Monday, Jan. 13, 2025
Is hand-counting votes more accurate than machine counting?
Studies show that manually counting votes is more prone to errors than counting by machine.
In 2022, Nevada’s Nye County attempted to hand-count their ballots and saw error rates as high as 25%. Hand-counting is also slower and can increase election costs. California’s Shasta County estimated the cost of manually counting 110,000 ballots was $1.65 million. Places in the U.S. that count ballots by hand tend to have 1,000 or fewer registered voters.
Voting machines regularly go through “logic and accuracy” tests to make sure they tabulate ballots correctly, and can be further audited by comparing their results against hand-counted vote tallies.
In Colorado, bipartisan groups of county officials test voting equipment and audit elections to ensure accuracy. Both processes are observable by the public as an additional layer of verification.
See full source list below.
This fact brief is responsive to conversations such as this one.
Sources
- Verified Voting Hand Counted Paper Ballots
- CW Las Vegas Nye County ballot hand count won’t make Thursday deadline
- Shasta County Elections Department Analysis of Manual Tally Options for Shasta County
- Vote.gov Your vote is safe
- Colorado Secretary of State Facts vs Myths on Election Security
- Election Law Journal Post-Election Auditing: Effects of Procedure and Ballot Type on Manual Counting Accuracy, Efficiency, and Auditor Satisfaction and Confidence
- Rice University An Examination of the Auditability of Voter Verified Paper Audit Trail (VVPAT) Ballots
- Election Law Journal Learning From Recounts
- Voting Rights Lab Ballot Hand Counts Lead to Inaccuracy
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Fact briefs are bite-sized, well-sourced explanations that offer clear "yes" or "no" answers to questions, confusions, and unsupported claims circulating online. They rely on publicly available data and documents, often from the original source. Fact briefs are written and published by Gigafact contributor publications.
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