Dozens of election workers examining ballot after ballot, hour after hour. Unofficial results trickling in days after Election Day.
If Republican Denny Hoskins wins the race for Missouri secretary of state in November, that scene may one day play out across the state.
Hoskins, a state senator from Warrensburg who won his party’s nomination last month, wants to dump the ubiquitous electronic tabulators currently used by election officials in favor of hand counting every paper ballot — upwards of three million in a presidential election.
Election authorities warn the move would impose substantial burdens, requiring them to hire more workers and delaying results. Experts on election security say moving to hand counting would feed voter distrust and create periods of uncertainty over election outcomes that candidates or grifters could exploit.
“If this candidate wants very expensive, inaccurate counts that take a really long time, then he’s got a great policy prescription,” said David Becker, director of the Center for Election Innovation & Research, a nonprofit group that works to build confidence in elections.
“But if he wants accurate counts that take up a reasonable amount of resources that can be done quickly when people expect them, then this is an incredibly bad idea.”
The overwhelming majority of American election authorities machine-count ballots. More than 75% of U.S. voters in 2020 cast ballots that were counted by optical scan machines, according to data compiled by the MIT Election Data and Science Lab. Less than 1 percent of ballots cast were counted by hand.
But interest in hand counting has surged in recent years, however, as former President Donald Trump and his allies have continued to falsely assert the 2020 election was stolen, sowing baseless fears about election security.
Hoskins has supported hand counting for some time; he prefiled legislation in December 2023 to require hand counting. The bill never advanced as Hoskins and other members of the Missouri Freedom Caucus, a faction of hard-right senators, clashed with Republican leaders.
But Hoskins’ position on hand counting was at times lost amid a large, chaotic Republican primary race where candidates struggled for name recognition. Hoskins was one of eight candidates in a field that included other sitting legislators as well as a social media provocateur. He won with 24.4% of the vote.
Hoskins, an accountant by trade, now stands a strong chance of becoming the next Missouri secretary of state – becoming the state’s chief election official and gaining a significant platform to champion hand counting.
“There … can be all sorts of glitches when we talk about anything electronic and computerized,” Hoskins said during a campaign event in Jackson County this summer.
During his campaign, Hoskins has said repeatedly on social media that he supports hand counting. “I believe we need to eliminate the election machines and hand count ballots,” he wrote on Facebook in June.
The Republican-controlled Missouri General Assembly would likely need to pass legislation mandating a hand count. Some lawmakers might be inclined to support Hoskins, but others would undoubtedly hear significant concerns from local election officials.
Lt. Gov. Mike Kehoe, the Republican candidate for governor, sidestepped a recent question about hand counting. Speaking with reporters at the Missouri State Fair last month, he said “what the legislature does and what that legislation ends up looking like, we’ll have to see what form that might take.”
