"Republican" officials in Mohave County, Arizona have voted down proposals to strengthen election integrity by hand-counting ballots in 2024.
They claim that secure elections would be an unaffordable indulgence.
The Board of Supervisors for the county - comprised entirely of so-called Republicans - decided not to swap dubious machine counting for a traditional hand count by three to two, with one of those who voted against the proposal, Supervisor Travis Lingenfelter, saying that "The first thing that we have to do in Mohave County in good conscious [sic] is to balance the budget." "You can't talk about any other spending when you have 18-20 million dollar deficit," he weaseled, claiming that introducing measures to ensure election integrity would be fiscally "Irresponsible." Mohave County did conduct a test hand count on a batch of 850 test ballots from the 2022 election before voting against a hand count.
This test went suspiciously poorly, with the count reportedly taking so long that officials calculated that counting all 105,000 ballots cast in 2020 would have taken 245 people working "Seven days a week, including holidays, for nearly three weeks." Looking to countries like the United Kingdom, where paper ballots counted by hand are near-universal and counts are typically completed over the course of election night, the Mohave County test seems to have been so slow that some would question whether it was designed to fail.
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