Experts agree that manual recounts are valuable in tight races where a small number of ballots could change the outcome; a voter’s intent may be clear to a human, for example, but not to a machine. They also agree that manual audits — spot checks of a small percentage of ballots — are useful for verifying the tally of machines.
Audits, which are common, can confirm “whether the machine worked,” said Charles Stewart III, professor of political science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and director of the MIT Election Data and Science Lab.
But these tools are valuable because they are limited: the fewer ballots workers have to examine in hand, the more time and attention they can devote to each one.
This level of diligence cannot realistically be replicated for every ballot in every race, experts said.
In at least one location, Nye County, Nevada, officials are trying to have it both ways — doing an initial machine count followed by a full hand count. (The American Civil Liberties Union is suing to try to stop the plan.) But that, too, comes at a cost in time and resources.
Election staff are often overworked, and “to add something so time-consuming and error-prone on top of all that work is very concerning,” said Gowri Ramachandran, senior program counsel for the Elections and Government program at the Brennan Center for Justice. . . “In all but really the smallest jurisdictions, it just doesn’t make sense.”
In Cochise County alone, which accounted for less than 2% of the votes cast in Arizona in 2020, Mr. Lindeman estimated that a full count would require 12,000 person-hours of work. The United States District Court for the District of Arizona found in Ms. Lake and Mr. Finchem’s lawsuit that in the state’s largest county, Maricopa, a manual count would require 25,000 temporary workers.