ND ballot initiative could force ‘hand counting’ ballots for future elections

Bismarck, N.D. (AP) – A ballot initiative in North Dakota is gathering signatures for a June 2024 referendum that could require all votes cast in future North Dakota elections to be only counted by hand.

The initiative may achieve a goal of activists across the country who distrust modern vote counting but, at the same time, dismaying election officials who say the change would needlessly delay vote tallies and lead to more errors.

Backers of the proposed ballot measure are far from gathering enough signatures, but if the plan makes the June 2024 ballot and voters pass it, North Dakota would have to replace ballot scanners with hundreds of workers across the state who would carefully count and recount ballots.

It’s a change other Republican-led states have attempted unsuccessfully in the years since former President Donald Trump began criticizing the nation’s vote-counting system, falsely claiming it was rigged against him.

Lydia Gessele, a farmer who is leading the effort to get the measure on the ballot, said, quote: “We’ve always done hand counting before we got these machines. They can find the people to do the job, because there are people that are willing to come in and do the hand counting.”

Former Secretary of State Al Jaeger, a Republican who oversaw North Dakota’s elections for 30 years through 2022, rejected Gessele’s claims, saying, “There was nothing that took place that would have changed the outcome of a vote. Nothing at all.”

Earlier this year, Fox News reached a settlement with Dominion Voting Systems to pay $787.5 million to settle a defamation lawsuit brought over statements broadcast by the network that Dominion machines were rigged against Trump.

The North Dakota ballot measure proposes all voting “shall be done by paper ballots and counted by hand starting on the day of the election and continuing uninterrupted until hand counting is completed.”

North Dakota Republican Secretary of State Michael Howe said he opposes the proposed measure because hand counts are less standardized than using scanners. He likened it to having a computer rather than a human umpire a baseball game.

Howe said: “When you hand-count, you bring in the human element of umpiring. You could have a wide strike zone, you could have a narrow strike zone. What you get with a machine is one consistent strike zone every single time.”

Last year, 317 ballots took more than seven hours to count by hand in Nevada’s least populated county.

Legislators in at least eight states also proposed prohibitions, in some way, on ballot tabulators.

Nearly 44% of voters participated by early voting or by mail in North Dakota’s November 2022 election.

Story by AP