FEATURED ARTICLE
The Trouble With Hand-Counting
Even Democrats acknowledge it's not necessarily accurate.
Florida's Supreme Court yesterday approved manual recounts of ballots in the state's counties. This decision will no doubt be used to assert that manual counting is the gold standard of accurately determining an election result. The notion seems to be that if you let individuals look at the ballots and record what they see, the result will be as accurate as knowing that a playing card with the number 2 and two red hearts on it is in fact the two of hearts. This is not true. Hand counting is not as infallible as cable news viewers are being led to believe. The problems with hand counting are very well known to professional election supervisors.
In Florida itself, Hillsborough County's Democratic Supervisor of Elections, Pam Iorio, has been quoted to this effect several times the past week. "Hand counting is not always the most accurate indicator of voter intent," she was quoted as saying by the wire services.
In a Washington Post story earlier in the week, Ms. Iorio said: "Oh, no, to start manually recounting millions of ballots in the state of Florida would cause more problems than it would solve. The norm is, 'What do the machines count?' You vote a ballot, and it's what the machine counts that counts. With a manual recount, each ballot is at the discretion of a human being. . . . You're going to get mired in problems."
The St. Petersburg Times this week wrote about the accuracy of hand counts and described the opinion of Pasco County Supervisor of Elections Kurt Browning: "Browning, who is also a Democrat, recalled the 'good old days' of hand counting ballots and said the system was far less accurate than the machines that count punch cards."
The ballots, normally stacked and run through the machine, are handled, and every time they are handled, it is possible to alter the ballot, accidentally or intentionally.
But perhaps the worst aspect of hand counting, as it has been proposed in this instance, is that there are no uniform, common standards among Florida's counties for conducting a recount by hand. Thus in one lawsuit, circuit Judge Jorge Labarga said he would leave it to the discretion of the local county election officials to decide if, and how, they would count "dimpled chads." In the absence of uniform standards, and with the standards for this particular recount left to discretion, the incentives to let politics influence interpretations and judgment calls are very strong.
We are not arguing that recounts are impossible or should never be done. We are pushing against the conventional wisdom just now that the manual counts of Florida's punch-card ballots will produce the gospel truth about who won in these counties.
