Trump’s election moonbats in Codington County get little succor from their choices for County Auditor. Republican incumbent Brenda Hanten and independent challenger Debbie Melville both reject hand-counting ballots:
“I am not in support of hand counting for the simple fact of the accuracy,” Hanten said, noting the fatigue election workers face after a long day. Melville agreed, adding that the tabulator systems are rigorously tested and that any kicked-out ballots are verified by another set of eyes to guarantee accurate counts [Steve Jurrens, “Watertown Candidate Forum Highlights Data Center Debate, School Funding, and Codington County Auditor Race,” Northeast Radio SD, 2026.10.06].
Hanten and Melville can find support for their confidence in machine tabulators in every bit of research and practice out there. Machines ballot counters are more accurate:
Humans are notoriously poor at completing rote, repetitive tasks (especially if counting begins after a full day of working the polls). One election official noted to BPC that she had four sets of workers hand count the same ballots only to receive four different results. Tabulators, by contrast, are designed intentionally for this sort of repetition, and research confirms that tabulators have a lower error rate than hand counts. In their 2018 Election Law Journal article Learning from Recounts, Ansolabehere et al. analyzed two statewide recounts in Wisconsin, concluding that “Scanning paper ballots produces a more accurate election night count than hand-counting” [Wren Orey, Grace Gordon, and Christopher Thomas, “How Ballot Tabulators Improve Elections,” Bipartisan Policy Center, 2022.04.25].
…more trustworthy:
To get a hand count of a full ballot with dozens of contests, Americans would have to wait weeks, if not several months, to get an accurate result. Extended results reporting timelines are precarious for voter trust as candidates can capitalize on these periods of uncertainty to sow distrust in the results. As the 2020 election demonstrated, even when officials proactively warn that election results will take longer than usual, delayed results are perceived as inherently suspect by candidates and members of the public.
Tabulators are proven to produce more accurate results on election night. In our rapid information society, expedient reporting is not only an expectation of the American public but a cornerstone of generating trusted results [Orey, Gordon, and Thomas, 2022.04.25].
…and more efficient:
Before electronic tabulating systems were widely used, many jurisdictions conducted hand counts after the polls closed on election night. To ensure that a precinct board could finish tabulating within a few hours of the close of polls, Michigan limited the maximum size of precincts to 400 registered voters. That calculation was based directly on the number of offices and issues on the general election ballot and the number of ballots a precinct team could tabulate in a short window.
Tabulating ballots by hand (many of which had 50 to 60 different contests) took a significant amount of time and was not a sustainable system in the long term. Michigan introduced mechanical lever machines into urban areas initially, followed by today’s system in which all ballots are tabulated by optical scan.
If Michigan were to revert to the 400-voter precincts needed to sustain hand counts, the state’s total number of precincts would increase from the current 4,800 to 17,500. The workforce needed would increase more than 300% from 24,000 precinct inspectors in election day polling places to 87,500. There is neither a workforce nor the facilities available to sustain 17,500 precincts [Orey, Gordon, and Thomas, 2022.04.25].
Vote confidently, Codington County: whomever you choose to count your ballots for the next four years is listening to the facts about ballot-tabulating machines, not the conspiracy-theory cranks trying to crash our elections.