A proposal to hand-count ballots promotes a false and dangerous narrative
To those who grumble that Jan. 6, 2021, is ancient history and everyone should just move on already, we offer rebuttal in the person of Missouri state Sen. Denny Hoskins. The Warrensburg Republican, who is in the running next year to become the state’s top election official, has filed legislation to require hand-counting of the state’s roughly 3 million ballots.
His backward rationale is that it would make voting more secure and accurate. In fact, all serious data indicates the opposite is true — unless, of course, you’re fully vested in the MAGA-manufactured myth that ballot-counting machines are being hacked by foreign governments and other dark forces.
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It’s anyone’s guess whether Hoskins is truly this delusional, or is merely playing to the persecution fantasies of the fringe right. But it’s one of the two.
The worst domestic assault against American democracy since the Civil War culminated on Jan. 6, but it began earlier. In the weeks before the mob of then-President Donald Trump’s supporters attacked the Capitol, Trump and his surrogates laid the groundwork by spreading outrageous, easily disproved lies about supposed election fraud. Among the loopiest was that tabulating machines used to count paper ballots had been compromised to flip votes to challenger Joe Biden.
For an indication of just how far down the rabbit hole this conspiracy-mongering went, consider that a voting-machine company called Dominion Voting Systems this year landed a landmark libel settlement from Fox News for almost $800 million. Among the deranged, entirely fictional allegations the network allowed Trump surrogates to spin on its shows was that Dominion was formed to fix elections by associates of the late Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chávez.
You can’t make this stuff up — except, Trump and his lawyers did, again and again.
No significant instances of election fraud were ever uncovered, despite the most vigorous post-election reviews in U.S. history. Dozens of courts threw out Trump’s claims as utterly baseless. Even now, some of Trump’s former lawyers are facing lawsuits and disbarment for peddling his lies.
Still, Trump continues peddling those lies even today, attempting to make next year’s election a referendum on the validity of the last one. It’s a cynical and dangerous crusade to erode Americans’ confidence in their elections.
Hoskins, running for Missouri secretary of state next year, is effectively endorsing that crusade with his legislation to hand-count all Missouri ballots. He says it’s based on “concerns” from “a lot of people” about “the accuracy of tabulating machines.” Yet he can’t cite a single shred of evidence that there’s been any actual security problem with the machines.
Even most of Hoskins’ fellow Republicans understand that hand-counting ballots is unfeasible because it would require immense staffing and would delay election results for weeks or months — and then would yield numbers more likely to be corrupted by human error or mischief.
But unfeasibility isn’t the most offensive aspect of it. To the extent that the public has “concerns” about election validity, they have been planted by Trump’s big lie and by legislation like this, which lends that lie undeserved credibility. Peddling this kind of corrosive conspiracy hokum should be disqualifying for statewide office.
—St. Louis Post-Dispatch Editorial Board/TNS
