Arkansas election officials debate voting machines vs. hand-counted paper ballots

Searcy County Election Commission Chairwoman Laura Gross (left) and County Clerk Jeff Cotton hear questions about the county's ballot-counting process from the Legislature's Joint Performance Review Committee on Thursday, June 27, 2024. (Screenshot/Arkansas Legislature)

Arkansas state and county officials disagreed Thursday on the integrity and security of using voting machines or hand-counted paper ballots in elections.

The State Board of Election Commissioners found “several discrepancies… that could not be reconciled” in the vote tallies from Searcy County, a rural North Central Arkansas county that hand-counts ballots. The discrepancies were found during an audit after the March primary elections, board director Chris Madison wrote in a memo to state lawmakers.

The Legislature’s Joint Performance Review Committee met Thursday to discuss SBEC’s audits of elections in Searcy and Saline counties.

Searcy County officials told the committee they had learned from the issues with counting votes in March. By contrast, Saline County officials said hand-counting ballots during elections is both more expensive and less accurate than using machines to count votes.

The Searcy County Quorum Court voted in late 2023 to hand-count ballots, though voting machines are still available for voters with certain disabilities or for anyone who wants to use them, said county election commission Chairwoman Laura Gross and County Clerk Jeff Cotton.

Gross said fewer than 10 Searcy County voters chose to use voting machines in November when presented with the option of using paper ballots instead.

Thirty people counted roughly 1,700 ballots the day after the March 5 primary, and counting took up the entire day, Madison wrote in the SBEC memo.

The ballot-counting team scanned each ballot through voting machines but sent the hand-counted data, not the data tallied by the machines, to the Secretary of State’s office to certify the election results. Auditors found discrepancies between the numbers of ballots counted by hand and those tabulated by the voting machines, Madison wrote.

Gross admitted that the hand-counting process was imperfect.

“It was a learning curve because we had never done it before, and we didn’t have any direction about how to do it. But our goal was to have a transparent, secure, quality election to the best of our ability under the circumstances,” she said.

The process included marking votes on “tally sheets” and adding them up, but the state audit found that “some votes weren’t carried over in the hand count,” Gross said.

“We were very disturbed by that because we want every vote to count,” she said.

Gross said the Searcy County Election Commission will improve its procedures in order to avoid future discrepancies, and she repeatedly advocated for the continued use of hand counts rather than voting machines, which she called “a $4,000 electronic pen.”

“If I take my pen, which costs 99 cents, and put my votes on the piece of paper, two things have happened: I’ve saved a whole lot of money… and I’ve also made sure I don’t have a machine, some of which have computers in them, between my choices and what’s written on the paper,” she said.

Gross said she believed “there’s a very small percentage of people who will cheat if they can, whatever they’re using” and said computers in voting machines could be hacked and manipulated.

This is not true, said Jon Davidson, SBEC’s educational services manager, who was on the committee that chose the type of voting machines Arkansas counties use.

“I have 100% faith that these machines cannot be hacked,” Davidson said. “There’s no way to hack them, there are no modems connected to them, there’s no way you can get into the software to hack them.”

Saline County Judge Matt Brumley and County Clerk Doug Curtis both said they have not seen evidence of fraud or misconduct in machine-counted elections.

“If I knew anything that someone was cheating, I would go to the prosecuting attorney’s office so fast it would make your head spin,” said Curtis, a former Saline County Quorum Court member. “I’ve heard so much about people cheating in elections, and I haven’t seen it. The system that we’ve got in place, electronic voting, that’s where it’s at.”

Arkansas Supreme Court affirms circuit court decision in voting machine lawsuit

The Donald Trump-connected Arkansas Voter Integrity Initiative has been engaged in ongoing efforts to convince counties statewide to trade voting machines for paper ballots. Cleburne County agreed to do so in January 2023 but later reversed the decision .

In April, the Arkansas Supreme Court upheld a lower court’s dismissal of a lawsuit filed by AVII and its CEO, Conrad Reynolds, that argued voting machines do not comply with state law.

‘Logistically impossible’

Searcy County was one of 15 counties SBEC randomly selected to audit from three pools of counties based on population.

Madison wrote in his memo to lawmakers that Searcy County officials and ballot counters “were dedicated and demonstrated a high degree of effort, and it was clear that they took the responsibility seriously to perform their hand count.”

However, even though county procedures “were methodical and consistent,” the counting teams drew conclusions about ballots with unclear voter intent when they should have left that to the election commission, Madison wrote. Ballots with unclear voter intent are marked in a way that makes it difficult to tell for whom votes are being cast.

“These voter intent ballots were not kept separately but were included in the precinct batches and totals,” Madison wrote.

Additionally, some ballots from one precinct were included in a pile with ballots from another precinct, and other ballots were printed on the incorrect type of paper and would not scan through the voting machine, he wrote.

Gross said using paper ballots will save Searcy County thousands of dollars in the long term since it would not have to replace its voting machines when they no longer work. L.C. Ratchford, a member of the county election commission, said the voting machines already don’t always work well and are expensive to transport throughout the county.

The Secretary of State’s office maintains a contract to fix election equipment so counties do not have to foot the bill, said Leslie Bellamy, the office’s director of elections. She estimated that the current voting machines will not need updates for at least 10 years.

I have 100% faith that these machines cannot be hacked. There’s no way to hack them, there are no modems connected to them, there’s no way you can get into the software to hack them.

– Jon Davidson, State Board of Election Commissioners educational services manager

Act 350 of 2023 requires counties that switch to paper ballots to pay the associated costs themselves . Sen. Kim Hammer, R-Benton, who sponsored Act 350, represents part of Saline County and is co-chair of the Joint Performance Review Committee.

Trading voting machines for hand-counted ballots in Saline County would be “the epitome” of disenfranchising voters, Curtis said, because it would be too time-consuming, too costly and “logistically impossible.”

The population of Searcy County is roughly 7,800, according to the U.S. Census, while Saline County has more than 123,000 people. Saline County would have to stop allowing voters to vote early if all the ballots had to be counted by hand, Curtis said.

In response to a question from Hammer, Brumley said the necessary budget for hand-counting ballots would vary depending on the election but could exceed $750 million more than what elections currently cost the county.

Hammer said after the committee meeting that “there’s a portion of people on either side [of the debate] that have their minds 100% made up.”

“Personally, I have no concerns about the current election process and the use of the equipment that we have,” he said. “…I’ve been in politics since 2010 and I’ve never felt like I’ve been cheated out of anything.”

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