Resurrecting longstanding complaints about how U.S. elections are run, President Donald Trump this week reiterated that he wants faster election results, but doesn’t want voting machines.
In Aug. 18 remarks at the White House, Trump said that a forthcoming executive order will “end mail-in ballots” and change voting machines.
Trump continued, “The machines, I mean, they say we’re going to have the results in two weeks. With paper ballots, you have the results that night.”
This echoed Trump’s 2024 campaign promises to use only paper ballots and count all votes on election night.
In an Aug. 18 Truth Social postTrump said he is going to “lead a movement to get rid of” mail-in ballots and voting machines.
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We asked the White House to explain what types of machines Trump wants eliminated — such as vote tabulators — and whether he meant all brands or only certain ones. We also asked whether Trump intends to have election workers count every ballot by hand, and if so, how they would do that fast enough to announce results on election night.
A White House spokesperson did not answer these specific questions and instead sent a statement about voter ID and California and New York voting laws.
In interviews with PolitiFact, voting experts agreed that if Trump’s goals are to end the use of machines and to have results on election night, those goals are diametrically opposed.
Without machines, “Hand-counting all ballots on election night and tabulating all the results would be a vast challenge,” said Mark Lindeman, policy and strategy director for Verified Voting, a nonprofit that studies election administration. “How many people do you need to hire, vet and train? How much space, in how many places, do you need to accommodate all those people and ballots? And once you have all those hand counts, how do you combine them into vote totals for many different contests in overlapping districts without possibility of error or fraud?”
Experts said Trump is wrong to say that machine-conducted voting inevitably takes two weeks, and it’s inaccurate that using an entirely paper system would assure results on election night. More than 155 million votes were cast in the 2024 presidential election.
States set laws that give election officials often weeks to complete an official count, which includes overseas ballots. If the margins are wide enough, media outlets project winners based on unofficial results.
All but a tiny sliver of American voters cast their ballots either directly on paper or use machines that print out a paper record of their votes that they can verify directly, before a machine counts them.
Hand counting ballots is slow; machines are fast
“Scanners make results faster, not slower,” Lindeman said.
Hand counting is feasible for smaller-scale elections, experts told PolitiFact, but for not elections with large numbers of ballots, and with as many as a dozen races to be tallied from each ballot. If 15 offices are being contested on a ballot, those ballots would need to be counted 15 times, said Barry Burden, a University of Wisconsin political scientist.
“Countries such as Canada that hand count ballots on election night typically have only one contest on the ballot,” Burden said.
In many elections, each voter gets a ballot that accounts for the congressional district, county, state legislative district and local districts where they live. Because of this, Burden said, “even a modest sized city can have hundreds of unique ballot combinations. This makes hand-counting of ballots much more complicated.”
In Dane County, Wisconsin, which includes the state capital of Madison, voters cast about 300,000 ballots in November 2022. “It would take months” to hand-count every ballot, said Scott McDonell, the Dane County clerk.
It took Dane County eight 16-hour days to recount by hand its 2016 presidential race ballots, McDonell said — and that was just one race.
Burden cited a 2020 recount in Georgia’s presidential election, which required thousands of ballot counters working long shifts over multiple days to hand-count ballots for just one contest. It took almost a week to complete and cost the state millions of dollars.
In 2023, Mohave County, Arizonapopulation 213,000considered but rejected moving to hand counting for the 2024 election cycle after its elections director said it would cost $1.1 million and would require hiring 245 people. The director said a test hand count also produced errors.
When contractors hired by Arizona Republicans hand-counted 2020 presidential and Senate votes in Maricopa County, which includes Phoenix and its suburbs, it took them months to complete the process, using hundreds of volunteers. Their results reconfirmed Joe Biden had defeated Trump in the county.
Stephen Richer, the former Maricopa County Recorder, told PolitiFact that “tabulation is one of the fastest parts of the process. Tabulators can read thousands of ballots an hour.”
Maricopa County ballots cast in the 2020 general election are examined and recounted by contractors working for Florida-based company, Cyber Ninjas, at Veterans Memorial Coliseum in Phoenix on May 6, 2021. (AP)
Machines are more accurate than people for counting ballots
Studies have shown voting machines produce more accurate counts compared with hand counts.
“Counters must pause for regular breaks to stay rested and sharp,” Burden wrote in 2023 for The Conversation. “Counting must periodically stop to resolve challenges and questions from observers. It is painstaking work.”
Given the limits of human endurance and focus, human counters can make errors, such as losing track of their counts.
“In contrast, dedicated tabulator machines, which are used after voters have marked their ballots, are excellent at counting,” Burden wrote. Scanners for standardized ballots have lower error rates than most other technologiesmaking them significantly more accurate than counting the same ballots by handhe said.
Richer said in an X post that vote scanners — similar to machines that read filled-in ovals for standardized tests — “are highly, highly accurate. And fast. And cheap.” States also have procedures to test and audit voting equipment.
“Hand counting hundreds of millions of individual votes is so stupid it’s not worth spending more time on,” Richer said on X.
Our ruling
Trump said with voting machines, “They say we’re going to have the results in two weeks. With paper ballots, you have the results that night.”
Scientific studies and experience with past elections show that both parts of this assertion are incorrect.
Trump is wrong that machine-conducted voting inevitably takes two weeks. And getting rid of machines that tabulate votes and relying solely on humans to count paper ballots would, in most cases, take longer, require more personnel and add expense to the process, particularly in large jurisdictions with large numbers of ballots cast and a variety of races on each ballot.
We rate the statement False.
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