Gillespie County, Texas — For the final 12 months, Mark Cook dinner has been preaching a sort of low-tech, election-doubting gospel in political battlegrounds throughout the nation.
“However we’re instructed: belief the machines…and that may be a option to manipulate an election,” Cook dinner just lately stated at an occasion in Lancaster, Pennsylvania.
Touring by RV, Cook dinner calls the three-hour plus presentation he is delivered to greater than 100 counties, the “Hand Depend Roadshow.” Cook dinner is a part of an election conspiracy motion that is been rising since 2020 and claims that voting machines could be hacked and manipulated —which means the one voting system to be trusted is an old school hand depend.
Final 12 months, in deep-red Gillespie County in Central Texas, Cook dinner satisfied Republicans who run their very own primaries to hitch the small minority that hand depend votes. So, on election night time in March, lots of of volunteers stayed up till as early as 4:30 a.m. the subsequent morning handy depend roughly 8,000 votes, a course of that resulted in quite a few errors.
“We solely have 13 precincts, 12 of which turned in closing tally sheets that had been inaccurate,” Jim Riley, the elections administrator who oversees elections in Gillespie County, instructed CBS Information.
Riley believes there was no drawback in Gillespie County that wanted to be solved by hand counting ballots.
“No, the hand counting, for my part, did nothing to enhance elections within the county,” Riley stated.
Riley, a Republican, says Gillespie County’s programs had been already top-notch. They concerned paper ballots, tallied by a state-approved scanner, that had been then verified for accuracy.
Riley says that as a lot as he and his group have tried to create transparency and visibility to reassure voters, for some “it will not ever be sufficient.”
Mo Saiidi was the Gillespie County Republican chair when Cook dinner’s “Hand Depend Roadshow” got here to city.
“No one offered a single iota of proof, it was simply this notion that if it is plugged into the wall, they’re topic to hacking,” Saiidi stated.
Annoyed by his get together’s resolution, Saiidi resigned.
“We had been chasing this elusive drawback that by no means existed,” Saiidi stated. “I, in good conscience, I couldn’t lead the hassle as a Republican chair.”
The problem has obtained much more consideration following a controversial rule handed final month by the Republican-majority Georgia State Election Board that the variety of ballots solid be counted by hand within the November election. Democrats filed a lawsuit Monday in an effort to dam enforcement of the rule.
Quite a few research have proven hand counts to be much less correct, extra expensive and extra time-consuming, however that hasn’t stopped Cook dinner from preaching it.
In Michigan, CBS Information approached Cook dinner’s RV to ask him some primary questions, however he drove away. When CBS Information then approached him in Pennsylvania, he once more refused to speak. Nevertheless, he frequently seems on right-wing podcasts.
Even within the wake of Gillespie County’s hand depend ordeal, the hardened hand depend faction is flooding county conferences demanding change earlier than November.
Riley calls the hand depend expertise “a internet loss.”
“If you happen to do not like hand counting, you are evil,” Riley stated of how among the county’s constituents see the difficulty.
It seems to be an answer in quest of an issue.
