A new Wyoming ballot initiative petition drive launched by Brent Bien, Cheryl Aguiar and Rich Weber seeks to require hand tabulation of votes in Wyoming elections.  Opinion That’s an even worse idea than the other ballot initiative the trio is behind: One that would cut residential property taxes in half. It probably won’t be hard to get hand-counting petition signatures, though. Former President Donald Trump has spent the past four years claiming without evidence he was the victim of massive election fraud in 2020. Many MAGA followers went apoplectic and still believe it, despite state and federal courts rejecting more than 60 election lawsuits. Trump garnered 70% of the vote in Wyoming for his biggest margin of victory in any state. Gray, a former state lawmaker from Casper, based his winning 2022 Secretary of State campaign on the crazy notion Wyoming elections are fraught with unspecified “tremendous problems.” Despite this supposedly widespread voter fraud, neither Gray nor the scores of other Wyoming Republican candidates who’ve won office since 2020 have expressed a scintilla of doubt about the results of their own races. Funny how that works. Gray told the Park County Board of Commissioners that state law says each county’s board “may adopt,” either experimentally or permanently, in any election or all polling places within the county, any electronic voting system authorized by law. Apparently, in Gray’s twisted logic, the use of “may” means that the boards could also decide to hand count all ballots. He also seems to think making it harder for people to vote by banning ballot drop boxes would imbue our already perfectly secure and accurate elections with more “integrity.”  But Gray was rebuffed by the group representing Wyoming’s county clerks, who have rejected his argument that the boxes are somehow illegal because they are inanimate objects. (Mr. Secretary: So are mailboxes, and your office approves them even though they aren’t remotely as safe as ballot drop boxes.) Jill Kaufman organized a recent election integrity event in Wheatland. She’s worried about votes being flipped and hacked, viruses or incorrect programming, the inability to see paper ballots up close and personal, and electronic poll books shutting down and losing registered voters’ information, according to reporting from Jasmine Hall of the Jackson Hole News&Guide. Her concerns were largely echoed by Rick Weible, a computer consultant who spoke at the event and claimed to have found an astonishing 1,878 “vulnerabilities” in Wyoming’s electronic voting equipment. “So many people do not trust the system of electronic machines right now that they’re almost saying they’re not going to vote,” Kaufman said. “And that is just not acceptable.” Of course, they don’t trust electronic voting machines: The former president, Wyoming’s top election officer and a flotilla of political operatives like Wiebel — who was involved with a similar hand-count push in neighboring South Dakota — having been telling them not to for years.  Advocates of hand counts contend they are cheaper, faster and more accurate than electronic equipment like the Election Systems & Software machines used in all 23 Wyoming counties, South Dakota and many other states. In reality, according to many organizations that have done extensive research on both types of tabulations, hand counts are far more expensive, laboriously slow and contain more errors. Here are a few of their conclusions: Brennan Center for Justice — “In an experiment from Rice University using only 120 ballots, people counting by hand got it right only 58% of the time. Now imagine multiplying that by 100 or 1,000. As a Bipartisan Policy Center report put it, humans, unlike tabulation machines, are ‘notoriously poor at completing rote, repetitive tasks.’” Voting Rights Lab — “Mandating election officials hand count every ballot is an extreme proposal that would be far more expensive, result in significant delays, and, most concerningly, lead to higher error rates and heighten voter concern over corruption.” States United Democracy Center — Shasta County, California, conducted two mock elections to prepare for a hand-count election this year that was scrubbed. To process the county’s average of 53,000 ballots, each with at least 17 races and ballot propositions, would have cost an estimated $658,925 and required hiring 375 extra staff for the presidential primary alone. Wyoming’s last presidential election had nearly 280,000 ballots.  Gray supports an effort that has failed three times, most recently in April, to convince the five Republicans on the Park County Board of Commissioners to approve hand counting ballots. The Platte County Republican Party passed a resolution supporting the return of paper ballots and hand counting that was later approved by the state Republican Party. That shows just how misinformed or disingenuous the state GOP is. Counties across Wyoming already conduct elections with paper ballots that are tallied by electronic counting machines. Votes on paper ballots are recorded on the scanner, and the paper ballots are securely saved for auditing and verification of results. Counties can track every ballot. Voters fill out ballots at the Restoration Church polling center in Casper Nov. 8, 2022. (Dustin Bleizeffer/WyoFile) The machines do not have the hardware or software required to allow internet connectivity and are only accessible to authorized personnel like county clerks. Wyoming law requires equipment to be tested prior to an election, and a post-election audit. Both processes are open to the public, but county clerks report that few attend. People with election integrity concerns should definitely take advantage of these opportunities to see how the procedures they claim are full of errors are actually used. A statistical audit of the 2022 Primary Election verified that the electronic tabulation was 100% accurate. I think 100% error-free should be enough proof of election integrity for even the most avid Trump loyalist, but then I remember I live in Wyoming and I realize it’s not. There will always be voters in Wyoming who don’t accept the results when their candidates lose. Heck, in Wyoming’s 2020 presidential contest, many clearly weren’t happy that Trump only outpolled Biden by 120,000 votes. Weber, one of the Wyoming petition organizers, told a Wheatland audience the entire statewide count could be completed an hour after the polls close because only about 225,000 registered voters participate in elections and people could tabulate throughout the day.  Yes, sir, give everyone a ballot and let’s get counting! The post Hand count ballots if you don’t mind mistakes, wasting time and money appeared first on WyoFile .