How election deniers are fueling the push to hand count ballots

Gillespie County, Texas — For the last year, Mark Cook has been preaching a kind of low-tech, election-doubting gospel in political battlegrounds across the country. 

“But we’re told: trust the machines…and that is a way to manipulate an election,” Cook recently said at an event in Lancaster, Pennsylvania.

Traveling by RV, Cook calls the three-hour plus presentation he’s brought to more than 100 counties, the “Hand Count Roadshow.”   Cook is part of an election conspiracy movement that’s been growing since 2020 and claims that voting machines can be hacked and manipulated —meaning the only voting system to be trusted is an old-fashioned hand count.

Last year, in deep-red Gillespie County in Central Texas, Cook convinced Republicans who run their own primaries to join the small minority that hand count votes. So, on election night in March, hundreds of volunteers stayed up until as early as 4:30 a.m. the next morning to hand count roughly 8,000 votes, a process that resulted in numerous errors.

Newspaper Ads Canyon Crest CA

“We only have 13 precincts, 12 of which turned in final tally sheets that were inaccurate,” Jim Riley, the elections administrator who oversees elections in Gillespie County, told CBS News.

Riley believes there was no problem in Gillespie County that needed to be solved by hand counting ballots.

“No, the hand counting, in my opinion, did nothing to improve elections in the county,” Riley said.

Riley, a Republican, says Gillespie County’s systems were already top-notch. They involved paper ballots, tallied by a state-approved scanner, that were then verified for accuracy.

Riley says that as much as he and his team have tried to create transparency and visibility to reassure voters, for some “it won’t ever be enough.”

Mo Saiidi was the Gillespie County Republican chair when Cook’s “Hand Count Roadshow” came to town.

“Nobody provided a single iota of evidence, it was just this perception that if it’s plugged into the wall, they’re subject to hacking,” Saiidi said.

Frustrated by his party’s decision, Saiidi resigned.

“We were chasing this elusive problem that never existed,” Saiidi said. “I, in good conscience, I could not lead the effort as a Republican chair.”

The issue has received even more attention following a controversial rule passed last month by the Republican-majority Georgia State Election Board that the number of ballots cast be counted by hand in the November election. Democrats filed a lawsuit Monday in an effort to block enforcement of the rule.

Numerous studies have shown hand counts to be less accurate, more costly and more time-consuming, but that hasn’t stopped Cook from preaching it.

In Michigan, CBS News approached Cook’s RV to ask him some basic questions, but he drove away.  When CBS News then approached him in Pennsylvania, he again refused to talk. However, he regularly appears on right-wing podcasts.

Even in the wake of Gillespie County’s hand count ordeal, the hardened hand count faction is flooding county meetings demanding change before November.

Riley calls the hand count experience “a net loss.”

“If you don’t like hand counting, you’re evil,” Riley said of how some of the county’s constituents see the issue.

It appears to be a solution in search of a problem. 

Major Garrett

Major Garrett is CBS News’ chief Washington correspondent. He’s also the host of “The Takeout,” a weekly multi-platform interview show on politics, policy and pop culture.