Custer County does not need hand counting

Recent reports coming out of Pennington County Commission meetings is that it is looking at moving to hand counting ballots during upcoming elections, although the commission decided not to move in that direction for yesterday’s gubernatorial runoff because there wasn’t enough time to train election workers, recruit them, etc. That does not mean that county won’t do it in the future, however. And, Pennington County is not alone in taking steps to move in that direction.
Here is to hoping the Custer County Commission never takes the steps to go looking for a solution to a problem that doesn’t exist.
After each election, counties are required to do a small hand count audit of certain races and precincts to make sure what the tabulating machine produces on election night is accurate. To date county staff and volunteers who help with the elections is batting a thousand. The audits have matched what the tabulator has shown, showing that county officials are doing a wonderful job running elections and there is absolutely zero malfeasance going on. In fact, the public is welcome to and has sat in on counts and setting up and learning about the machine. A machine, by the way, that is not hooked up to the internet.
We have watched the Custer County Auditor’s Office handle dozens of elections. They do so with the utmost integrity. By the way, the person running the office, Dawn McLaughlin, is a Republican. Her right-hand man for elections has been Dana Benjamin, who has also handed the elections with skill and integrity. In fact, the only issue that almost came up with this past election was when we at the Chronicle forgot to run a legal notice twice and nearly single-handedly sabatoged the creation of the East Custer Ambulance District.
Luckily, people were able to work around that mistake and the election moved forward. Those people? County employees.
We would argue there is more room for error in hand-counting than electronic counting. It’s why we invented computers in the first place, isn’t it? If you think election results take a long time now, wait until they are hand-counted. And who is going to sign up for that duty? I suspect the number of people volunteering for working an election would fall off a cliff.
When’s the last time a Democrat won anything in Custer County? Or the state for that matter, outside of Sioux Falls? The last statewide office vote we can even remember being close was when Billie Sutton narrowly lost to Kristi Noem in 2018.
We believe our county auditors do a fine job, and believe our elections are safe and secure. Going backward  is tantamount to having an anesthesiologist hand you a piece of wood to bite down on before surgery, or taking tractors away from farmers and handing them a couple of oxen and telling them to have at it.
If other counties want to go back to hand counting, they are free to do that. We hope that doesn’t happen in Custer County. It seems completely unnecessary and an insult to the folks who work so hard to handle our elections.