By Howard Fischer | Capitol Media Services
Mark Finchem has apparently given up on his perennial bid to require that all ballots be counted by hand.
The Republican senator, in an online letter to his new constituents in Prescott, conceded a majority of his colleagues aren’t buying his arguments that having election workers at every voting location hand counting the ballots is the only way to ensure accurate results.
“While I prefer hand-counting paper ballots at the precinct level, not all my colleagues do,” he wrote.
But Finchem, a former representative from Oro Valley who moved to Prescott after losing his 2022 bid to become Secretary of State, has a fallback position. He wants a law that says if Arizona sticks with machine counting, which is the only method allowed by statute, the tabulators must “meet Department of Defense-level cybersecurity standards.”
