Missouri Republican candidate wants to hand count ballots, alarming election experts

Dozens of election workers examining ballot after ballot, hour after hour. Unofficial results trickling in days after Election Day.

If Republican Denny Hoskins wins the race for Missouri secretary of state in November, that scene may one day play out across the state.

Hoskins, a state senator from Warrensburg who won his party’s nomination last month, wants to dump the ubiquitous electronic tabulators currently used by election officials in favor of hand counting every paper ballot – upwards of three million in a presidential election. The change would upend how Missourians experience elections, with voters enduring long waits before learning who won big races.

Election authorities warn the move would impose substantial burdens, requiring them to hire more workers and delaying results at a time when many Republicans buy into false conspiracies surrounding election administration. Experts on election security say moving to hand counting would feed voter distrust and create periods of uncertainty over election outcomes that candidates or grifters could exploit.

“If this candidate wants very expensive, inaccurate counts that take a really long time, then he’s got a great policy prescription,” said David Becker, director of the Center for Election Innovation & Research, a nonprofit group that works to build confidence in elections.

“But if he wants accurate counts that take up a reasonable amount of resources that can be done quickly when people expect them, then this is an incredibly bad idea.”

The overwhelming majority of American election authorities machine-count ballots. More than 75% of U.S. voters in 2020 cast ballots that were counted by optical scan machines, according to data compiled by the MIT Election Data and Science Lab. Less than 1 percent of ballots cast were counted by hand.

But interest in hand counting has surged in recent years, however, as former President Donald Trump and his allies have continued to falsely assert the 2020 election was stolen, sowing baseless fears about election security.

Hoskins has supported hand counting for some time; he prefiled legislation in December 2023 to require hand counting. The bill never advanced as Hoskins and other members of the Missouri Freedom Caucus, a faction of hard-right senators, clashed with Republican leaders.

But Hoskins’ position on hand counting was at times lost amid a large, chaotic Republican primary race where candidates struggled for name recognition. Hoskins was one of eight candidates in a field that included other sitting legislators as well as a social media provocateur. He won with 24.4% of the vote.

Hoskins, an accountant by trade, now stands a strong chance of becoming the next Missouri secretary of state – becoming the state’s chief election official and gaining a significant platform to champion hand counting.

“There … can be all sorts of glitches when we talk about anything electronic and computerized,” Hoskins said during a campaign event in Jackson County this summer.

Hoskins didn’t respond to multiple calls and text messages for this story.

During his campaign, Hoskins has said repeatedly on social media that he supports hand counting. “I believe we need to eliminate the election machines and hand count ballots,” he wrote on Facebook in June.

Creating ‘chaos’

The Republican-controlled Missouri General Assembly would likely need to pass legislation mandating a hand count. Some lawmakers might be inclined to support Hoskins, but others would undoubtedly hear significant concerns from local election officials.

Lt. Gov. Mike Kehoe, the Republican candidate for governor, sidestepped a recent question about hand counting. Speaking with reporters at the Missouri State Fair last month, he said “what the legislature does and what that legislation ends up looking like, we’ll have to see what form that might take.”

The Democratic candidate for secretary of state, Rep. Barbara Phifer of St. Louis, in an interview called the idea of hand counting ballots “incomprehensible.”

Phifer emphasized that Missouri law already provides for post-election audits where election authorities randomly choose 5% of precincts for hand recounts. Hand counting all ballots would be an expensive and time-intensive endeavor, she said.

“It would create chaos and create distrust in elections as the time went on and on while ballots were being counted,” Phifer said.

Sara Zorich, the Democratic director at the Jackson County Board of Elections, told The Star this summer that hand counting ballots would more than double the necessary work and resources. The board, which has roughly 270,000 active registered voters within its jurisdiction, administers elections within Jackson County but outside of Kansas City.

“It would be necessary to rent a large enough space to accommodate the amount of staff needed to handle such a task,” Zorich wrote in an email.

“The number of hours to hand count just a single race may seem simple,” she said. “But realistically with all the races and/or measures in an election … would be a significant amount of staff, time and cost.”

Missouri law allows for hand counting but, practically speaking, most localities use machines that scan paper ballots. Hand counting requires bipartisan teams to look at each ballot when recording votes.

Ballots, even for low-key elections, are often complex. A single election can involve potentially dozens of races and ballot questions. In some races, voters can even pick multiple candidates.

Every additional race that appears on a ballot adds to the time needed to count each ballot. Just a few extra seconds per race per ballot eventually adds up over hundreds of thousands of ballots.

With machines, most election authorities can provide mostly complete, unofficial results by late on election night, often by 10 or 11 p.m., if not earlier. A hand count could push that process well into the next day or even last several days, depending on the number of workers available.

Delays dismissed

Some Republicans who support hand counting dismiss concerns about the potential for delays.

Sen. Bill Eigel, a Weldon Spring Republican who finished second in the Republican primary for governor, summed up the case for hand counting in an interview last year. He said hand counting would restore “a lot of the transparency” in elections that, he said, has been missing since 2020.

All machines involved in elections involve “certain vulnerabilities,” he said, adding that the best way to avoid those pitfalls is to go back to hand counting. He mentioned that Osage County used hand counting in a recent municipal election and was able to report results at roughly the same time as other jurisdictions.

“So I don’t think it’s going to lead to delays,” Eigel said.

Osage County, in central Missouri, did in fact try hand counting in its April 2023 municipal election. But County Clerk Nicci Kammerich wrote in a letter to the editor in the local newspaper, the Unterrified Democrat, that some results took an additional two to three hours with hand counting. Hand counting in the future would have also required more than a dozen additional election workers.

Kimmerich wrote that the largely rural county would continue using machines to count ballots.

“Our tabulation machines the county uses for elections are faster, accurate and more efficient to get the job done,” she wrote.

Finding enough workers to count ballots could prove challenging in some counties, said Eric Fey, the Democratic director of elections in St. Louis County and president of the Missouri Association of County Clerks and Election Authorities. Hand counting requires a bipartisan team and finding equal numbers of workers from each party would be difficult in areas that strongly lean Republican or Democratic.

When voting machines began to be used in the 1950s, they were seen as a way to prevent voter fraud and counting mistakes, Fey said.

“People who are very fatigued after a very long day of counting thousands of ballots, they would just make mistakes, honest mistakes quite often,” he said.

Becker, the director of the Center for Election Innovation & Research, said he suspects any serious candidate once in office will quickly realize how bad of an idea hand counting is – and how it will unify both Democratic and Republican election officials in opposition.

“Because it is a failed policy that has been proven time and again to be a failure,” Becker said. “And it is fueled not by any actual issues with the counting of ballots.”