MAGA Plan to Hand-Count Ballots Is 'Dumbest Idea': GOP Elections Official

A Georgia elections official at the heart of the state's 2020 recount has called efforts by Republican supervisors in one Arizona county to hand-count ballots in 2024 "the dumbest idea possible" on Friday.

Gabriel Sterling, the voting implementation manager with the Georgia secretary of state's office, remained steadfast in the state's election operation amid calls of results in favor of Joe Biden being rigged by former President Donald Trump and his MAGA supporters. Trump's claims of widespread voter fraud during the 2020 election have been unfounded.

According to Sterling in 2020, Trump encouraged death threats and other violent acts against him and other election officials, adding that questioning elections undermines democracy.

Arizona, another hotly contested state, experienced similar vitriol from many Republicans following the state's gubernatorial election last November during the midterms. Democrat Katie Hobbs ultimately was labeled victorious with an approximate 17,000 vote win over Republican Kari Lake, who was endorsed by Trump, continues to file legal challenges based on claims of election fraud.

Arizona's Mohave County recently completed a hand-count tabulation experiment after the northwestern county's supervisors voted to request a plan to hand-count ballots for all elections that will be held in 2024.

"The push by a tiny minority of activists to move to hand counting ballots for all elections is, well, how to say this...the dumbest idea possible," Sterling wrote on Twitter on Friday morning in response to the experiment's results. "Like it would be hard to do a dumber thing. It is more expensive, less accurate (by a lot), delays results, puts outcomes in doubt."

Newsweek reached out to Sterling via email for comment.

The experiment was approved by Mohave officials in June who directed the county's elections department to study its feasibility between June 22-26. The vote by Republican supervisors was nearly unanimous, according to the Arizona Mirror, with one dissenting vote.

The experiment's results showed that it took a group of seven part-time staffers three days, or eight hours per day, to count 850 ballots. Another four full-time staffers monitored the process and the tallying of the votes. Those results were announced after officials counted 850 sample ballots with an average of 36 races per ballot, or about 30,600 contests.

Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes, a Democrat, wrote a letter to the Mohave County Board of Supervisors following the news of them looking into hand-counting ballots.

"I am concerned that any plan to initiate a full hand count of ballots for a future election would put these officials in serious legal jeopardy, including possible criminal liability, for violations of state law," Fontes wrote earlier last month. "I urge any county official to consider the negative consequences to election systems, voters and taxpayers that would result from the introduction of election procedures that will increase the risk of error and have no legal basis or proof of concept."

Meanwhile, a spokesperson for Fontes told Newsweek via email on Friday that "the results of the feasibility study reinforce the secretary's concerns about cost, accuracy, and feasibility."

It was estimated to cost the county an additional $1.14 million to hand-count races in 2024 as opposed to machine counting, with the caveat that only if there are no recounts as there were in 2022, tweeted Stephen Richer, the recorder of Maricopa County who was elected in November 2020.

Richer, a Republican, sued Lake last month for defamation after she allegedly blamed him for her defeat to Hobbs last fall.

According to the results, there were 46 noted errors in hand-counting. In a normal election, such errors would require ballots to be fully recounted across all races on a given ballot. That retally time was not taken into account in this study.

"If there are recounts, it will cost more," Richer tweeted. "They had an error rate of 5.4 percent. The maximum allowable machine error rate for certified equipment is 0.00001 percent."

Newsweek reached out to Richer via email for comment.

Such cost increases would be due to securing a large enough venue to conduct the hand-counts, network infrastructure for live streaming and recording the count, compensation for part- and full-time staffers, and paying for security guards monitoring the facility, according to the results.

The board is expected to discuss on August 1 the results of the experiment and either adopt, modify or reject the hand-counting plan, according to board documents.