What was wrong with hand counting? (Genuinely curious )
It’s fine as a backup, but not releasing totals until after the hand counts are complete is just a delaying tactic. The delay could be used for all kinds of shenanigans by bad faith actors. These ballots have a lot of contests on them and will take a long time to hand count.
They want each precinct to hand count after the computer scan count before releasing the vote totals. Decreed it just months before the election. Wants each county to pay for it themself and somehow find bodies to actually count these ballots in a timely manner. It is a way to delay the results.
And to add to what has already been said - hand counting is actually quite unreliable. It’s easy to be a few ballots off the machine count and then you’ve got fuel for conspiracy.
It is not just slower (allowing for a bunch of court stuff to be tried) it is often less accurate. votingrightslab.org/2024/02/27/b...
In recent years, a troubling trend in voting policy has emerged: efforts by state legislators to either ban the use of electronic tabulators or impose unworkable requirements on their operation, effec...
The argument against it, as I understand it, is that it doesn't accomplish much, and it introduces unnecessary delays and opportunities for discrepancies may be used opportunistically to cast false doubt on the result. Note that this isn't a hand-count of votes but a hand-count of ballots.
Intended to delay the result to allow for more shenanigans
The typical way is local machine counting to start with, releasing those results, sending ballots to a central location, and depending on state either counting everything again manually to verify or doing spot checks to verify the result matches the statistics from the checked ballots.