How much does it cost to hand count?

Dispelling the lies and propaganda

In case you haven’t heard, three counties have successfully completed their petition process and have landed the hand count ordinance on the June 4, 2024 primary ballot!

Tripp, Gregory and Haakon Counties will vote in June to discontinue using automatic tabulating machines and require hand counting in the precinct of the paper ballots. Gregory County Commission voted to perform a 100% hand count audit of the election, and the Tripp County citizens are lobbying their commission to do the same.

For some reason, the citizens in these counties don’t trust ES&S to conduct a fair election by printing, programming and counting an initiated measure to get rid of their services! Could there be a bigger conflict of interest when conducting an election?

The success of the petitioning effort and the increased pressure from the electorate to return to hand counting has the establishment running scared. The leftist media continue to write one-sided, incorrect, slanted hit pieces against any efforts to restore the power to the people.

This article does an excellent job pointing out the fact that the auditors have no back up plan, no efficient or practical hand count methods, no training in the actual precinct level hand counting statutes, rules, or procedures, and have NO IDEA what a REAL COST ANALYSIS looks like. Since this article gave us some fun numbers to work with, we will break it down for you.

In Haakon County, the cost of the general election without hand-counting will already be about $10,000 to $15,000, Pinney said.

If the ballot initiative passes, Pinney expects she’ll need 10 extra people to hand-count ballots. That can cost anywhere from $5,000 to $10,000 more, she estimates.

WHAT? Wow - that is shocking isn’t it? $10,000 EXTRA to HAND COUNT the election? Being an election official her numbers must be correct, after all, she is an auditor. This one sided article did not present any estimate from organizations who have actually conducted public hand count studies with updated, accurate and efficient methods.

Haakon County State’s Atty noted this on the Primary Ballot:

I don’t know what kind of math this is, but it isn’t accurate, and this incorrect statement should be removed from the ballot. Is this election interference from the County Government in a local election? Is it legal to list “opinions” on the ballot that aren’t true? This calculation is grossly inaccurate, unless the auditor or hand count teams would be intentionally trying to sabotage the process.

Here is what we come up with for an accurate estimate of hand counting costs in Haakon County:

The above is very generous estimate as the 2020 primary ballots in Haakon County had one race for Democrats and three races for Republicans. NOTE: THERE WERE ONLY 586 BALLOTS CAST.

Here is a different cost estimate for the same race:

NOTE: The 2020 General Election only had 1,150 BALLOTS CAST.

This estimate is based on a hand count we performed on the Sioux Falls City Election test deck with one race on the ballot. We counted 632 ballots in 36 minutes including a couple interruptions and reconciling the tally sheets. We counted 18 ballots/minute with one race. We estimate counting three races on a ballot would take half the time of 250/hour with 11 races, or less.

The Haakon County Auditor publicly stated to South Dakota Searchlight that she estimates it will cost $10,000 to hand count this upcoming primary election. We estimate it will cost $480 MAX, and could be as low as $160 based on the number of ballots cast in the primary election. Voter turnout is predicted to be lower than 2020 this year. The State’s Attorney “opinion” on the ballot estimates 20 workers at $15/hr. for 15 hours = $4,500.00. The SA must be allowing them an 8 hour nap time, a one hour lunch break, and two hours of snack breaks to come up with this estimate. Using our method, Haakon County 2020 ballots with 10 races on the ballot could be sorted, counted and tallied by 20 workers in TWO HOURS for a total cost of $800.00 with a pay raise to $20/hr.

Haakon County - you need to get your officials to one of our hand count training sessions ASAP.

Linda Rantz, an election integrity activist in Missouri, developed the Missouri method of hand counting by looking at the state law and applied it to precinct level tallying of votes. Her methodology has spread across the nation and groups have taken her lead and adopted variations of this in their states.

Rick Wieble has put together a version of this for South Dakota that is compliant with state statutes and rules, while testing the accuracy and speed with leaders from Minnesota, South Dakota, Wisconsin, Ohio, South Carolina, Texas, Georgia and Florida. The average speed at which a team of four can count ballots averages 250 ballots per hour with 11 races on the ballot. This method has been tested locally and can be scaled to fit any election.

Julie Bartling, Gregory County auditor, said if her county’s tabulator ban passes, she’ll have to break up the south-central county’s three precincts into six or 10 precincts to have manageable ballot amounts for hand counters.

That will cost the county $5,000 to $8,000 more – assuming she can convince poll workers who’ve already been working 12-hour days to stay longer and hand-count ballots.

“A lot of people think hand-counting is cheaper, but it really isn’t,” Bartling said.

Julie Bartling estimates $8,000 in extra costs to hand count this primary election. Here is what we came up with:

Again, the above is a very conservative estimate as Gregory County has three races on the Republican ballot and one race on the Democratic ballot.

Here is another estimate based on the reduced items on the ballot for Gregory County:

Gregory County Auditor claims it will cost $8,000 to hand count, we estimate anywhere between $480 - 800 using our methods and tally sheets. That is a HUGE DIFFERENCE.

The auditors gave no source of information for their overzealous estimates while our numbers are based off actual studies and work sessions using these methods. We have taught these methods to all kinds of people and the consensus is it’s fast, easy, fun, and WE CAN DO THIS!

Tripp County Auditor Barb DeSersa said she’ll have to find another 65 people to hand-count ballots if the measure passes. DeSersa oversaw Tripp County’s 2022 general election hand-counting effort, when it was the only county in South Dakota to hand-count all its ballots.

DeSersa was awake for 40 hours straight between Election Day and the day after in 2022, with a significant amount of that time supervising volunteers hand-counting ballots. Several races had to be recounted by volunteer counting boards – sometimes three or four times that night.

If the ban passes, she won’t have poll workers hand-count, and she’ll have five hand-count volunteers per precinct rather than three. The extra two will be “onlookers to ensure everything is done correctly,” DeSersa said.

After Tripp County citizens successfully obtained a hand counted election in 2022, they recruited and turned in an extensive list of volunteers who wanted to help hand count. DeSersa did not use any of them, but rather assigned poll workers, some of whom were impaired due to age and physical limitations such as strokes and poor vision. To those who were left out of the process, but showed up to watch, the lack of organization and training were obvious, which some thought to be intentional.

Bartling said some people think different ballots can be used, but, by law, the county has to use the same ballot whether it hand-counts or uses machines. For Gregory, the tabulator machines cost less than $2,000 each election to use, Bartling said.

Julie Bartling claims it costs less than $2,000/election to use the tabulators in Gregory County, however, these documents obtained by citizens show invoices paid to ES&S amounted to $7,192.03 for 2022 and $11,451.71 for 2020.

How did Julie come up with these numbers to quote to the media? Better yet, why does the media print “facts” quoted from officials with no proof? Quotes with no proof are hearsay, not facts.

The auditors seem to do a special kind of math geared towards the narrative approved by those who are doing everything in their power to maintain control of the elections, the people, and ultimately their power, that they usurped from WE THE PEOPLE, by contracting our rights away to a third-party for-profit vendor, that clearly costs an insane amount of money when compared to hand counting.

The City of Sioux Falls contracts with Minnehaha County to use the ES&S tabulators for their elections. The City of Sioux Falls finds and pays their own poll workers, but has to pay the County for staffing, tabulators, etc. They also paid ES&S $5,000 just to have the rep show up for the first election, not including the runoff election this week.

This is Jerad Schwab, ES&S rep for South Dakota, present at the City of Sioux Falls election, featured in the article photo above.

We estimate the City of Sioux Falls spent at least $43,000 on the election just to contract for ballot tabulating services, which is likely to be significantly more than that. Our estimate of counting one race on the ballot, at 18/min for 11,468 ballots would have taken 44 people one hour to count, 22 people two hours to count, and we threw in an extra hour for ballot sorting and reconciliation time for a total cost of $1,320.00.

As you can see, the cost for hand counting is so much less it’s not even comparable. The amount of money your jurisdiction is wasting on funding a private, third-party, for-profit, out of state corporation who engages in lawfare, intimidation, bullying, and gaslighting campaigns should be turned back into paying willing citizens to participate in their elections.

Hand Counting in the precinct is LEGAL, accurate, efficient, auditable, transparent, verifiable, secure, cost-effective, and restores public trust. Don’t believe the propaganda and gaslighting in the liberal news media.

If you want to see Rick’s estimate for your county - click HERE.

Review the White Paper published by the multi-state hand counting team HERE.

Visit Cause of America Hand Counting Simplified HERE.

For hand count materials and Tally Sheets visit USCASE.org.

If you want to do an estimate for your county yourself, request an itemized list from your auditor of all expenditures paid to ES&S for the prior elections, and then apply our estimates of ballots/hour by the number of races on the ballot. Do the math. Then take that to your commission and demonstrate the sheer waste of money contracting with ES&S is, while they continue to disenfranchise the taxpayers by forcing us to use machines we don’t want while hiding the audit trail and then demanding we trust them.