South Dakota’s most populous county, Minnehaha, was in the spotlight this week after its top election official ordered the county's post-election audit to consist of all 2024 primary ballots being counted by hand.

But the debate over counting votes by hand vs. machine found a more decisive venue 250 miles away in McPherson County, on the state’s northeast edge bordering North Dakota, with a population of about 2,300.

On June 13, citizen hand-counting boards were formed in the county seat of Leola, South Dakota, to conduct a post-election audit of 100% of the ballots from the June 4 primary, which had been tallied by machine tabulators on election day.

The auditing boards, mostly composed of residents who support hand counts and question the accuracy and security of voting machines, encountered problems.

The hand count in two of the county’s four precincts did not match election day tallies, and board members of those precincts ended the audits before the count was reconciled, according to county officials.

South Dakota Canvassing, an electoral activist group that supports eliminating machine voting and tabulators, declared victory on social media, posting the tally sheets and stating that the “hand count results were correct and the machine errors are not explainable.”

'You're going to see problems'

McPherson County State’s Attorney Austin Hoffman filed a request for declaratory judgment June 20 to have the ballots unsealed so the counts could be reconciled, though none of the county or legislative races were close enough to be impacted.

A state circuit court judge allowed the re-audit to occur June 25. Board members from the non-affected precincts were asked to handle the counting.

That re-audit established that human error during the hand counting accounted for the earlier discrepancies, and that machine counts from the primary election were correct, according to County Auditor Lindley Howard, who provided the tally sheets and other documentation to News Watch.

Howard also noted that the hand counting took about 15 minutes per race, which in a general election with 13 or 14 races could have caused reporting lags even in McPherson County, the state’s 54th largest county.

“If anything, it reinforced my opinion that hand counting is not the way to go on election night if you’re looking for speed and accuracy,” said Howard, who is also a member of the State Board of Elections.

Law requires post-election audits

South Dakota passed a law in 2023 requiring post-election audits using hand counts of randomly selected voting precincts. The law calls for an audit of at least 5% of precincts, but McPherson County consists of just four precincts.

In February, the county’s board of commissioners voted in favor of a hand-counted post-election audit of all ballots cast in the June 4 primary election.

Needing 20 citizens to fill out four audit boards of five members each, Howard chose people who had expressed interest in hand counting as an alternative to machines.

One of those was Mike Klipfel, a Leola farmer who supported a petition for a public vote to eliminate voting machines in McPherson County for 2024. The county commission voted in April to reject the petition based on legal advice that the measure's wording could violate federal voting laws.

'It is not numerically possible'

The initial pre-election audit was held June 13 at the McPherson County Courthouse and took two-and-a-half hours. Two of the precincts came out fine. The other two had problems.

One of the discrepancies involved Precinct 3, where 127 Republican ballots were received. That should have amounted to 254 total votes for District 23 House, since people could vote for two candidates and undercounts would still be tallied.

The hand count ended up with 253 total votes.

“It is not numerically possible to have 253 total votes tallied, including under votes, with 127 ballots,” Hoffman, the state's attorney, wrote in his June 20 request to unseal the ballots for another audit.

Hoffman made it clear in his filing that the results of the District 23 legislative races “will not be affected by the results of a post-election recount.”

But since the discrepancies in the audit weren't reconciled, county officials didn't want to send inaccurate final voting tallies to the secretary of state's office.

Commission race throws off count

In Precinct 4, there were 135 Republican ballots cast in the primary. The audit board tallied 262 votes in the District 23 House race. But the total should have been 270, with Hoffman again stating that a result of 262 was "not numerically possible" with 135 ballots.

Howard and Hoffman theorized that the board was likely thrown off by the fact that the McPherson County Commission race was only listed on four ballots. The board counted those ballots first and tallied the Senate ballots that also included the county race before setting those four ballots aside.

But they neglected to reincorporate those four ballots while counting the House race, making them eight votes short (two House votes per ballot). That explained why they came up with 262 rather than 270.

The same audit board "did re-count the Republican ballots to attempt to reconcile the tally numbers for the State Representative race," Hoffman wrote in his filing. "However, it is believed that the four ballots were again not included in this re-count and the tally again came out to 262."

County officials cited human error for the discrepancies that occurred during the original post-election audit for Precincts 3 and 4.

"The eight-vote discrepancy in the original audit of Precinct 4 was human error from four ballots that were not included in the House race count when the board conducted the audit," Howard said, confirming earlier theories of what occurred.

This story was produced by South Dakota News Watch, an independent, nonprofit news organization. Read more in-depth stories at sdnewswatch.org and sign up for an email every few days to get stories as soon as they're published. Contact Stu Whitney at stu.whitney@sdnewswatch.org.