Silver State Times

Esmeralda County last week joined Nye County in dispensing with electronic voting machines in future elections and moving toward hand counting of ballots.

Nye approved the change in March, and Elko and Lincoln counties are possibly considering a change from Dominion Voting Systems, reported The Nevada Independent.

Head of one national voter integrity group Ken Cuccinelli, national chairman of the Election Transparency Initiative and former Virginia Attorney General, told the Silver State Times that his group has taken no formal position on hand-counting but did say that “machines count more accurately than people do.”

“The gold standard is optical scan ballots, the kind you fill in the bubbles for, run through machines that are not connected to the internet and are using open source programming for the counting, where the paper ballot is the official vote not the machine count,” he said.

Another voter integrity expert, Cleta Mitchell, senior legal fellow at the Conservative Partnership Institute and chair of its Election Integrity Network, said that she has “mixed feelings” about hand-counting ballots.

“I do think that for rural areas where there are not millions of ballots to count, it is likely better, but in the big cities run by Democrats?” Mitchell told the Silver State Times in an email. “Where they keep R’s from having access to be able to observe…..and when I think about what happened in Fulton County during the ‘recount’ where they literally wrote on the tally sheets wildly incorrect vote totals….which only was discovered the following year with a lawsuit….then I think we all need to re-think the hand count issue.”

Politico reports that Republican lawmakers in at least six states have introduced legislation that would move their states to hand-counting of ballots. And a dozen or so New Hampshire towns are also considering proposals to go to hand-counting.

“It’s our responsibility, and it should be our desire, to count every vote and to imbue confidence in our citizenry that our elections are fair and free, and that their vote is being counted,” New Hampshire state Rep. Mark Alliegro, sponsor of a hand-counting bill, told Politico.

Nevada’s Esmeralda County has just over 600 registered voters.