Democrats in South Dakota are upset that voters in three rural counties will decide tomorrow whether to return to counting ballots by hand in this fall's elections. The process may be slower, but too many questions have been raised about the accuracy of the machine tabulators that are in use at most precincts around the nation these days. When the Associated Press decided to cover this bit of local news, they of course took a mocking tone, talking about "unfounded conspiracy theories." But clearly some of South Dakota's voters don't feel that way. If the media wants everyone to have more confidence in the election results, perhaps they should be encouraging all of the state governments to act with more transparency and give people a reason to be confident.

Voters in at least three rural South Dakota counties are set to decide Tuesday whether to return to counting ballots by hand, the latest communities around the country to consider ditching machine tabulators based on unfounded conspiracy theories stemming from the 2020 presidential election.

The three counties, each with fewer than 6,000 residents, would be among the first in the U.S. to require old-school hand counts, which long ago were replaced by ballot tabulators in most of the country.

A number of other states and local governments have considered banning machine counting since the 2020 election, but most of those efforts have sputtered over concerns of cost, the time it takes to count by hand and the difficulty of hiring more staff to do it.

I appreciate the approach being taken by SD Canvassing, a citizen's group supporting this initiative. Their president explained that, "a decentralized approach to the elections is much more secure, much more transparent, and that the citizens should have oversight over their elections." That's exactly correct. The more centralized any large system is, the further it is removed from the hands and the oversight of the individual. 

Only three counties are voting on the proposition tomorrow, but 40 more counties are working through the process currently. Four counties rejected the effort earlier this year. The objections raised against it included the fact that it takes longer to count ballots by hand it could be expensive to hire the extra people required to do all of the counting and reporting. I suppose those concerns could be valid, but if you want to address them, why not do both? They already have the machine tabulators. Let the workers run them through and produce what can be submitted as a set of "tentative results" for the media, but then sit down and count every ballot by hand and check them all for authenticity. If the figures come out the same, that's great. But if they are off significantly, then you've identified a potentially serious problem and the results should not be made official until it's been resolved.

No matter which direction they choose, these three counties might be an excellent test case for the rest of the nation to observe. It's small enough that it likely won't delay the release of the final results by much at all. It's estimated that all three counties only have a total of 7,725 registered voters between them. It also won't have a significant impact on the national elections. Trump is expected to carry the state by a very significant margin. But if they perform the hand count and the next morning we learn that it differed significantly from the machine tabulators, we will know that we still have a problem on our hands and some significant investigations will need to be undertaken. No matter how it comes out in the end, wouldn't you feel better knowing the truth either way? That's one way to help restore voter confidence, which the legacy media should be all in favor of if they're being honest.