The morning before polls opened in Cochise County, Arizona, a judge still had not ruled on how local votes would be counted.
On one side of the case were state officials and voters who opposed an effort to audit Tuesday’s election by hand. Arguing in favor of an audit were some of Cochise County’s Republican officials, backed by lawyers previously involved in a chaotic 2021 election audit in Arizona’s Maricopa County. Only on Monday evening—hours before the election—did a judge rule against a hand recount of the entire Cochise vote.
Cochise, a rural county on the southern border, was one of several to preemptively call for an audit of its 2022 midterm vote. Although counties routinely review their elections, this new wave of audit enthusiasts is cozy with conspiracy theorists, and promotes methods like hand-counting ballots, which elections security experts describe as one of the most surefire ways to accidentally introduce errors into a vote count.
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Hand-counting ballots is a bad idea, elections experts say. They cost more, take longer, and open opportunities for meddling from partisan kooks (see: the Maricopa audit, during which conspiracy-driven volunteers searched ballots for bamboo fibers, under the mistaken belief that ballots had been imported from China). Even without involvement from election truthers, hand counts are more error-prone than electronic counts. A 2018 study found hand counts to be less accurate than machine-counts, and a 2012 study found hand counts to have 2 percent error rate—a worryingly high margin that could tip elections, particularly in neck-and-neck races like several in this year’s midterms.
Evidence aside, some Republicans have heartily advocated for hand recounts. Those efforts tie into a broader pro-Trump movement to cast away electronic voting machines (which conspiracy theorists falsely claim hacked the 2020 vote in President Joe Biden’s favor) and “vote Amish,” i.e. entirely with hand-counted paper ballots.
And in Cochise County, a court battle over a hand-counted audit was still ongoing just hours before the midterm election.
Two Republicans on Cochise’s three-person board of supervisors voted in favor of the audit last month, only to be hit with a lawsuit from a local voter and an alliance of Arizona retirees, who called the hand recount “unlawful, chaotic, time consuming and unnecessary.” Arizona’s secretary of state also weighed in with a brief, warning that a recount could cause a delay in Arizona’s election, where multiple election-denialist candidates have already raised the specter of fraud in the midterms. Arizona officials have previously raised concerns about conspiracy theorists using election delays as fodder for claims of election fraud.
But Cochise County officials said they were within their rights to audit the vote by hand. The group struck back in court, represented by Bryan Blehm, an attorney who previously worked for Cyber Ninjas, the group behind a freewheeling “audit” in Maricopa County. In a filing last week, Blehm argued that opposition to the hand count was actually part of a plot to benefit Democratic Arizona gubernatorial candidate Katie Hobbs.
“This matter is political, and it is intended to benefit a flailing gubernatorial candidate on the eve of Arizona’s 2022 election,” Blehm wrote in the filing. “As such, the Washington Democratic National Political machine recruited former Hillary Clinton attorney Mark Elias and his law firm to target Cochise County, a small rural Arizona County with an estimated population of approximately 125,000 people. This full-frontal assault is intended to generate publicity for Democratic candidates and not compel the Cochise Board of Supervisors to cease and desist for violating Arizona law.”
A judge ruled Monday night that the county can only conduct hand recounts of small portions of ballots. The county is expected to appeal the ruling, the Arizona Republic reported.
Cochise County is not the only area hoping to review its vote by hand.
Some of the loudest calls for preemptive audits come from Republican strongholds in swing states like Arizona, Pennsylvania, and Nevada. Officials in Pennsylvania’s Lycoming and York counties have already committed to hand recounts, although York County officials said it would only examine ballots from three of its 161 precincts.
York County’s decision to hand-audit its election came after a meeting between York County President Commissioner Julie Wheeler and Audit the Vote PA, the York Dispatch reported. ATVPA, an election-denial group, previously made headlines for an error-riddled “canvass report” of Pennsylvania voters. While conducting that survey, ATVPA volunteers knocked on doors and asked questions about residents’ votes, leading to York County locals accusing the group of intimidation and voter suppression efforts. ATVPA has also attempted to remove electronic voting machines in York County.
Wheeler, who did not return a request for comment on Monday, told CBS21 that the hand recount “is not tied to any election issues in the past. This is not an indication that we believe that prior election results that we certified are inaccurate.”
Other counties have entertained calls for hand counts, only to be stopped in the courts or by local officials.
A conspiracy-driven coalition campaigned to audit Pinal County, Arizona’s election, but was voted down by county officials this month. And in Nye County, Nevada, a county clerk who falsely believes Donald Trump won the 2020 election announced that he would conduct a hand-counted audit of his county’s vote. That effort was already underway in late October, when Nevada’s secretary of state halted the effort.
In a statement, Nye County announced that it would resume the hand count "as soon as our plan is in compliance with the Court’s order and approved by the Secretary of State."
This story has been updated to reflect a Monday night ruling in Cochise County.
