Fueled by Big Lie Conspiracy, GOP Officials Move to Hand Counts in Arizona, Nevada

Bombarded by residents who believe former President Donald Trump's baseless claims that voting machines were manipulated during the 2020 election and other conspiracy theories, county officials in Arizona and Nevada have signaled that they will proceed this week with hand counts of early midterm election ballots--despite warnings that the change is illegal and that hand counts are far less accurate than machine tabulation.

The interim county clerk in Nye County, Nevada directed six teams of five people each to begin a hand count on Wednesday after the Nevada Supreme Court gave approval for the plan last week.

The court stipulated that the clerk's office could not livestream the count, as clerk Mark Kampf had planned.

"To layer something this time-consuming and this prone to error on top of all [election workers'] other work is very concerning."

Kampf announced the count was beginning even as Secretary of State for Elections Mark Wlaschin was deliberating whether the county's plan met the requirements laid out by the high court.

Trump supporters including Jim Marchant, a former state lawmaker who is now running to be Nevada's top election official, have pushed for hand-counting ballots.

Marchant, who has said he ran for office at the urging of an influencer linked to QAnon, said earlier this year that he would first introduce hand counts in the state's rural counties and then "force Clark and Washoe" Counties, where Las Vegas and Reno are located, to adopt the method.

The New York Times reported earlier this month that election experts including Stephen Ansolabehere, a professor of government at Harvard who has led at least two studies examining vote tallying methods, have found hand counts to be "subject to more error than having a machine do it."

"To layer something this time-consuming and this prone to error on top of all [election workers'] other work is very concerning," Gowri Ramachandran, senior counsel in the Elections and Government Program at the Brennan Center for Justice, told the Times. "In all but really the tiniest of jurisdictions, it just does not make sense."

Commissioners in Nye County, which has about 33,000 registered voters, were "bombarded with complaints by residents who have been subjected to nearly two years of conspiracy theories related to voting machines and false claims that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from former President Donald Trump" before they voted in favor of a hand count earlier this year. The decision prompted a resignation from the former county clerk.

Kampf announced the count would begin just as the board of supervisors in Cochise County, Arizona voted in favor of a hand count on Tuesday, alarming state and county officials.

"Ultimately, the legislature is the proper place to address this," Cochise County Attorney Brian McIntyre told the board. "That's how government works--not unilaterally deciding to go a new direction because of the will of an admittedly vocal portion of the public. Additionally, you cannot order county employees to violate the law."

Arizona Secretary of State Katie Hobbs, a Democrat who is running for governor, told the county that the state will file a lawsuit against it if officials move forward with the hand count. She gave the county until the end of the day Wednesday to decide how it will proceed.

The editorial board of the Herald Review, a local newspaper, wrote Wednesday that the county's hand-counting mandate is a "direct attack against Cochise County voters, election workers, and everyone else who believes in a fair and functional vote."

"Since the 2020 election, we have seen more attacks on the fabric of the democratic process in America, including the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection in the U.S. Capitol, numerous threats against election and other officials (including here in Cochise County) and so-called 'drop box monitors' intimidating voters seeking to return their early ballots," wrote the editorial board.

"All of these actions add up to a bigger picture that we must view with clear eyes," the editors added. "There are individuals and organizations in this country that are actively seeking to dismantle the election process and strip away the voting rights of millions of Americans. And that's the whole point: question and criticize everything until the voters believe nothing."