Voting machines are more accurate at tabulating results than relying on tired election workers to count thousands of ballots by hand.

There is no real argument about this. But Barbara Haney and Tammie Wilson, followers of Trumpism, are claiming that we need to abandon voting machines in Fairbanks and rely on temporary workers to count everything by hand on Election Day, all because they don’t trust the machines.

Next they will be calling to abolish the cash register, the electronic calculator and the abacus. Tinfoil hats will become mandatory at borough assembly meetings.

Haney and Wilson are chiefly responsible for getting a misguided initiative on the Fairbanks October 6th ballot to ban voting machines and require that ballots be counted by hand.

This would require hiring a lot more people for temporary election jobs, positions that are difficult to fill as it stands now. Where are all these people who are dying for a chance to count thousands of ballots?

“Computers — which ballot scanners rely on — are very good at tedious, repetitive tasks. Humans are bad at them. And counting votes is tedious and repetitive,” Charles Stewart, director of the MIT Election Data and Science Lab, has written.

But Haney and Wilson claim that counting is easy.

“People in this borough are smart enough to count one, two, three, four, I hope,” Haney told a TV news reporter earlier this year about her plan.

They are also smart enough to recognize a dumb idea and vote against Proposition No. 3.

In promoting the anti-machine effort, Haney has quoted the work of a guy named Edward Solomon, who is famous in election-denial circles.

Dominion Voting Machines alleged in 2021 that “Ed Solomon was portrayed by OAN on its network as an alleged ‘expert mathematician.’ In reality, however, he is a convicted felon who, at the time he was interviewed by OAN, was working as an ‘installer’ at a swing set construction company in Long Island.”

Local election deniers—irked at the defeat of Haney and others in the 2025 borough election—arranged for Solomon to do a Zoom presentation last December in which he claimed he had studied the 2025 election results in Fairbanks.

He claimed the results were manipulated. He claimed to have discovered “Synthetically Engineered Election Results” created by the machines. I’m sure I’m not the only one who found his presentation impossible to understand.

The borough elections are nonpartisan, meaning not based on political parties, but Haney claimed Solomon “examined how ballots from different partisan groups were ordered and processed across multiple races” in the 2025 contest.

“What he found was unusual. Voters who leaned one direction and voters who leaned the other moved in near-perfect sync throughout the count — like two lines on a graph mirroring each other too precisely to look natural,” Haney said in one of the two columns she wrote for right-wing websites attacking voting machines.

No one can really say what this guy and Haney are getting at. There was no evidence of fraud. There was no evidence of “synthetically engineered election results.”

There was considerable claptrap, however.

There was a hand count after the 2025 election to test the accuracy of the voting machine results by checking 3,338 votes in two precincts and the early vote totals. The machine results matched the hand count 100 percent.

With the Wilson-Haney hand counting, it would take longer on Election Day to get results because the votes would have to be counted by hand. Then they would have to be counted a second time, to reduce the number of errors.

This exercise would take place late at night.

It would be a challenge not only to find competent new temporary election workers, but also to manage the new people assigned to count the ballots and ensure that they can deal with the tedious and repetitive task without messing up. No one knows how much this new plan would cost. Or how many mistakes would be made while rushing to get the unofficial numbers posted.

Here is the biggest problem, as identified by the borough clerk: “When a voter inserts a ballot into the electronic tabulation system, the machine alerts them to potential ballot-marking issues and provides the voter an opportunity to review their ballot and vote a new ballot if they choose. If the proposition is adopted, ballots will not be reviewed by voters through the electronic tabulation process. Instead, the hand-counting board will determine voter intent according to election procedures.”

There is no reason to adopt this plan and do without the assistance of the machines in guiding voters through the process.

Election Day proposal

Borugh Proposition 2, also promoted by Haney and Wilson would move the local Fairbanks elections to same date as the state and federal election in November. It is also a terrible idea.

The election season of 2026 shows exactly what’s wrong with their plan.

The local elections are drawing little attention because of the massive spending on the U.S. Senate race, the U.S. House race and the governor’s race.

The only chance for increasing community awareness about the October 6th election is that by holding it on an earlier date, there is more opportunity for people to become informed.

This separation is far more important now than in the past, given the decline in news coverage by the TV stations and the Daily News-Miner, which no longer have the resources to do the job as in the past.

Had local elections this year been set for the same date as the state and federal election, they would be getting completely lost in the nonstop ads about those other contests. No one would have any idea who is running for the assembly or the school board.

Under the Wilson-Haney plan, voters would have to wait in lines twice on Election Day, once for the state election and once for the local election.

“The Borough does not expect this change to reduce election costs. Currently, the borough shares some election costs with the City of Fairbanks and the City of North Pole when elections are held together. If those cities continue to hold elections in October, the borough could lose those shared cost savings,” the borough says.

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Stick with voting machines, ignore the society of tinfoil hats

Election Day proposal