A two-year legal battle over whether a rural Arizona county could abandon voting machines in favor of hand-counting every ballot has ended, after the Arizona Supreme Court declined to review a lower court’s decision that such hand counts violate state election law. The ruling closes one chapter of a broader national movement pushing hand counts as an alternative to machine tabulation.
How the fight started
The case, Gould v. Mayes, began after Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes sent the Mohave County Board of Supervisors a letter on November 19, 2023, warning that a vote to hand-count all ballots would violate state law. The board subsequently voted 3-2 against hand counting. Mohave County Supervisor Ron Gould then sued Mayes in his individual capacity, filing the case on January 13, 2024.
Gould’s arguments
Gould argued that Mayes’s letter improperly influenced the board’s vote and amounted to an unlawful threat. He contended that using certified voting machines should be optional rather than mandatory under Arizona law, and argued that a prior court ruling in a separate Cochise County case — which found counties lack authority to order full hand-count audits after a machine tally — should not apply to full hand counts where no machine ever counts the ballots in the first place.
How the courts ruled
A trial court granted Mayes’s motion to dismiss the case on September 10, 2024, prompting Gould’s appeal. The Arizona Court of Appeals affirmed that dismissal on November 6, 2025, holding that Arizona election law requires ballots to be counted using certified machines and rejecting full hand counts as less accurate and more prone to error than machine tabulation. Gould then asked the Arizona Supreme Court to take up the case on December 8, 2025; the court denied review on March 27, 2026, effectively ending the litigation. Pro-democracy groups, including the Arizona Alliance for Retired Americans, had intervened in the case in 2024 to oppose the hand-count push.
Part of a wider movement
Mohave County’s fight was not an isolated episode. Arizona state Sens. Sonny Borrelli and Wendy Rogers have pushed multiple counties, including Pinal County, to adopt hand counts, with mixed results — Mohave County supervisors at one point struck down a separate plan to hand-count all of the 2024 general election ballots. Hand-count advocates argue the practice offers greater transparency and voter confidence than electronic tabulation, which they view with suspicion following the unsubstantiated fraud claims that followed the 2020 election.
Why courts have been skeptical
Election administrators and the courts that have reviewed hand-count proposals have consistently pointed to research showing hand counts are slower, more labor-intensive and more error-prone than machine counts, particularly in larger jurisdictions. The earlier Cochise County ruling cited in the Mohave case similarly found that Arizona’s election code simply does not grant counties the discretion to replace certified-machine tabulation with manual counts for standard elections.
What it means going forward
With the Arizona Supreme Court’s denial of review, Mohave County — and by extension other Arizona counties eyeing similar moves — now has clear appellate precedent confirming that machine counting remains legally required for the 2026 midterms and beyond, barring a change in state law. The ruling is likely to dampen, though probably not end, the broader push by some state legislators and local officials to expand hand counting, a debate that continues to simmer in rural counties across several states even as the legal path for mandating it in Arizona has now effectively closed.
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