Conservative Arizona county votes against hand-counting ballots in 2024 election

A conservative county in northwestern Arizona voted Tuesday against a proposal to hand-count ballots in the 2024 election, after the local elections director argued against the proposal due to its high costs and worker demand. 

The Mohave County Board of Supervisors voted 3-2 against the plan. Supervisors Ron Gould and Hildy Angius voted in favor, while the three other supervisors, including Board Chairman Travis Lingenfelter, opposed it. Lingenfelter pointed to the county’s current budget deficit in defending his vote.

“It’s a really stark situation, because when you look at Mohave County’s budget, it’s a conservative budget,” Lingenfelter said. 

“But the first thing that we have to do in Mohave County, in good conscious, is to balance the budget,” he continued. “You can’t talk about spending when you have $18- to $20-million deficit. I mean, that’s irresponsible.”

Mohave County Elections Director Allen Tempert spoke prior to the vote and emphasized the confidentiality, timeliness, accuracy and costs to consider in the hand-counting process. Tempert led a review of the proposal and found the county would need to hire hundreds of people to tally the ballots, spend more than $1.1 million and an additional $31,360 for recounts. 

Tempert expressed concerns over confidentiality of the hand-counting process. “It’s obviously impossible to get hundreds of people to do hand tallying,” he said. “And for them not to go home and tell their husband or their wife or their best friend or something or another what they have seen, what’s been going on all day long.” 

Tempert pointed to the requirement that ballot-counting must be completed in 14 days after the primary election and 20 days after the general election, which he argued would “really be pushing it.” 

“It’s an awful lot of work that has to be done in a short amount of time, considering we had 105,000 ballots for the general election of 2020,” Tempert said. 

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Tempert pushed back against reports claiming hand-counting is more accurate than machine counting, calling them “not true.” Tempert’s review claimed workers made 46 mistakes during a test hand-count of 850 ballots over a three-day period. 

Both Mohave and Cochise counties delayed their ballot certifications in the 2022 election after GOP members claimed voters were disenfranchised. In Cochise County, conspiracy theorists argued the county’s vote-counting machines were not properly certified. Cochise County approved a hand-counting proposal last year, but it was later blocked by a judge. 

The Hill reached out to the Mohave County Board of Elections for further comment.