.

As The New American previously reported, the mainstream media is already laying the groundwork for alleged upcoming “misinformation” regarding the reliability of voting machines. A Politico article from last month sounded the alarm bell about upcoming changes to federal voting-machine certification guidelines.

Per the article’s author, Zach Montellaro, the cause for worry is not the update itself, but the way in which these changes can be used by the Right, particularly supporters of President Donald Trump, as “misinformation” in order to sow doubt about the credibility of the 2024 election.

The new standards were adopted by the Election Assistance Commission (EAC) in early 2021 — in the wake of the contentious 2020 election, which many voters across the country believe was decisively influenced by voter fraud that favored Joe Biden.

Although the new guidelines ostensibly aren’t slated to go into effect until after the 2024 elections, election officials worry about EAC’s use of the word “deprecation” — referring to the classification of equipment as obsolete. Election officials are concerned about the word’s vagueness, saying it might cause confusion and cause voters to think machines are being “decertified.”

Is it not a case of much ado about nothing? Why is the media so intent on preemptively telling us that claims of voter fraud in 2024 will be nothing more than “misinformation?” Do they anticipate fraud happening — and want to shut down anyone who dares to point it out, as they did in 2020?

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