The Senate Elections Committee heard a presentation from We the People AZ Alliance (WPAA) co-founder Shelby Busch on Monday regarding its plan for restoring trust in elections by including hand counts of ballots.
Both the Arizona Republican Party, the Maricopa County Republican Committee (MCRC), and Arkansas Republicans have already implemented the AVII method, which is known as the Arkansas Voter Integrity Initiative, in its party elections. Republicans in Arkansas want to make the AVII method law by putting the question to voters as a constitutional amendment.
Busch showed the committee a 3-minute video about AVII, which displayed footage of the procedure in place during the MCRC election last month. She said the method proved successful since “[t]wo slates ran in a heated race and no one challenged the election.”
She said the procedure optimizes transparency and eliminates errors, describing it as “trustworthy, transparent, accountable, and accurate.” Busch said the reason hand counting is necessary is due to “confidence decline,” citing polls that show Americans don’t trust their votes are being counted accurately. She said the decline was due to black box voting and electronic tabulation. Also, Busch said it reduces civic participation.
Busch (pictured above) explained that ballots are printed on 10-factor security paper, which includes “void if copied” watermarks and UV fibers for authenticity. Black lights reveal the UV watermarks during tabulation. Candidates or selections are assigned a number to correspond with the result. This makes it more difficult for bad actors to change later since they would need to also know which number was associated with a candidate or measure.
It is based on precinct models. Ballots are divided into batches of 25. “Reconciling totals in small batches allows for a level of scrutiny that is both thorough and manageable,” Busch said.
The ballot images are saved so anyone can look at them later. They are hand-counted at tables with four people: a counter, a validator, and two scorers. Each worker receives two hours of training. Every table has cameras; the ballots never leave the view of cameras. Voters can mark boxes with a checkmark, an X, or fill it out entirely without worrying about machine readability problems.
The process is fast, she said, there were 2,574 ballots for all the races and they were counted in just over an hour. “All of the tabulation sheets and final results sheets are available and made available online” within 24 hours, she said, so anyone can verify the results.
Col. Conrad Reynolds, writing for AVII, said a primary concern driving the effort is the vulnerabilities of electronic tabulating machines. He cited a confidential report by University of Michigan computer scientist J. Alex Halderman, which was recently unsealed from Georgia litigation. Halderman went over various ways the machines can be hacked.
“For instance, by exploiting a ‘Zip Slip’ vulnerability, an attacker can install malicious code that executes with root privilege when the machine loads the election definition from a USB stick,” Reynolds said. “This code can change the election outcome without detection.”
Halderman demonstrated in court how a Dominion machine could be hacked within seconds using everyday items, a Bic pen, and a $10 smart card.
Kari Lake and Mark Finchem filed a lawsuit to stop using electronic tabulating machines in the 2022 election, but the Democrat-appointed judge has consistently ruled against them, even awarding sanctions against their attorneys despite the fact it wasn’t common in similar cases.
County officials who have attempted to conduct hand counts have been prosecuted by Attorney General Kris Mayes or threatened with prosecution. Mohave County Supervisor Ron Gould sued Mayes after she threatened him.
AVII put on a two-hour symposium last year discussing the need for hand-counting ballots. A flowchart with all the various ways electronic machine tabulators are subject to vulnerabilities is here.
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Rachel Alexander is a reporter at The Arizona Sun Times and The Star News Network. Follow Rachel on Twitter / X. Email tips to [email protected].
