A few weeks ago, a USA Today story entitled “Democrats propose voting rights bill to counter Georgia’s election changes and others” was essentially a press release. It offered no engagement with the text of the proposed bill, labeled the “Voter Empowerment Act of 2024,” beyond repeating what the proponents said about it.

This bill is hardly new. Its released text shows it’s a recycle bill from previous sessions. But I want to highlight one provision of this bill that has received no media attention:

(iii) MANUAL COUNTING REQUIREMENTS FOR RECOUNTS AND AUDITS.—(I) Each paper ballot used pursuant to clause (i) shall be suitable for a manual audit, and shall be counted by hand in any recount or audit conducted with respect to any election for Federal office.

(II) In the event of any inconsistencies or irregularities between any electronic vote tallies and the vote tallies determined by counting by hand the individual, durable, voter-verified paper ballots used pursuant to clause (i), and subject to subparagraph (B), the individual, durable, voter-verified paper ballots shall be the true and correct record of the votes cast.

The proposed bill would compel every state to use hand count procedures for any “recount” in any federal election. As someone involved in a recount in a congressional election in 2020, I can assure you that if we were required to follow this rule, our recount would have moved from about 60 hours to complete to roughly 250 hours to complete–and likely miss state deadlines in the process.

In Georgia’s recount in the 2020 presidential election, it’s deeply unlikely it would have been able to recount in a timely fashion, and certainly not to meet the deadlines now fixed by the Electoral Count Reform Act.

Elements of the Voter Empowerment Act were components of the Freedom to Vote Act, which this recent Center for American Progress piece promotes. CAP there complains, “the legislation has been blocked in the U.S. Senate by a minority of members through the use of the filibuster.”

Quite true–and mercifully so, because the Freedom to Vote Act in the 117th Congress has the same hand count rules baked into the statute (sec. 3902, if you want to look).

One problem with major log-rolled bills is an inattention to detail about how its many individual components work. Without the kind of ordinary process of legislative hearings to give consideration to its many working parts, the bill simply becomes a symbol of something greater–and it could become a true nightmare if some portions of it were adopted. (Jessica Huseman had similar concerns in a piece in 2021.)

But it shows how close we were to compulsory hand counts in any recount this presidential election–and how some in Congress are still pushing for it. I should note that this is not a universal sentiment–some reformers, long ago, support hand counts for recounts. But there is extensive literature and academic research resulting in opposition to manual tallies and helpful news summaries. Some might distinguish between the count and the recount–but, if manual tallies are more time-consuming, more costly, and less accurate than machine tabulation, it’s hard to know why those negatives are improved in a recount instead of the original canvass. (And, of course, jurisdictions do allow limited manual counts if, say, a machine malfunctions and is unable to read the ballots–that’s different in kind.)

So, perhaps the next time these bills are recycled in the next Congress, some of these provisions might be removed. And, perhaps some–any–critical scrutiny of bills would be helpful when they are introduced.