Votes are counted by staff at the Maricopa County Elections Department office on Nov. 5, 2020./ Photo by Courtney Pedroza | Getty Images
By Jeremy Duda
A proposal approved by a Senate committee would overhaul the way counties conduct post-election hand count audits of ballots.
After every election, counties must conduct a hand count of ballots from 2% of its precincts and 1% of the early ballots cast to ensure they match up with the tallies from the machines used to tabulate ballots. Counties can base their hand counts on voting centers instead of precincts if that’s how they conduct their elections. The audits are conducted by members of county political party organizations.
But because the audits require at least two recognized parties to conduct the partial hand counts, they can’t happen if the political parties don’t participate. That happened after the 2020 general election in Apache, Gila, Graham, La Paz and Yuma counties. During a Senate Government Committee hearing on Thursday, Chairwoman Kelly Townsend said one county hasn’t conducted a hand count in years.
Townsend’s solution is Senate Bill 1573. Under that proposal, which the committee approved along partisan lines, county recorders would simply select county employees of the appropriate party if one or more political party didn’t take part in the partial hand count.
The bill would make other significant changes to the post-election audits.
