Republicans in at least a half-dozen counties in Texas are considering or have made plans to count ballots by hand in next March's primary elections, a move that's financially costly and could inject uncertainty into key contests.
Texas Republicans who are pushing for the shift argue that voting machines that normally handle the process are unreliable, a position President Donald Trump and his allies have been pushing for years, despite a lack of evidence. But voting experts and Democrats warn that hand-counting could result in errors, delays in final results and post-election litigation.
Texas tasks political parties, rather than local governments, with running Election Day voting in primaries, giving partisan officials unusual say over election administration. Democrats and Republicans in the state often administer elections jointly, outsourcing the job to the county election officials, and their expenses are reimbursed by the secretary of state.
But this time around, Republicans in some Texas counties want to run their elections on their own, planning to conduct them at the precinct level so they can hand-count ballots on Election Day.
According to interviews with party leaders and activists in Texas, Republicans in Dallas, Hays, Eastland and Gillespie counties have approved plans to hand-count ballots in next year’s primary. Orange County Republicans also approved plans over the summer to hand-count Election Day ballots, according to local media. And at least one other county, Denton, is considering a similar measure.
Hand-counting ballots isn't easy. In Texas, the election code requires that ballots be counted within 24 hours of polls’ closing and the precincts’ presiding judges are unable to leave polling sites until counting is finished, which would force someone to remain on site for as long as 36 hours.
Dallas and Hays county Republicans are raising funds to cover the extra costs and asking people to sign up for marathon sessions of counting, for which they'll be paid $12 an hour. A hand-count could cost larger counties hundreds of thousands of dollars, but even small counties would most likely incur sizable costs. State officials have told county parties not to expect reimbursements for costs in excess of recent election estimates.
“This is something that, all across Texas and all across the nation, people are starting to be interested in,” said Allen West, chair of the Republican Party in Dallas County, the largest Texas county that's pursuing a hand-count.
West said the machines that typically handle vote-counting are unreliable.
“We’ve seen catastrophic failures of the electronic systems up here in Dallas County,” he said. “I can’t fix the machine. I don’t know about algorithms and all of these things that consistently continue to happen, so I think the pure definition of insanity is to continue to do the exact same thing and think you’re going to get a different result.”
State officials, including Republican Attorney General Ken Paxton, have disputed some of West’s claims of voting machine failures in Dallas County, saying recent issues in pre-election testing were identified and resolved.
Any issues with a hand-count in Texas next year could lead to drama in a competitive Republican primary for the Senate, as Sen. John Cornyn faces challenges from Paxton and Rep. Wesley Hunt. Texas is also hosting primaries for governor, the House and other key offices on March 3.
Democrats will be forced to run their elections at the precinct level, too, since the state allows countywide polling sites only if both parties agree to use them.
Kendall Scudder, chair of the Texas Democratic Party, said the changes could lead confusion around where voters are supposed to cast ballots.
“It’s a huge duplicative process that shouldn’t have to happen,” Scudder said in an interview. “What will happen in Dallas County is both parties will have to recruit each about 2,300 election workers, and they’ll each have to have about 500 different locations for people to vote in. And Republicans will have to recruit an additional 3,600 people to try to get the ballots counted within 24 hours. And because they’re doing it by hand, instead of doing it by optical scan, they will have human error in their counts, where we won’t.”
Hand-counting's popularity has grown in GOP circles in the wake of the unfounded stolen election claims Trump and his allies pushed after his 2020 loss.
Since 2020, lawmakers in at least 17 states introduced legislation that would have required ballots be counted by hand, according to Chris Diaz, who tracks state legislation for the Voting Rights Lab, a nonpartisan nonprofit group that favors expanding voting access. But none of the bills passed a single legislative chamber.
“There’s a reason that tabulators are used across the country basically everywhere,” Diaz said. “It’s because the legislators — when the rubber hits the road — see that that is what works to get accurate, timely results.”
Still, state election officials have begun helping those who want to use that method prepare.
The secretary of state's office recently issued guidance on how hand-counting must be conducted in accordance with state law. And state officials briefed around a hundred attendees at a Republican Party of Texas training event in Austin this fall on how to legally conduct a hand-count if desired.
Texans typically use electronic ballot-marking devices to cast their votes, generating paper ballots that are run through scanners for counting. Hand audits later check the results.
Cutting those devices out of the process can slow the vote count and introduce errors, real-world tests and academic studies have shown.
In Nye County, Nevada, a hand-counting effort in 2022 had an estimated 25% error rate on the first day. Officials in Mohave County, Arizona, held a test run of the method in 2023 using old ballots. They ultimately spent three days counting 850 ballots and were left with errors in 46 races.
The Texas counties' hand-counting efforts aren't set in stone. GOP leaders in Dallas and Hays counties acknowledged in interviews they may need to cancel their plans if they can’t secure the necessary staffers and funds.
West, a former Florida Republican Party chair and congressman, said Dallas County will need 3,000 staffers and $500,000 for the effort. The county had 58,000 votes in Republicans' March 2024 primary.
Hays County Republican leaders voted in October to prepare for a hand-count, according to party Chair Michelle Lopez. She said the county, where more than 18,000 votes were cast in the March 2024 primary, will need to recruit more than 300 staffers and find new polling places. While some in the state have countywide polling sites, those that are hand-counting must have voters cast their ballots at assigned precincts, she said.
Lopez said last month that the county party officials planned to check in in mid-November to see whether they have the resources to go ahead with the hand-counting move.
Robin Hayes, the chair of the Eastland County Republican Party, said it plans to cut nearly all machines out of the process and will instead count paper ballots by hand. The county had more than 2,800 voters in the March 2024 Republican primary.
“We will not do a machine count, because they are not reliable, they are online and they can be hacked,” Hayes said in an email. Texas voting machines aren’t connected to the internet.
Hayes said the county planned to use a five-person team to call out results and tally them, checking their work as they go.
“We will have all information within 2 to 3 hours from our election!” Hayes wrote.
That’s what Republicans in Gillespie County hoped in March 2024, when they first tackled a hand-count. County Republican Chair Bruce Campbell told Votebeat, a nonpartisan news outlet focused on elections, at the time that he thought results would start rolling in around 8:30 p.m., but volunteers were counting ballots until 4:30 a.m. The nearly 24-hour counting marathon left them contending with errors in nearly every precinct’s results, Votebeat reported. The party didn't conduct an audit or a recount to verify their results.
Still, the county approved plans Tuesday night to hand-count ballots in the March primary, according to Tom Marschall, a precinct chair in Gillespie.
In Denton County, Republicans are expected to vote on whether to count ballots by hand in next year’s primary this week, according to Beverly Foley, a Republican in the county who has been training other county Republicans in the process. County party Chair Melinda Preston didn’t respond to request for comment.
And in Tarrant County, Republicans haven’t announced plans to hand-count ballots, but they have been hosting training sessions for the method at party headquarters this fall. This week, the county GOP is hosting hand-counting “speed tests,” which were promoted by former Trump election attorney Sidney Powell.
Still, most county Republican parties are choosing not to hand-count ballots in March.
“We weighed pros and cons of hand-counting mail in ballots, hand-counting early voting, hand-counting Election Day or just doing a hand-count audit after the election,” Williamson County Republican Party Chair Michelle Evans said in an interview. “The agreement that we came to was that a hand-count audit is as effective as hand-counting — without the high stakes.”
“It’s not as simple, like, rip off the Band-Aid and we’re back to election integrity, hand-counting, paper ballots, all of that. It’s going to need to be a multifaceted approach of taking incremental steps in the county, at the county party level, but also advocating at the Legislature for changes that we feel are necessary in order to be able to go back to that,” she added.
