Experts agree that hand recounts are valuable in close races where a small number of ballots could change the outcome; a voter’s intent may be clear to a human, for instance, when it was not to a machine. They also agree that hand audits — spot checks of a small percentage of ballots — are useful in verifying machine counts.
Audits, which are common, can confirm “whether the machine’s basically got it right,” said Charles Stewart III, a professor of political science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the director of the M.I.T. Election Data and Science Lab.
But these tools are valuable because they are limited: The fewer ballots that workers have to review by hand, the more time and attention they can give each one.
This level of diligence cannot realistically be replicated for every ballot in every race, experts said.
In at least one place, Nye County, Nev., 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, has costs in time and resources.
Election staffs are often overworked, and “to layer something this time-consuming and this prone to error on top of all that other work is very concerning,” said Gowri Ramachandran, senior counsel in the Elections and Government Program at the Brennan Center for Justice. “In all but really the tiniest of jurisdictions, it just does not make sense.”
In Cochise County alone, which accounted for less than 2 percent of votes cast in Arizona in 2020, Mr. Lindeman estimated that a full hand count would require 12,000 person-hours of work. The United States District Court for the District of Arizona found in the lawsuit from Ms. Lake and Mr. Finchem that in the state’s largest county, Maricopa, a hand count would require 25,000 temporary workers.
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