Should ballots be counted by hand? Conservatives in Polk County want the option

When Polk County's legislators sat on stage in early October to hear from constituents, several urged the elected officials to change Florida law and allow county election supervisors to count ballots by hand, rather than requiring them to use machines for tabulating votes.

Royal Brown III, president of the Winter Haven 9-12 Project, a conservative group, was one of at least half a dozen speakers who urged lawmakers to change one word in a state statute. The law now reads, “A county must use an electronic or electromechanical precinct-count tabulation voting machine.”

Brown and others asked the legislators to replace the word “must” with “may.”

“The use of machines of any kind for counting votes can and does lead to voter fraud,” Brown said during the meeting at the Polk State College Center for Public Safety in Winter Haven.

Elizabeth Suits, a representative from Citizens Defending Freedom, a conservative group based in Polk County with chapters in other states, made the same request of the legislators.

The Florida Legislature has adopted measures in recent sessions changing election processes in ways that voter-advocacy groups have criticized. Those actions, and the push to allow the hand counting of ballots, reflect an “election integrity" movement that gained strength after former President Donald Trump’s claims that the 2020 president election was stolen.

Most of Trump’s allegations have been rejected by courts or otherwise debunked. The Florida Division of Elections states on its website: “Florida is a model for successful election administration, and we continue to seek ways to improve our processes.”

Brown praised the Legislature for passing bills in previous sessions limiting ballot drop boxes, restricting voter registration efforts, increasing the frequency of voter roll reviews and creating the Office of Election Crimes and Security. But he said more changes are needed.

Changes followed 2000

In Florida, elections are conducted at the county level, overseen by an elected supervisor of elections. Polk County Supervisor of Elections Lori Edwards, who has held office since 2001, said Florida election offices have not counted ballots by hand for more than 20 years.

Mark Earley, the Leon County supervisor of elections and past president of the state association of supervisors, said that all counties have been using optical scanners to count votes since about 2010. Voters mark ovals next to candidates’ names on paper ballots, which are fed into scanners at the voting site to record the results.

The Florida Legislature adjusted its rules on vote counting following the 2000 presidential election, in which the national outcome hinged on the state’s result, which took weeks to determine. The U.S. Supreme Court ultimately halted recount efforts, leading to George W. Bush’s election with an advantage of just 537 votes in Florida.

That election generated nationwide embarrassment for Florida. At that time, many counties still used punch-card machines, and during the hand recounts media coverage focused on such peculiarities as “hanging chads” and “dimpled chads.”

As a result, the Florida Legislature outlawed the use of punch-card voting machines. Another state law emerging from the 2000 election required counties to use precinct-based tabulation systems, rather than bringing machines to a central location for counting.

Trump and many of his supporters alleged election irregularities in the 2020 election, focused on crucial states that his opponent, Joe Biden, won by narrow margins. Though the complaints did not include Florida, a state Trump won handily, some conservative groups have claimed that election fraud is a problem in the state.

A group called Defend Florida conducted what it called a “canvassing effort” after the 2020 election, reviewing mail voting in a range of counties, including Polk. The group claimed that its assessment found discrepancies on 22% of ballots overall and 27% in Polk County.

At the time, Citizens Defending Freedom requested permission from Edwards’ office to inspect its equipment and capture what it called a “forensic audit,” a copy of the program’s functions. Edwards denied the access, saying that the information sought was exempt from public-records laws and that the software licensing agreement did not allow access by a third party.

Brown, reached following the legislative delegation meeting, was asked if he has reason to think that recent vote counts in Polk County have not been accurate.

“While I'm not sure if vote counting/tabulation per se was a problem in Polk County, there definitely was voter fraud based on inaccurate voter rolls and illegal aliens living here who voted based on their lying on box on Registration which simply asks if you are a citizen — there is no verification process for citizenship,” Brown said by email. “Our SOE refuses to do a needed scrub of voter rolls and states she sends any objections to (Secretary) of State for resolution.”

Brown said he is concerned about accurate vote counting in “blue counties,” such as Alachua, Broward, Leon and Palm Beach.

Edwards responded that her office regularly maintains voter rolls. Her staff designated more than 40,000 voters as inactive last year and removed 8,112 voters identified as non-citizens, convicted felons without their rights restored, declared mentally incompetent by a court or deceased, she said. The Florida Division of Elections is responsible for determining voter eligibility.

Robert Goodman, executive director of the CDF, did not respond to an interview request.

If the Legislature were to revise the law, giving counties the option of manual counting, the Polk County Commission would have the authority to make the decision, County Attorney Randy Mink said.

How long would it take?

Earley said that he has heard “some rumblings” about a push for hand counting of votes in other counties.

Florida law requires county supervisors to conduct limited audits after each election, a process that involves hand counting of ballots. In Polk County, the mandate means checking votes from two randomly selected precincts out of 172.

The canvassing board, which oversees the audits, consists of Edwards, a Polk County commissioner and a county judge. Edwards said the audits consistently verify that the totals produced by the optical scanner system are accurate.

Both Earley and Edwards say that by any measure, voting results tabulated by Florida’s current electronic system are accurate and secure. The machines are not connected to the Internet and not vulnerable to outside tampering.

Edwards said that her office tests scanning machines before each election. Workers feed in marked ballots to verify that the scanner correctly records the votes.

“And so our equipment is tested thoroughly, and has proven itself to be reliable,” Edwards said.

Earley rejected the suggestion that Florida would be better off counting votes manually rather than by machine.

“It's just a horrible idea for many, many reasons,” he said. “There's been many studies and what have you — voting machines are well tested, they're certified and tested before and after elections. We have audits to validate that they’re tabulating properly. Hand counts, it's been proven time and again, even for simple ballots, are inaccurate, over and over again.”

As Edwards noted, ballots in Polk County are far from simple. Her office must create ballots for voters based on multiple elections with differing boundaries, from the U.S. House to the Florida Legislature to such small races as lakes management districts and community development districts. And in primary elections, voters in the same precincts receive differing ballots based on their party registration.

The 2022 election, which did not involve a presidential race, produced 38 races in Polk County, Edwards said. With about 230,000 ballots cast, that amounts to 8.74 million individual race results that would have to counted by hand, she said.

“And I would insist that you did it twice,” Edwards said. “I mean, you can't just say, ‘Here, count 8.74 million.' You’ve got to at least count it twice (for accuracy). So it's 8,740,000 times two. So although I am not sure of what the cost would be, and I'm not sure exactly how I would know, I can tell you that in terms of time, it would take a long time to count, just in Polk County, 8,740,000 races twice.”

In one of the manual audits from the 2022 election, it took a two-person team about 15 minutes to count a single race on 213 ballots and another team 20 minutes to tabulate one race on 291 ballots, Edwards said.

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Earley said that human involvement, and the potential for error or tampering, is limited with machine tabulations.

“Hand counts are inaccurate, unreliable, extremely expensive — because you’ve got to have a lot of people and then you have to redo them over and over — very insecure, because you have all these people that have not been very well vetted touching your ballots, when you don't even know the results," he said. "So they could be altering your ballots, potentially. So there’s a major security problem here."

Earley said that counting by hand would greatly delay the release of election results.

“In complicated ballots, like we have in Florida, you just could never get an election counted,” he said. “These are the same people that want results the next day or unchanging results election night.”

The Polk County supervisor’s office, like others in Florida, relies on temporary workers to help conduct elections. If the county shifted to hand counting, the office would have to greatly expand its roster of election workers, and that would increase costs, Edwards said.

Professor: Bad idea

Aubrey Jewett, a political science professor at the University of Central Florida, wrote a paper on ballot invalidation in the 2000 Florida election and has studied and written about the conduction of elections.

“In brief, machine counting is more accurate, much quicker and less expensive than hand counting,” Jewett said by email. “There have been a number of academic studies that have shown that hand counting is less accurate than machine counting.”

He pointed to a report by Barry C. Burden, director of the Elections Research Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, which found that hand counting is worse than machine counting for both accuracy and speed.

“Some argue that France uses a hand count for its national election and it is fairly quick,” Jewett wrote. “That is true, but there is only one race to count — president — not dozens of races for many different locations.”

Rep. Melony Bell, R-Fort Meade, is challenging Edwards next year in the supervisor of elections race. Bell expressed support for the change in state law and said she has met with members of the groups making the requests.

“I think it should be up to each county, if they want do that,” she said. “Absolutely, I think there needs to be a second set of eyes (examining ballots).”

Bell said she planned to talk to Florida Secretary of State Cord Byrd about the issue. The Department of State oversees the Florida Division of Elections.

But Bell said she didn’t know if leaders of the Florida Legislature would support a bill revising the law on vote-counting rules. And if they do, she isn’t sure she would be allowed to sponsor it, considering that she is running to become an election supervisor.

A representative for Sen. Colleen Burton, R-Lakeland, said she was not available for comment. Other Polk County legislators could not be reached.

The Legislative session begins on Jan. 9.

Gary White can be reached at gary.white@theledger.com or 863-802-7518. Follow on X @garywhite13.

This article originally appeared on The Ledger: Conservatives in Polk want legislators to allow hand counting of votes