Here's the New York Times report on an ACLU lawsuit aimed at stopping the hand counting of ballots in Nye County, Nevada, population 51,591.
The American Civil Liberties Union of Nevada filed a complaint on Monday with the Nevada Supreme Court seeking to stop a rural county from continuing its hand count of ballots, citing concerns that the process will be used to fuel misinformation about election security.
The group, which is suing Nye County, argued that hand counts “set a dangerous precedent for future elections by encouraging local officials to make up and implement their own vote-counting processes that violate voters’ constitutional right to an accurate election.”
Voter protection advocates from the A.C.L.U. and the Brennan Center, which also participated in the lawsuit and provided legal representation, are worried that the hand-count, which was being conducted alongside the official count being done by machine, might produce faulty numbers that would provide fodder for conspiracy theorists.
Nye’s hand count was initiated by the state’s Republican nominee for secretary of state, Jim Marchant, who lost his race on Saturday.
Another recent story about election administration out of Nye County is here.
Other stories about controversies regarding election administration are here (out of Jasper, Georgia), here (Shasta County, California) and here (Surrey County, North Carolina).
Postscript: A New York Times piece about an election integrity skeptic in New Hampshire is here. The talented and always balanced Farah Stockman is the author.
And here's a story out of Tripp County, South Dakota, population 5,624, that also implicates election integrity. The South Dakota Searchlight reports under the headline, "Tabulator catches human error in Tripp County post-election audit." The subhead is, ‘To me, that shows that the machine is more accurate than humans,’ auditor says. Makenzie Huber is the reporter, and here's an excerpt:
The case of Tripp County’s 75 “missing” ballots has been solved, County Auditor Barb Desersa said this week.
The discrepancy emerged last week after a hand count of ballots in the only county in South Dakota in nearly 20 years to perform one. The mismatch does not have any impact on election results.
Tripp County officials were prepared to ask for a court order to reopen a ballot box to find the answer, but the question was resolved without one. The human error explanation for the mismatch, it turned out, was right there in the records from the vote tabulator – the machine that county commissioners had ordered Desersa not to use to tally the county’s official, reportable Election Day results.
A Thursday vote canvas revealed a discrepancy in a single precinct between the number of official, completed ballots recorded in the poll book and the number of audited ballots in one precinct.
Several races had to be recounted by Tripp County’s volunteer counting boards – sometimes three or four times on election night. The last precinct to come in, Colome, had mismatched numbers according to the tabulator audit the next day.
Postscript: The NPR Politics podcast on December 6, 2022 was about Cochise County, Arizona's vote certification delay. Here's the summary:
Under a court order, officials in Republican-controlled Cochise County, Ariz., finally certified their local midterm elections results after they missed the state's legal deadline and put more than 47,000 people's votes at risk. A bipartisan pair of former officials in the state are calling for the two members who initially voted against certification to be criminally investigated.
Here's a December 4 story by Minnesota Public Radio under the headline, "Post-election hand counts find no issues with Minn. ballot-counting machines." Kristi Marohn's story reported details on hand recounts out of a number of nonmetro counties; these re-counts have been a norm since 2006, but Marohn reports that some counties are recounting more precincts than is required. No irregularities have been found.
Postscript: In early 2023, Shasta County, California ended its contract with Dominion Voting Systems, and a county official took a trip to meet with Mike Lindell, the My Pillow guy who has peddled election conspiracies.
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