The Marching Morons

I would rather have a president designate March 31 years ago as a day to value people who have been persecuted for millennia than have one who puts out this trash on Easter. pic.twitter.com/pZHot69Fnt

— Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) March 30, 2024

Hand counts? Yeah, uh...no.

This week, Republicans in Gillespie County, Texas hand counted every single one of the ballots cast in their primary. There were about 8,000 ballots, each of which contained choices for more than 30 races. 

It took around 200 people 21 collective hours to count all of the ballots, and Votebeat departed the Gillespie County Elections office at 5:12 a.m on Wednesday after watching the effort. It was a long night, and one that Texas Republicans are portraying as a success. A local conservative website praised the effort: “Following months of preparation, hundreds of volunteers helped count thousands of paper ballots within 24 hours.”

200 people. 8000 ballots. One county. One small primary. 1,102,418 votes were cast in Harris County in 2022. Extrapolate the number of hours and volunteers it would take to hand count all those ballots. Here, I’ll get you started: that’s over 137 times the number of votes in one primary in Gillespie County. (Back of the envelope: 2700 people, over 3031 hours. 25 days, ‘round the clock. Give or take a week )

It didn’t really go that well:

An hour after Gillespie County Republican Party Chairman Bruce Campbell declared the hand-counted primary election results completely accurate and certified them as final, he found another discrepancy. 

“It’s my mistake for not catching that,” he said, sitting in front of his laptop inside the Gillespie County election administration office Thursday. “I can’t believe I did that.” 

The late catch meant that Campbell had to ask the early voting ballot board chair, who had already left and lives 30 minutes away, to return to the elections offices, figure out how the error happened, and fix it. 

The election was a low-profile party primary, but stakes are high. Gillespie County Republicans, led by Campbell, decided months ago to hand-count more than 8,000 ballots. Experts agree and studies show the method is time-consuming, costly, less accurate, and less secure than using machines, but local Republicans, citing unsupported concerns about the accuracy of voting machines, were determined to try and show otherwise. Workers recruited and trained by the party counted until the early hours of the next morning, and declared the effort a success. Proponents of hand-counting are now touting GIllespie as a model. 

But the county party had to fix a series of errors in the results reported from almost every precinct between the election and the canvass Thursday, though none of the discrepancies changed the outcome of a race. Travis County Republicans, who hand-counted some ballots as well, also had to fix discrepancies in their tally.

Discrepancies like this:

Scott Netherland, the election judge for Precinct 6, turned in all of the necessary paperwork to the elections office just before midnight on election night, believing it all checked out. When he woke up the next day, he decided to double-check the results. He told Votebeat that 197 voters had cast ballots at his precinct on election day. For each race on the ballot, the total number of ballots cast should have totaled to 197, including, for example, instances when a voter skipped a race. But in one race, he’d reported only 160 votes. In another, 157. As he went down the list, he noticed he had 207 votes reported for a third race. 

“My heart sank,” Netherland said. He’d miscounted the totals in seven separate races.

This is the kind of thing Giuliani still swears happened in Georgia, and is why he thinks the judgment against him for slander should be overturned.  Aren’t hand counts supposed to avoid these problems?

Netherland said he immediately contacted Campbell, then rushed to the elections office to review tally sheets. In doing so, he realized that multiple other precincts also had reported clearly inaccurate totals. 

If he hadn’t done that, “we’d be still sitting on mistakes,” Netherland, who’s been working elections in Gillespie for more than a decade and did not support the hand count effort, told Votebeat.

Besides, the count is supposed to be done by midnight on Election Day. And we can’t trust algae rhythms, we’re supposed to trust people!

Netherland said he still isn’t confident the election results are accurate, based on the errors that he and others have found. On Thursday, Netherland said the Republican Party in Gillespie has introduced human error into the election process with the hand count. 

“We took something that worked and now broke it,” Netherland said. “We failed to guard the purity of the election with this hand count. What we just did is evidence that this hand count was not accurate.”

Cheer up! Things could be worse! Sure enough, they got worse!

Some judges quickly explained how errors happened on Thursday during the canvass, reasons ranging from “poor penmanship” that was hard to read, to accidentally writing the wrong numbers, or miscalculations. 

Gillespie County Republican Precinct Chairs and other election workers gathered for the party’s canvass of the March 5 primary election. During the meeting the precinct judges corrected discrepancies that were found in reconciliation forms from all but one of the county’s 13 precincts. 

The short public meeting lasted around 30 minutes. After their mistakes were resolved and results were certified, some clapped and said, “We did it!” Soon after, all the precinct judges except for one went home. Campbell and the Gillespie County elections staff stayed behind to begin manually entering the official results into the state’s reporting system. 

That’s when Campbell found yet another error, forcing him to call the early voting ballot board chair back to the elections office for another round of correction. 

After that, entering the results in the state system posed yet another challenge. When ballots are scanned using voting equipment and software, a report of the totals is created in the same format the state uses. The state requires those results be manually entered, separated by candidate and proposition totals for the day of the election, early voting, and mail ballots. But in his spreadsheet on Thursday, Campbell only had those totals broken out by candidate and propositions per precinct. 

Elections staff printed out the spreadsheets, laid them out across four tables, and read the totals out loud, adding them up with a calculator so they would be aggregated in the format the state requires, and then manually entered them into a computer. 

This process took nearly three hours because they caught themselves making new data entry errors as they were reading the newly aggregated totals out loud and writing them down before entering them into the state system.

It’s not like people make mistakes, right?

"This 100% is indicative that we know mistakes are going to happen every single time. And I don't know how anybody would feel confident, after that many errors were identified, that all their errors had been identified,” said Jennifer Morrell, a former election official and an expert on election audits. Morrell is the CEO of the Elections Group, an elections consulting firm. 

“The only way I can think to validate what they claim are the final vote counts is to run all those ballots through a voting system and compare the two outcomes.” 

Morrell added that the discrepancies found in Gillespie and in Travis don’t typically occur in elections where voting equipment is used. Even in parts of the process where hand counting is used, such as audits or recounts (where only one or two races are counted rather than the entire ballot), “we find that it’s easy for people to make mistakes,” she said. And that’s especially true when tallying undervotes. 

In Gillespie, the Republican Party has no intention of doing any sort of recount, Campbell said. Neither do Travis County Republicans, Mackowiak said. 

Campbell stressed that each hand-counting team had a caller of the votes, a watcher to ensure the caller was correct, and three people writing down the totals. “If it didn’t match, they’d have to go back and count again,” he said. “You have three people. Three of them are not going to make the same error.” 

Campbell said a committee was created by the party to study the hand count. The committee will survey every person who participated. 

On the primary election night, Joy Smith, the Precinct 4 judge, was the last to bring election results to the county’s elections office. It was Smith’s first time as the precinct’s supervisor. On Thursday, she also had to fix an error. When writing the total number of votes for a proposition on the ballot, Smith wrote the number 451. It should have been 415. “I literally just switched the two numbers when I wrote it down on the form,” she said, something she attributed to exhaustion in the wee hours of the morning after a long night.

We really need to get that down to midnight so the count is reliable. That or just skip voting altogether and go with the polls most favorable to GOP candidates. Well, certain GOP candidates.

Tl;dr: Donald Trump is a complete moron. And the people who listen to him aren’t any brighter.