Bucking national trends, a third of Maine towns still count ballots by hand

When polls close at 8 p.m. on Nov. 5, six trained election clerks in New Vineyard, a town of about 700 in Franklin County, will start counting ballots by hand. There are 13 questions on New Vineyard voters’ ballots: eight races for county, state and federal positions and five state referendum questions. Each of these votes will have to be tallied independently — not once, but twice.

Election clerks will divide into groups of two (generally one Democrat and one Republican), and each group will count batches of 50 ballots at a time. Working concurrently, the two clerks will review the same ballot and state aloud the race or question and the choice — “State Senate, Jane Doe; Question 1, Yes” — and each will record the voter’s selection on their individual tally sheets.

As each batch of ballots is completed, the teams will compare their tally sheets to ensure that they match. If they don’t, the team has to recount the race or question that was off. Once everything is settled, the clerks sign the certification on the tally sheets and one sheet goes to the warden and the other stays bundled with the ballots.

Michelle Beedy, New Vineyard’s town clerk, said she would like to get voting tabulation equipment, such as the hand-fed optical scanners the majority of Maine municipalities use to count ballots.

“It just would make counting a lot easier,” Beedy said. “There’s a lot to counting those ballots.”

But the town enjoys its traditions, hauling out an old-fashioned wooden ballot box for each election.

New Vineyard is one of 150 towns, or about a third of all voting jurisdictions in Maine, that counts ballots by hand. Each of the towns has fewer than 750 registered voters, though the average number of voters among the towns is much lower, at 251.

In Maine, unlike most of the country, elections are run by municipalities. Nationwide, elections for 90 percent of registered voters are run at the county level. Only half of a percentage of those voters’ ballots are exclusively hand counted. By contrast, Maine jurisdictions that hand count ballots represent 4 percent of registered voters, or about 37,000 people.

(Not all Maine voters’ polling places are in the same jurisdiction as where they’re registered to vote, especially in unorganized territories. The 241 registered voters from Connor Township in Aroostook County, for example, will go to Caribou to vote in the upcoming election.)

Maine’s other 330 cities and towns use devices called hand-fed optical scanners, which scan  hand-marked paper ballots and tabulate the votes cast, storing the data on a memory stick-like device. If something on the ballot is incorrect or unclear, like too many choices filled in for a single race or a partially filled in bubble, an alert displays on the screen and offers to return the ballot for correction.

Since 2012, Maine has had a contract with the company Election Systems & Software, which makes optical scanners. Municipalities can opt in to receiving the DS200 ballot scanning device at no cost to them, Secretary of State Shenna Bellows told The Monitor .

In the 12 years since Maine entered into that contract, the number of cities and towns that opt to hand count has gone down significantly: in 2012, only about one-third of towns used a hand-fed optical scanner to tabulate their ballots, while the remaining two-thirds hand counted.

More than 2,300 voting jurisdictions from 39 states or territories, including Maine, use this particular make and model of ballot scanning device, according to Verified Voting, a nonpartisan organization that researches the use of technology in elections.

Per state law, it is up to municipalities to decide if they want to use state-approved tabulation equipment, which besides hand counting is the only other state-approved tabulation method. Bellows said her office strongly suggests large municipalities do so.

“The data demonstrates that hand counting increases the possibility of human error, and it takes a lot longer to count ballots when you’re doing it by hand,” Bellows said.

A peer-reviewed study published in the Election Law Journal compared the election night hand count and the statewide recount for two Wisconsin elections and found that vote counts done by scanning devices were more accurate on average than those tallied by hand.

Bellows referred to other reports on elections in New Hampshire and Nevada that found hand counting to have much higher error rates than scanners.

But she gets why small towns like New Vineyard stick to hand counting.

“We understand that they prefer the old-fashioned hand count, recognizing that it’s really important that they be as scrupulous as possible in ensuring the accuracy of that count,” she said.

GOP lawmakers and supporters in some states have made a push to go back to hand counting ballots, including in New Hampshire where Trump ally and MyPillow founder Mike Lindell, peddling unfounded conspiracy theories of fraud related to voting tabulation devices, like optical scanners, helped orchestrate a campaign to get rid of them earlier this year.

But Pam Smith, the president and CEO of Verified Voting, said the number of voting jurisdictions that have gotten rid of their equipment in favor of hand counting remains small nationwide. In New Hampshire, the effort failed — just one small town voted to ban voting machines, and the decision is unlikely to stand.

Smith said the DS200 optical scanners used across the state are secure and accurate, particularly because all Maine jurisdictions, regardless of how they tabulate votes, use hand-marked paper ballots. This ensures there is a paper trail in case of a recount or audit. (A law allowing the Secretary of State to conduct post-election audits goes into effect on Jan. 1.)

“It’s important to have that evidence because then you can use it,” Smith said. “If your system was purely electronic and there was no separate record that the voter could see and confirm, then you don’t have that same benefit and that equipment is not securable in the same way that a scanner is.”

All but 1.4 percent of voters in the U.S. will have a paper record of their votes in the upcoming election, including hand- or device-marked paper ballots or receipt-like print-outs called Voter Verified Paper Audit Trails.

All Maine jurisdictions also have ballot-marking devices called ExpressVote from the same manufacturer that makes the optical scanners, which allow people with disabilities to vote “privately and independently,” according to Verified Voting’s equipment database .

The device generates a printed ballot when the voter is finished, which is then tabulated by a scanner or by hand. (Some Maine voters with disabilities also have the option to vote absentee via a secure online portal.)

Smith said the security and accuracy of hand counted ballots depends on how many voters there are: the larger a jurisdiction gets, the more difficult it is to “cautiously and carefully” tabulate votes in a timely manner. And the larger the jurisdiction, the more expensive and time-intensive the process — a point Bellows echoed.

“Mainers are accustomed to receiving results on election night, and the tabulators advance the speed of the results as well as the accuracy,” Bellows said.

Beedy, New Vineyard’s town clerk, said she’ll have two election clerks counting absentee ballots throughout the day, and four more clerks counting ballots cast on election day once the polls close. Each clerk is paid minimum wage, $14.15 an hour. Beedy and the election warden will be there the entire time. It will cost the town — which only has about 530 registered voters — about $700 for just the six election clerks and more than 14 hours to count every vote.

“We’re responsible for every single ballot,” she said. “You miss one number and your whole tally sheet is off. So you could be back trying to find one ballot out of 800.”

Beedy figures the election clerks will be counting until at least 11 p.m.

“If all goes well,” she said.

This story was produced with support from the Institute for Nonprofit News' Rural News Network and the Google News Initiative.