Donald Trump's plan to count ballots by hand would result in 'unimaginable chaos': election experts

State government officials over the past few weeks have discussed the idea in public meetings in Colorado, Louisiana, Kansas and New Hampshire of requiring the hand-counting of election ballots going forward. While none of those statewide bills have passed, there has been increasing pressure placed on Republicans to endorse the idea, and a number of smaller towns and counties are now seriously considering it.

Those pushing the hand-count initiative primarily are believers in former President Donald Trump's "Big Lie" that the 2020 election was stolen from him due to compromised voting machines. As the Washington Post reports, "Top backers of Trump’s election fraud claims are investing heavily in the effort to promote hand-counting — and using the pitch to raise money from energized supporters."

Experts told the Washington Post that "hand-counting ballots is so impractical that, if adopted, election results would be thrown into unimaginable chaos, inviting mass human error and delaying results — and potentially giving bad actors more time to slow or even block certification. Time and again, post-election audits have confirmed that machine counts are extremely accurate, and experts have said that there is no proof machines were hacked in 2020."

Nonetheless, some of the key proponents of the false claim that voting machines were rigged to steal the 2020 election from Trump traveled to the Nevada desert last month with a new pitch.

“The electronic voting machines are so vulnerable and so uncertifiable, I don’t see how we can trust them,” Jim Marchant, a Trump-supporting Nevada secretary of state candidate, told Nye County commissioners recently.

As The Post points out, "The vast majority of Americans now vote withhand-marked paper ballots or on touch-screen machines that print one — a security feature that most Republicans and Democrats support and that allows ballots to be hand-counted in post-election audits or in the event of alleged discrepancies or very close races."