Votebeat

2026 primary elections start off with a Texas-sized mess

2026-03-09T09:00:00+00:00

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Election officials, start your engines.

The 2026 midterm elections officially kicked off last week with primary elections in Arkansas, North Carolina, and Texas. It was the first big test for hundreds of candidates who are vying to take up residence in Washington, D.C., and state capitals next year — but it was also a dress rehearsal for election officials in a year expected to pose unusual and daunting administrative challenges.

And things were a little rocky.

While the election went smoothly for a majority of voters and jurisdictions, thousands of voters were affected by problems in Texas in particular.

Some of those — like a poll-worker shortage in South Texas or malfunctioning electronic pollbooks in northeastern North Carolina and El Paso, Texas — were routine, inevitable in a country with thousands of election jurisdictions and just as many things that can go wrong.

But others resulted from Republican-driven changes to voting procedures that Republicans argued would make the elections more secure. And in that sense, the messy primary day was a reminder that the GOP’s proposals to suddenly and dramatically overhaul voting this November carry real risks of harm to voters, election officials, and anyone affected by the results.

Sudden shift to precinct-based voting causes voter confusion

Entering this year, motivated by a trumped-up belief that voting machines are not trustworthy, a handful of county Republican parties in Texas considered counting their primary ballots by hand. (In Texas, county political parties have the authority to decide how to run their own primaries, although they usually outsource the actual work to the government.) However, hand-counting thousands of ballots requires a ton of manpower, and two of the biggest county GOPs considering it — Dallas’ and Williamson’s — ultimately decided the idea wasn’t feasible.

Instead, party leaders in those two counties settled on a compromise: conduct Election Day voting at neighborhood-based precincts, which Republicans consider to be more secure than the counties’ usual setup of a smaller number of large vote centers where anyone in the county could vote. Crucially, under state law, the county GOPs’ decision forced Dallas and Williamson Democrats to switch to precinct-based voting as well.

The result was mass confusion, as at least several hundred, and potentially thousands of, voters showed up at former vote centers where they usually cast their ballots only to be told they had to go to a different location. According to Kardal Coleman, the chair of the Dallas County Democratic Party, at least 359 Democratic primary voters had been turned away from two major polling places as of 11:30 a.m. on Election Day. That number, of course, does not capture anyone who was turned away after 11:30 a.m., anyone who was turned away from the dozens of other polling places, and any Republicans who were turned away.

Ominously, the chaos ensued even after election officials and parties made a concerted effort to educate voters. Dallas County spent $1 million on mailing notices to voters and airing digital and TV ads to get the word out about the relocated polling places. Both the Dallas County Democrats and Republicans said they had publicized the changes to their voters. And Williamson County conducted interviews with local media and posted on social media and on their website about it.

It’s worth emphasizing that many people who were initially turned away from the polls probably eventually found their correct polling place and were able to cast a ballot. Despite midday fears on Election Day, turnout in the Democratic primary in Dallas and Williamson counties was in line with the statewide average. Based on unofficial results from Wednesday evening, the number of votes cast statewide in the Democratic primary for U.S. Senate was 48% of the number of Kamala Harris voters in the state in the 2024 general election. In Dallas County, that number was 54%; in Williamson, it was 44%.

Voters got some relief when a judge ordered polling places for the Democratic primary to stay open two hours later, until 9 p.m., in Dallas because of the issue. A different judge also ordered two precincts in Williamson County to stay open for both parties until 10 p.m. because of long lines. However, within hours, the Texas Supreme Court temporarily stayed both of those orders, creating doubt about whether ballots cast by voters who got in line after the regular 7 p.m. poll-closing time would count. (Those voters all cast provisional ballots, allowing them to be separated from the undisputed votes.)

As of Friday night, the Texas Supreme Court still had not issued its final rulings on whether those ballots should be counted. A significant number of votes hang in the balance: In Dallas County, 2,316 provisional ballots were cast in the Democratic primary, and 541 were cast across both primaries in Williamson — although those numbers also include any provisional ballots cast for other reasons, like the voter’s eligibility being unclear.

Hand-counting ballots leads to delayed results

Meanwhile, Republicans in three counties — Calhoun, Eastland, and Gillespie — actually went through with their plans to rely on hand-counting. Under state law, this compelled them to use precincts instead of vote centers on Election Day, too, which created headaches, at least in Eastland County, which had previously used countywide sites. Poll workers at one site told Votebeat’s Natalia Contreras, who was on the ground in Eastland, that at least 89 voters had shown up to vote that day and learned it was the wrong location. At least one was ultimately unable to cast a ballot.

The sudden switch to a precinct-based system and separate primaries for Democrats and Republicans also meant that Eastland County did not have enough accessible voting equipment to put at each precinct — a violation of federal law. At least one voter showed up on Tuesday asking to use the equipment and was told it was unavailable, the county election administrator told Contreras.

And then the hand counts themselves, as they are wont to do, severely delayed the reporting of election results. Gillespie County Republicans did not report full results to the secretary of state until after 5 a.m. on Wednesday morning, long after most counties, as well as Gillespie County Democrats (who were still able to machine-count), had gone to bed. And that was actually relatively speedy: Eastland County didn’t submit its Republican primary results to the secretary of state until around 5:45 p.m. on Wednesday, and Calhoun County did not finish reporting results until Friday morning, after the county GOP failed to deliver its results within 24 hours of polls closing as required by state law.

Taking a long time to report results is annoying, of course, to those of us who tune in on election night hoping to learn who won the election. But more seriously, it can decrease public trust in the election — an argument, ironically, most often deployed by Republicans when complaining about the slow pace of vote-counting of mail ballots in states like California.

Worst of all, research has found that counting ballots by hand is more prone to error than doing it by machine. When Gillespie County Republicans hand-counted their ballots in the 2024 primary, they ended up needing to make corrections in 12 out of 13 precincts. We don’t know yet how accurate the 2026 hand counts in Texas were, but their spotty track record at least raises the specter of the worst-case scenario: that the election results won’t reflect how people actually voted.

In the face of some undeniable problems that disenfranchised at least a few voters, even some Republicans are asking themselves if their prescriptions were worse than the disease. That might be the kind of question it’s better to ask beforehand.

Nathaniel Rakich is Votebeat’s managing editor and is based in Washington, D.C. Contact Nathaniel at nrakich@votebeat.org.

Gillespie County Republicans scale back hand count amid staffing shortage

2026-02-18T22:23:39+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for Votebeat Texas’ free newsletter here.

Gillespie County Republicans have scrapped plans to hand count all of their 2026 primary ballots after failing to recruit enough workers — at least for early voting. The lack of manpower prompted party officials to vote last week to use the county’s voting equipment to tabulate thousands of ballots expected to be cast during the two weeks before Election Day on March 3.

However, Gillespie Republicans still plan to hand count ballots cast on Election Day, party officials told Votebeat.

The effort has deepened a divide within the county party: Some members wish to ditch electronic voting equipment entirely and hand count all ballots, while others trust that the county’s electronic voting equipment is safe and the process contains appropriate checks and balances. It’s a continuation of a long-running disagreement that began in 2024, when the county party first hand counted primary ballots.

In 2024, Republicans in Gillespie County spent nearly 24 hours on Election Day hand counting more than 8,000 ballots, deploying over 350 workers they’d spent months training and recruiting. Party officials later found tallying errors in 12 of the county’s 13 precincts, but because Texas law does not require a post-election audit of hand-counted ballots, those results were never formally reviewed for accuracy. The hand counting effort cost more than $40,000 — more than five times the roughly $7,000 spent in 2020, when the party used voting machines. Those expenses are ultimately reimbursed by the state.

Bruce Campbell, the chair of the county Republican Party, told Votebeat that since last week’s vote to use the county’s voting equipment to tabulate early votes, county party officials in charge of recruiting workers to count ballots have kept him in the dark about the number of people who have signed up to work on Election Day. Campbell said he doesn’t know how many will show up.

“They think that I’m going to somehow talk [workers] out of hand counting, which would not benefit me at all,” Campbell, who defended the 2024 hand count, said. “I just want the votes counted, and when it didn’t look like we were going to have enough people, I called a meeting and solved the problem.”

Worker shortages expose rift over machines, hand counting

The last time Campbell was given updated figures was at a party executive committee meeting in January, when the precinct chairs informed him that only about 60 people had signed up for a job that requires closer to 200.

Jim Riley, the county’s election administrator, declined a request for comment. He sent an email to the Texas Secretary of State’s Office late last month to say the local Republican party was receiving “little or no response in recruiting and training hand counters” and that some Republican precinct chairs had begun to “object” to the process of hand counting.

“I know this is a local problem and a Party problem. Yet, the splash back will hurt our elections in Gillespie,” he wrote, asking for guidance on how best to ensure votes were counted.

The Secretary of State’s Office told Votebeat they responded to Riley’s request for guidance via phone call, and declined further comment.

In 2024, the office sent election inspectors to monitor Gillespie County’s hand count, but no post-election audit was conducted because state law does not require audits of ballots counted by hand. This year, one inspector will observe part of early voting and two will be there on Election Day, according to the agency.

Texas law does require a bipartisan post-election audit of machine-counted ballots in a random sampling of precincts. But Gillespie Republicans say they plan to go further, voluntarily hand recounting all ballots cast in the election whether they were initially counted by hand or by machine — a step that would require recruiting many of the same volunteers a second time.

Party officials have not released details about how that recount would work. But unlike in 2024, this year’s ballots were designed to be scanned by a tabulator if needed, allowing results to be verified without organizing another full hand count. It’s unclear if party officials will take that step.

In 2024, the old ballot design meant results could only be counted — and recounted — by hand. Without a scannable paper trail, there was no practical way to independently verify the outcome without organizing another full hand count, so the 2024 results were never formally audited or otherwise checked for accuracy. This year, the ballots can be run through voting machines, a decision Riley told the Secretary of State’s Office he made because he “anticipated the collapse potential” of the hand count.

In the same email to the state, Riley described a chaotic internal debate within the county GOP. During a Zoom call held the day he sent the email, he wrote, party leaders acknowledged the mounting problems but disagreed about how to move forward — and some did not show up at all. “I didn’t expect the childish behavior of these folks,” he writes.

That meeting described in Riley’s email was the precursor for last week’s vote to count the early voting ballots electronically instead. The vote passed 7-3, Campbell said.

In September, Campbell sent the party’s 13 precinct chairs — local elected party officials tasked with staffing polling locations — contact information for all 355 workers who’d counted ballots in 2024. Campbell said the recruitment effort by precinct chairs wasn’t done early enough and there was little interest among hand counters for returning this year.

“People weren’t signing up like they did last time for whatever reason, so if we don’t have enough people, we need to be responsible,” said Campbell.

Lack of responsibility in this context has consequences. Texas law requires that ballots be counted within 24 hours after polls close. If a county’s results are not reported to the state within that window, party officials from that county could face a misdemeanor charge. They could also be subject to lawsuits from candidates contesting the results.

But not everyone in the party shares Campbell’s worries. David Treibs, a Republican precinct chair and vocal opponent of electronic tabulation, opposed the move to count the ballots electronically. He said he hasn’t heard of any candidates on the ballot concerned about the hand count, and told Votebeat he’s not worried about legal fallout if the count isn’t done by the state-mandated deadline.

“Nobody’s gone to jail yet over this,” Treibs said. “I don’t think anybody’s going to sue either, unless they want to make an example out of this.”

He also rejected assertions that the party’s recruitment efforts were unsuccessful.

“We were on track” to have enough workers, he told Votebeat. “I believe strongly that that was not the real issue. They just wanted to flip us back to machines.”

Each of the county’s 13 precincts will need a minimum of three election workers to help supervise the polling location and help check in voters, and a minimum of three additional people to hand count the ballots. The county’s two largest precincts would require between 3-5 teams of people to hand count.

Triebs said he doesn’t know how many workers the party has recruited. His precinct — precinct 13 — is fully staffed. But Triebs said it won’t matter if they don’t get the numbers they’re expecting — they’ll just take longer to count the ballots.

“It’s not like they’re going to shred all the ballots if we’re not done on time. Of course not. That’s ridiculous. That’s not going to happen, “ Treibs said. “The ballots will be counted, so that’s not the issue.”

Natalia Contreras covers election administration and voting access for Votebeat in partnership with the Texas Tribune. Natalia is based in Corpus Christi. Contact her at ncontreras@votebeat.org.

GOP-backed bill would help verify the results of hand-counted ballots in Texas

2025-04-09T22:01:53+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for Votebeat Texas’ free newsletter here.

A year after Gillespie County Republicans hand-counted thousands of primary ballots, a bill from a Republican Texas lawmaker whose district includes parts of the area could make it easier to verify the accuracy of hand-counted election results.

State Rep. Ellen Troxclair of Lakeway filed House Bill 3113, which would require counties opting for hand-counts to use a ballot that is capable of being scanned and tabulated by voting machines using optical scanning technology.

By law, Gillespie County Republicans were allowed to design their own ballots, and they didn’t choose to use ballots that could be scanned. That meant their primary results could only be verified manually.

If passed, the bill would allow for a faster recount or audit of any hand-counted results. Hand-counts can take days and involve hundreds of people. Studies have shown the method is time-consuming, costly, and less accurate than using machines.

“It will improve accuracy so that we can have greater confidence in the outcome,” Troxclair said.

The bill does not prevent a hand-count or require an audit, she said, but simply makes a faster recount of hand-counted ballots an option.

Last year, Republicans in Gillespie County, home to Fredericksburg, west of Austin, hand-counted every ballot cast in their primary. There were about 8,000 ballots, each of which contained choices for more than 30 races, including Troxclair’s. Days later, during the canvass, Votebeat reported that election officials found errors in the results of all but one of the county’s 13 precincts.

Troxclair said Votebeat’s reporting on Gillespie’s hand-count helped her understand where the process “could improve to ensure accuracy,” leading her to propose legislation. The bill was discussed during a House Elections Committee hearing Wednesday and is awaiting a committee vote.

Texas requires partial recounts only for ballots that are tabulated electronically. There is no provision in state law to require a recount or audit for the results of a hand-count. The Texas secretary of state’s election division does not have the authority to audit the election unless Gillespie is one of the counties the office randomly selects.

Public records showed the effort in Gillespie was costly for taxpayers. It required 350 people, who worked more than 2,300 hours on Election Day at $12 per hour, totaling more than $27,000 in wages. The amount did not include hourly wages for election clerks at each of the county’s 13 precincts on Election Day who checked in voters and performed duties other than counting.

Jim Riley, the Gillespie County elections administrator, testified in favor of the bill Wednesday.

Riley told lawmakers that there’s no way to know exactly how many errors and inaccuracies were made in the primary because the ballots could not be scanned and recounted.

“Unreadable penmanship, simple math errors, transposing numerals, all of those things made a difference in whether or not we were accurate,” Riley told lawmakers.

Those opposing the bill, including members of the Fredericksburg Tea Party who led the hand-count in Gillespie, said it would create additional costs for counties who choose to hand-count because voting equipment vendors would have to be paid to program the machines to handle the ballots.

“Why should counties who choose to hand-count like us, or who are considering returning to hand-count, be forced to contract with the very machine companies they’re trying to separate from?” said Jeannette Hormuth, a Fredericksburg Tea Party member who helped organize last year’s hand-count.

Christina Adkins, elections division director at the Texas Secretary of State’s Office, said that under federal and state law, counties must provide at least one accessible voting machine for voters with disabilities at each polling location, whether counties hand-count or not. That means counties already are required to have the capabilities to format ballots so they can be scanned.

Riley said the bill would not create additional burdens on the county. In fact, last year, his office offered to format the primary ballots so they could be scanned. The decision was up to the county GOP.

“We said they could hand-count the complete election at their leisure after it was over, but that was turned down,” he said.

Natalia Contreras covers election administration and voting access for Votebeat in partnership with the Texas Tribune. She is based in Corpus Christi. Contact Natalia at ncontreras@votebeat.org

Gillespie County’s election worker costs more than double after switch to hand count

2024-05-16T09:50:00+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for Votebeat Texas’ free newsletter here.

The hand count of thousands of Republican primary election ballots in Gillespie County is on track to cost taxpayers more than double the wage costs of the 2020 Republican primary, according to records obtained by Votebeat.

Public records show Republicans employed 350 people to hand count, who collectively reported working more than 2,300 hours the day of the election at a rate of $12 per hour. That means more than $27,000 in wages.

Those numbers aren’t final, and they’re likely to grow. The tally does not include hourly wages for election clerks who worked at each of the county’s 13 precincts on election day checking in voters and performing duties other than counting. In addition, Gillespie Republicans will also hand-count ballots in a runoff election at the end of the month, which will add to the costs.

Gillespie’s experience illustrates how election costs could rise if the method is more widely adopted across the state.

Four years ago, for the Republican primary election, the party spent less than $13,000 total on election worker wages, including wages for those who worked during a runoff election.

The initial costs also show the hand count of this year’s primary is set to cost taxpayers more than what the county spends annually on electronic tabulating equipment that can be used across multiple elections.

Gillespie County paid $160,968 to purchase voting equipment from Hart Intercivic in 2021, according to a source familiar with the county’s contract. The equipment has a 15-year life expectancy. In addition, the county spends $9,120 annually on licensing fees and technical support for the machines, plus around $6,000 per election for programming the equipment. Gillespie County elections administrator Jim Riley did not immediately respond to a request for comment Wednesday.

State will reimburse costs — up to a point

The Texas Secretary of State’s Office will reimburse Gillespie Republicans and other local parties across the state for primary and runoff election expenses. Last year, at an election law seminar hosted by the office, election division officials told political party chairs that the state has a fixed amount allocated to pay for primary elections.

Officials warned that if primary election costs were to increase beyond that amount because of multiple counties hand-counting primary ballots, the state might not have enough money to reimburse all expenses. By law, the funds must be distributed equally across the state’s local parties.

Experts said the additional costs associated with full hand counts are unnecessary and fiscally irresponsible.

“It’s absurd to spend this money on this when elections in Texas especially are just so chronically underfunded,” said Anthony Gutierrez, executive director of Common Cause Texas, a nonpartisan voter advocacy and government watchdog organization. “They could have used this funding for the election staff who are overworked and underpaid everywhere in Texas. It could be spent on election infrastructure so that voters have a more efficient voting experience, or on public outreach.”

Luis Figueroa, chief of legislative affairs at Every Texan, a nonprofit group that advocates for fair taxation and voting rights, said that over the past two years, Republican lawmakers have approved election policies based on administrative errors and discrepancies in Harris County — a Democratic stronghold — but are doing nothing about the issues that surfaced during the Gillespie hand count.

“A machine breaks down in Harris County, and lawmakers have multiple hearings and pass bills that not only would sanction them, but also to remove county officials, or want a redo of the entire election,” Figueroa said.

In contrast, in Gillespie, “they’re having inaccuracies doing hand counting, and there’s no accountability and no calls from anyone to stop this practice,” he said.

Bruce Campbell, Gillespie County’s Republican Party chairman, told Votebeat that increasing people’s confidence in the election is worth the additional cost. When asked if he thought county residents felt more confident about the process following the hand count, he could not say.

“I don’t have a sense of the county as a whole,” he said. “I know the 350 people who participated in it are mostly enthusiastic about it.”

Despite costs and errors, proponents stand by hand counting

Under Texas law, during a primary election, county governments are in charge of conducting early voting, but the political parties may choose their ballot counting method. On the day of the election, parties run the voting and choose the counting method.

In Gillespie, Republicans decided last fall to hand-count this year’s primary vote, more than 8,000 ballots in total. Experts agree and studies show the method is time-consuming, costly, less accurate, and less secure than using machines.

Nonetheless, citing unsupported concerns about the accuracy of voting machines, some people in Gillespie, including members of the Fredericksburg Tea Party, were determined to try and show otherwise.

The 350 workers recruited and trained by the party counted until the early hours of the next morning and touted the results as an unqualified success. But the county party subsequently had to fix a series of errors in the initial results in all but one of the county’s 13 precincts.

The night of the primary election, nearly 100 people gathered to hand count early-voting ballots at a local winery. On the compensation forms they filled out, some reported working for more than 12 hours that day, though others said they worked as little as five or even three hours.

The operational costs of a primary election vary based on the choices the political party makes. For example, parties can contract with the county’s election department for administrative services and voting equipment, or they can choose to have total control of the election and run it themselves.

Gillespie Republicans chose to handle almost every part of the election themselves. They printed their ballots and hand-count tally sheets at a locally owned printer in Fredericksburg. These costs, along with what the party spent on supplies, polling location rentals, postage, and administrative costs, such as office supplies and office personnel’s payroll, will be paid through funds allocated by the Legislature and distributed by the Secretary of State’s Office. The final total is still unclear. The Secretary of State’s Office declined to comment for this story.

Local parties submit a primary and runoff election cost estimate to the state, months ahead of Election Day. Upon approval, the state sends a portion of those costs to the parties, so they can prepare for the election and pay election workers. The final costs are reimbursed later this year.

In January, the Gillespie GOP estimated it would spend $34,210 on ballot printing and workers.

The state has allocated about $22 million to reimburse political parties and counties statewide for their primary and runoff election expenses. About $5 million of that comes from candidate filing fees.

Most counties decided against hand counts

Last summer, Republicans in counties large and small across the state considered hand counting ballots. Nearly all concluded that it would not be feasible, in part because of the cost. Nonetheless, proponents of hand counting continue to tout the method as a more secure way to run elections than electronic tabulators, and many are pointing to the Gillespie effort as an example of one that worked well, despite the costs and the initial errors in the results.

The push for hand counts is creating disruption in some communities.

In Kerr County, 30 minutes south of Gillespie, for example, Republicans have yet to win approval for a hand count, but the push to do it has already cost the county hundreds of thousands of dollars to pay for additional staff and resources following the resignation of county officials who managed elections.

Mo Saiidi, a former Republican county chair for Gillespie who resigned after publicly opposing the hand count, said voters deserve more details about how that primary election was conducted and the public should weigh whether hand counting actually improved anything. He doesn’t think so.

“You have not proven that we have done any better job of election integrity or transparency, and at the same time, we have incurred an horrendous amount of costs,” he said.

Natalia Contreras covers election administration and voting access for Votebeat in partnership with the Texas Tribune. Natalia is based in Corpus Christi. Contact her at ncontreras@votebeat.org

Texas county’s GOP officials declared hand count a success, but kept finding errors

2024-03-18T17:41:07+00:00

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FREDERICKSBURG, Texas — An hour after Gillespie County Republican Party Chairman Bruce Campbell declared the hand-counted primary election results completely accurate and certified them as final, he found another discrepancy.

“It’s my mistake for not catching that,” he said, sitting in front of his laptop inside the Gillespie County election administration office Thursday. “I can’t believe I did that.”

The late catch meant that Campbell had to ask the early voting ballot board chair, who had already left and lives 30 minutes away, to return to the elections offices, figure out how the error happened, and fix it.

The election was a low-profile party primary, but stakes are high. Gillespie County Republicans, led by Campbell, decided months ago to hand-count more than 8,000 ballots. Experts agree and studies show the method is time-consuming, costly, less accurate, and less secure than using machines, but local Republicans, citing unsupported concerns about the accuracy of voting machines, were determined to try and show otherwise. Workers recruited and trained by the party counted until the early hours of the next morning, and declared the effort a success. Proponents of hand-counting are now touting Gillespie as a model.

But the county party had to fix a series of errors in the results reported from almost every precinct between the election and the canvass Thursday, though none of the discrepancies changed the outcome of a race. Travis County Republicans, who hand-counted some ballots as well, also had to fix discrepancies in their tally.

Texas requires partial recounts only for ballots that are tabulated electronically — there is no provision in state law to require the local GOP to recount these ballots or audit the results of the hand count. The Texas Secretary of State’s election division does not have the authority to audit the election unless Gillespie is one of the counties the office randomly selects for an audit.

At least one precinct judge acknowledged mistakes were made during the count but said they were caught and corrected that night. Campbell said he has full confidence that the tallying of the votes was accurate, and the party will not voluntarily conduct an audit or recount to verify the results.

Gillespie County GOP Chairman Bruce Campbell, left, and Gillespie County Elections Administrator Jim Riley review precinct vote totals before submitting them to the Texas Secretary of State’s office on March 14.

But not everyone feels that way. Scott Netherland, the election judge for Precinct 6, turned in all of the necessary paperwork to the elections office just before midnight on election night, believing it all checked out. When he woke up the next day, he decided to double-check the results. He told Votebeat that 197 voters had cast ballots at his precinct on election day. For each race on the ballot, the total number of ballots cast should have totaled to 197, including, for example, instances when a voter skipped a race. But in one race, he’d reported only 160 votes. In another, 157. As he went down the list, he noticed he had 207 votes reported for a third race.

“My heart sank,” Netherland said. He’d miscounted the totals in seven separate races.

Netherland said he immediately contacted Campbell, then rushed to the elections office to review tally sheets. In doing so, he realized that multiple other precincts also had reported clearly inaccurate totals.

If he hadn’t done that, “we’d be still sitting on mistakes,” Netherland, who’s been working elections in Gillespie for more than a decade and did not support the hand count effort, told Votebeat.

Netherland said he still isn’t confident the election results are accurate, based on the errors that he and others have found.

On Thursday, Netherland said the Republican Party in Gillespie has introduced human error into the election process with the hand count.

“We took something that worked and now broke it,” Netherland said. “We failed to guard the purity of the election with this hand count. What we just did is evidence that this hand count was not accurate.”

Other Republicans continue to tout the effort as a success.

One of them was David Treibs, a member of the Fredericksburg Tea Party who helped lead the effort to hand count. In a video interview posted on a social media platform created by Mike Lindell — a well-known election conspiracy theorist and the CEO of bedding company MyPillow – Treibs acknowledged he’d made errors but said they weren’t a problem.

“So there were two ballots, and I just didn’t add them up. So I would have had to add 450 and two, and it would have been 452 and I didn’t. I just forgot to fill it in,” Treibs said in the video posted last week. “So I don’t really think that’s something that’s going to shut down the election and it’s like, ‘oh my gosh, he didn’t add 450 and two and come up with 452 and now that means the whole election was a failure.’ Well, that’s ridiculous.”

A long weekend reconciling errors

For his part, Campbell said he spent all weekend before the canvass going over tally sheets and double-checking vote totals on documents called precinct return sheets — reconciliation forms that election workers fill out with the number of votes cast for each race on election day. He repeatedly found errors. All but one of the county’s 13 Republican precincts had reported incorrect totals on the official reconciliation forms.

Campbell, by Texas law, is in charge of the GOP primary election in the county and responsible for attesting that the results are correct. He said he put together a spreadsheet with all the numbers from each precinct and each race. He consulted with the Secretary of State’s Office and local election officials. He highlighted the errors he found in red and sent the spreadsheet around to the precinct judges, telling them they needed to correct the errors at the canvass.

On Thursday, during the election canvass — the official examination of votes cast in an election — all of the precinct judges, who supervised each polling place, gathered at the election office to correct their errors. One by one, they called out the correct totals.

According to the precinct return sheets from election night obtained by Votebeat, Precinct 2 and Precinct 6 — Netherland’s precinct — had the most errors with inaccurate vote totals reported in seven races. Precinct 12 reported errors in vote totals for six races. Precinct 9 was the only one with no reported errors.

Some judges quickly explained how errors happened on Thursday during the canvass, reasons ranging from “poor penmanship” that was hard to read, to accidentally writing the wrong numbers, or miscalculations.

The short public meeting lasted around 30 minutes. After their mistakes were resolved and results were certified, some clapped and said, “We did it!” Soon after, all the precinct judges except for one went home. Campbell and the Gillespie County elections staff stayed behind to begin manually entering the official results into the state’s reporting system.

That’s when Campbell found yet another error, forcing him to call the early voting ballot board chair back to the elections office for another round of correction.

After that, entering the results in the state system posed yet another challenge. When ballots are scanned using voting equipment and software, a report of the totals is created in the same format the state uses. The state requires those results be manually entered, separated by candidate and proposition totals for the day of the election, early voting, and mail ballots. But in his spreadsheet on Thursday, Campbell only had those totals broken out by candidate and propositions per precinct.

Gillespie County elections staffer Alan Littman reviews precinct totals at the county’s election office before submitting them to the Texas Secretary of State’s office on March 14.

Elections staff printed out the spreadsheets, laid them out across four tables, and read the totals out loud, adding them up with a calculator so they would be aggregated in the format the state requires, and then manually entered them into a computer.

This process took nearly three hours because they caught themselves making new data entry errors as they were reading the newly aggregated totals out loud and writing them down before entering them into the state system.

In Travis County, where Republicans hand-counted more than 1,000 mail-in ballots on the day of the election, there were also discrepancies. In an email, Travis County Republican Party Chair Matt Mackowiak said that in the race for U.S. House District 35, undervotes were inaccurately reported as overvotes. An undervote is an instance when a voter appears not to have marked as many choices as they’re allowed to in a given race; an overvote is an instance when a voter selected too many choices in a given race. After resolving the errors, the party is “confident now” that the results are accurate.

Experts say these mistakes raise more questions about the accuracy of the vote tallies that can’t be answered without an audit or a recount.

“This 100% is indicative that we know mistakes are going to happen every single time. And I don’t know how anybody would feel confident, after that many errors were identified, that all their errors had been identified,” said Jennifer Morrell, a former election official and an expert on election audits. Morrell is the CEO of the Elections Group, an elections consulting firm.

“The only way I can think to validate what they claim are the final vote counts is to run all those ballots through a voting system and compare the two outcomes.”

Morrell added that the discrepancies found in Gillespie and in Travis don’t typically occur in elections where voting equipment is used. Even in parts of the process where hand counting is used, such as audits or recounts (where only one or two races are counted rather than the entire ballot), “we find that it’s easy for people to make mistakes,” she said. And that’s especially true when tallying undervotes.

In Gillespie, the Republican Party has no intention of doing any sort of recount, Campbell said. Neither do Travis County Republicans, Mackowiak said.

Campbell stressed that each hand-counting team had a caller of the votes, a watcher to ensure the caller was correct, and three people writing down the totals. “If it didn’t match, they’d have to go back and count again,” he said. “You have three people. Three of them are not going to make the same error.”

Campbell said a committee was created by the party to study the hand count. The committee will survey every person who participated.

From left, Gillespie County elections administrator Jim Riley, Gillespie County Republican Party Chair Bruce Campbell, elections worker Joy Smith, an inspector from the Texas Secretary of State's Office and Gillespie County elections staffer Alan Littman work on primary election results before submitting them to the Texas Secretary of State’s Office on March 14.

On the primary election night, Joy Smith, the Precinct 4 judge, was the last to bring election results to the county’s elections office. It was Smith’s first time as the precinct’s supervisor. On Thursday, she also had to fix an error. When writing the total number of votes for a proposition on the ballot, Smith wrote the number 451. It should have been 415. “I literally just switched the two numbers when I wrote it down on the form,” she said, something she attributed to exhaustion in the wee hours of the morning after a long night.

Smith said the hand count made election day as a first-time election judge more difficult. “There were a lot of extra forms that we had to fill out that day, double check the tally sheets,” Smith said. “There’s just a lot more on your plate. But I am not giving up. I’m going to keep helping.”

Natalia Contreras covers election administration and voting access for Votebeat in partnership with the Texas Tribune. Contact Natalia at ncontreras@votebeat.org.

Texas county’s hand count results impossible to verify, and state law doesn’t require recount

2024-03-11T10:00:00+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. A version of this analysis was originally distributed in Votebeat’s free weekly newsletter. Sign up to get future editions, including the latest reporting from Votebeat bureaus and curated news from other publications, delivered to your inbox every Saturday.

Hi, y’all,

This week, Republicans in Gillespie County, Texas hand counted every single one of the ballots cast in their primary. There were about 8,000 ballots, each of which contained choices for more than 30 races. It took around 200 people 21 collective hours to count all of the ballots, and Votebeat departed the Gillespie County Elections office at 5:12 a.m on Wednesday after watching the effort.

It was a long night, and one that Texas Republicans are portraying as a success. A local conservative website praised the effort: “Following months of preparation, hundreds of volunteers helped count thousands of paper ballots within 24 hours.”

Most of the words in that sentence are accurate. Beyond the basic facts of that statement, however, there’s much more we’re unable to verify, despite being the only two non-election workers present for the duration of the process. We watched the ballots be counted, we watched them be delivered to the elections office, and we watched as — around 4:30 a.m. — the last precinct turned in its results.

Gillespie County Republican hand count stretched into early morning hours

You would assume we’d know a lot about Tuesday’s process, but we don’t. What worries us most: There is likely no way to know what the error rate for this hand count is, and there is ample evidence the county party diverged from typical procedure — including their own admission that there were errors.

In a video posted on social media Thursday night, Tom Marschall, who was the Precinct 1 judge in Gillespie County, said errors were made during the count. But he didn’t see a “significant” problem with that, he said in the video. “What is significant concerning the errors is that they were seen and they were corrected before information went forward.”

Marschall’s wife, who was a counter of mail ballots, said in the video that one team didn’t follow the training “protocol” and that led to delays to count a batch of 50 ballots. “I was not impressed with that team. So I think the training needs to be more thorough. And maybe the trainers need to explain why they’re doing it the way they’re doing it,” she said,

We have no idea what process was followed in the room where mail ballots were counted — a tasting room at a local winery. It’s worth noting, though, that county GOP officials repeatedly told us throughout the day that counters had undergone “six months” of training. Some candidates told us they were confident counters knew exactly what they were doing.

Media were not allowed to watch from inside the winery or any of the precincts — by law only the counters, poll watchers, and election workers could be in the room — and Votebeat reporter Natalia Contreras was turned away from the practice session she attempted to enter on Saturday. Despite Natalia sitting in front of the chairman of the Republican Party all night long at the elections office, he couldn’t tell us exactly how many counters were at each precinct, who they were, or whether even recent recruits completed a full course of training. The workers at the winery, where Jessica was stationed on a patio looking in through a window, would not answer questions.

State law is also not conducive to ensuring that these results were accurately counted and reported. Texas requires partial recounts only for ballots that are tabulated electronically — there is no provision in state law to require the local GOP to recount these ballots or audit the results. Likely, a losing candidate would have to sue, but there weren’t very many close races: Just one sheriff’s race is headed to a runoff. Many of the candidates on that ballot also explicitly endorsed hand counting, so they’re unlikely to complain about it now.

What we have written above is the entirety of what we understand about the process. To the credit of the county GOP, the evening was orderly and the ballots were turned in on time. But from what we were able to observe, it did not follow the same steps to ensure quality hand counting both set into state standards and also demonstrated by another Texas county hand counting ballots at the same time.

One volunteer told the conservative publication above that “each team could count a batch of 50 ballots in about one and a half hours.” Let’s do some math.

If we assume that she is correct, that’s less than 2 minutes per ballot. On each ballot, there were at least 35 contests, meaning that human teams of five examined the ballot, and agreed on what it said in around three seconds per contest. That’s really hard to believe: Voter intent (because they initially selected the incorrect candidate or didn’t follow the ballot directions and marked the ballot unclearly) is sometimes hard to divine and must be decided by a committee.

“Given the speed of this count, I worry about its accuracy,” said Charles Stewart, a professor of political science at MIT who studies election administration and has published peer-reviewed studies on hand counting.

This is much faster than hand counts that have previously been done. By a lot.

Cathy Darling-Allen is the elections clerk in Shasta County, California. Her county leaders have been advocating for hand counting since 2020, and last September she prepared a detailed report on how much time it would take after studying the process for months. It took trained staff an average of 75 minutes to tally batches of 25 ballots, and then they took an additional nine minutes to audit those results.

Told of the Gillespie GOP’s counting rate, Darling-Allen expressed skepticism. “Without any audit at all, I would say the results have no validity,” she said.

None of the public comments or interviews of individuals associated with Gillespie County’s count have explained what steps they followed when voter intent wasn’t clear, or when teams disagreed on ballot marking.

In Travis County, home to Austin and not far from Gillespie County, Republicans elected to hand count only mailed ballots. This represented a small fraction of the total ballots cast there, coming to just under 2,000 ballots. They finished counting those ballots around midnight.

Then they began hours of quality checking the results, entering them into spreadsheets. This process took another eight hours, according to a GOP official and county election workers. The entire process was video recorded.

Based on what we saw with our own eyes, that is not how things went in Gillespie County.

Precincts counted ballots on site, while early and mailed ballots were counted at the winery. We watched as their materials were loaded into boxes, and then driven directly to the elections office to be returned. There, precinct judges — the people who supervise each polling location — turned in paperwork that included the totals the counting teams had reached, and left. We watched that, too. Some of those judges had to drive back to the elections office after they were informed they’d forgotten to fill out information or missed a signature.

There was a lot we couldn’t watch, and there was a lot that no one watched. While we could watch the counting being done at the winery through a window, none of the precincts were open to us by law. Candidates told us they had a hard time getting enough volunteer poll watchers to watch counting in 14 separate locations, much less for so many hours. Gillespie County Republicans also did not set up live streams of any of the counting, as Travis County Republicans did.

So, let’s sum that up: In an effort to increase transparency and reliability, Gillespie County Republicans counted ballots without publicly explaining how, in a manner that appears not to have followed standard practice, and they wouldn’t answer questions about how it worked while the counting was happening. They finished counting more ballots in a shorter amount of time than a Republican party nearby that was also hand-counting ballots, and did not follow at least some of the accuracy and transparency steps that the other county took along the way. No one from the county elections office watched.

The public is left with few options to ensure that the counted results were the results the county’s voters intended. We have requested the tally sheets and the notes and every other public document that should be made available to us under law, and we’ll review them thoroughly with a bipartisan slate of election officials to see what we can reconstruct.

There is nothing that specifically allows the county elections office to check the results, since in Texas primaries are party functions.

You’ll read more from Natalia in the coming weeks and months about hand counting in Gillespie County, and we’ll try to answer some of the lingering concerns we and others have about transparency and credibility. In that spirit: We know some of those who were involved in this hand count — as administrators, as poll watchers and campaign volunteers — read this newsletter. We’d like to talk to you about how this went, so that we can know with more certainty whether it actually was the success they have claimed this week.

As established above, we have lots of reasons to think it may not have been as straightforward a success as Texas Republicans are claiming. Certainly, the lack of clarity around the process is in stark contrast with the amount of transparency the same activists have loudly demanded of Gillespie County election workers.

And, finally, there is one crucial error in the quote from the above conservative news organization: There were no “volunteers.” By law, every counter was paid $12 an hour for that work, and — as the organization notes — there were hundreds of them. Taxpayers will foot the bill for those paychecks, since the state of Texas will be reimbursing the local party for the cost of this effort. This was hugely expensive, and Gillespie County Republicans are not paying for it — the whole of Texas is.

If you’ve got any insights, reach out. And please stay tuned.

Jessica Huseman is Votebeat’s editorial director and is based in Dallas. Contact Jessica at jhuseman@votebeat.org.

‘Are you kidding me’: Gillespie County Republican hand count stretched into early morning hours

2024-03-06T19:59:40+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for our free newsletters here.

FREDERICKSBURG, Texas — Bruce Campbell, chairman of the Gillespie County Republican Party, predicted that results from the 13 GOP precincts would start trickling into the county elections office by 8:30 p.m.

By 9:30 p.m., he expressed surprise that none had returned.

Shortly after, he informed county Elections Director Jim Riley it might be hours before workers finished hand counting the thousands of early and mailed ballots — a task they’d begun at 7:30 that morning in a glass-walled tasting room at a winery called The Resort at Fredericksburg.

“Are you kidding me?” Riley said.

Campbell wasn’t kidding, or even hedging. In the end, the counting took all night long.

At 4:30 a.m. Wednesday, Gillespie County Republicans completed hand counting more than 8,000 ballots, following through on a decision the county party made months ago amid a statewide push led by individuals who have promoted some of the wildest election conspiracy theories since the 2020 election.

Gillespie County Republicans decided to hand-count primary ballots even though experts agree, and studies show the method is time-consuming, costly, less accurate, and less secure than using machines.

Gillespie County Elections Administrator Jim Riley listens to someone speaking in the hallway of the Elections Office in Fredericksburg early Wednesday morning.

In each precinct and at one winery selected as the counting site for ballots cast during early voting, workers paid $12 an hour were hand-counting nearly 8,000 primary ballots, around half of which had been cast that day.

The workers couldn’t stop until they finished: Texas law requires the count be continuous. While the Gillespie County Republican Party has so far paid for the hand count, the state, which allocates money to reimburse political parties and counties for their primary and runoff election expenses, will ultimately reimburse most of its costs. The total has yet to be tallied, but that means Texas taxpayers will foot the final bill.

At the tasting room, called The Edge, ballots had been neatly stacked on tables supported by wine barrels, and estimates for when they’d complete this task fluctuated throughout the evening — from as early as 1 a.m. to as late as 5 a.m. Ultimately, party workers loaded the final set of counted ballots into a constable’s vehicle in front of the winery at 2:30 a.m. The final precinct would not report its results until just before 4 a.m.

Texas county’s GOP officials declared hand count a success, but kept finding errors

It was not the efficient process Republicans envisioned, though one carried out with no visible calamity. From start to finish, the process took almost 24 consecutive hours and involved around 200 people counting ballots. It remains to be seen if any of the candidates on the ballot will challenge the results, or whether this count will withstand next week’s official canvass. Texas law only requires that elections conducted on electronic tabulation equipment undergo a partial recount, so there is no such requirement here.

“You saw how this went,” Riley told Votebeat at 5 a.m., when all party members had departed the office. “This was a circus.” He said he’d withhold judgment on whether the count was accurate because he didn’t have eyes and ears in the rooms where it happened.

An election worker from Precinct 3 brings materials into the Elections Office on Tuesday.

For their part, the Democrats conducted their primary with the help of the county using the same machines they’ve used for a few years. Even with paperwork delays and a minor glitch at one polling location, the party was finished counting all of its ballots — around 700 of them — by 10 p.m. It was a light year, as many reliable Democratic voters in the bright red county chose to vote in the Republican primary in order to participate in a contested sheriff’s race.

Campbell said the party’s “original goal” was to have “enough volunteers that we finished counting before the Democrats did.”

“Clearly, that didn’t happen,” he said.

Republican Party official David Treibs had been the chief advocate for hand counting, and told Votebeat in December after the plans were finalized that the process was “not anything that’s really complicated. If you go ‘1, 2, 3, 4, 5′ then you can do it.” Party officials expressed confidence results would be known shortly after the polls closed.

Treibs, a precinct judge and local tea party member, turned in his precinct’s election results — Precinct 13, held at an auction house — at about 2 a.m. The counting of 450 ballots wasn’t hard at all, he said. Figuring out the paperwork and reconciliation forms was more of a challenge. “It’s not like we do this every day,” he said, though he added that he’s looking forward to doing it again.

“Oh my God. It was so exciting,” he said shortly after turning in the results — visibly energized, despite the hour. “I was so happy with it.”

Bruce Campbell, chairman of the Gillespie County Republican Party, in the Elections Office in Fredericksburg early Wednesday morning.

Campbell, speaking to Votebeat at 4 a.m. at the county’s election office, was more reserved — he said he couldn’t say whether the hand count went well. “You’d have to ask those 300 people who worked and counted,” he said, including in his count poll workers who operated the polls but didn’t count ballots. “You’d have to ask the voters.”

He’s also not sure the party could recruit enough people for a high-turnout general election in November. “We’d need double the workers,” he said. “It’ll be double the number of hours.”

In 2020, Gillespie County Republicans carried out their primary with only 45 workers, and the results were reported in a few hours. None of the candidates challenged the results. This year, more than six times as many poll workers and counters turned up for shifts throughout the day — and some worked the entire time. Still, that fell short of the recruitment goal that party leaders told Votebeat in December they expected to clear without issue.

Treibs has recently begun publishing his own right-wing newsletter, the Fredericksburg Liberty Bell. In its very first edition, published Feb. 19, Treibs wrote the party still needed “100 more volunteers to help with the hand count.”

Ongoing conspiracies pushed out the elections staff in Gillespie County. The new director won’t budge.

Republican turnout also ultimately exceeded expectations in the county, giving Republican workers a larger task than originally envisioned and pushing counting into the wee hours of Wednesday morning.

A worker from the 9th precinct — a volunteer fire station where only 77 votes were cast all day — was the first to return with results just before 10:30 p.m, after it took four people more than three hours to count those ballots. Precinct 4, where 439 voters cast their ballots on Tuesday at a local Girl Scout cabin, was the last to report. The precinct captain left the elections office at around 4:30 a.m.

Jerry Vaclav served as a Democratic election judge on Tuesday, and said the Republicans’ elongated counting process and frustration over the slow trickle of results “serves them right.”

“The sad part is this makes us look stupid to the rest of the state,” he said. Of Texas’s 254 counties, Gillespie was second to last to report its results. Harris County — the state’s most populous and home to Houston — still had precincts outstanding as of Wednesday morning. The county, which has become well-known for its recent spate of election problems, had nearly 1,200 precincts.

Tables and chairs fill the inside of The Edge, a winery tasting room workers used to count ballots.

The tasting room at the winery, where about 4,200 early and mailed ballots were counted from 7 a.m. on Tuesday to 2:30 a.m. Wednesday, is a picturesque space. Counters worked beneath vaulted ceilings and in front of large windows overlooking a winding section of the Pedernales River. The Resort features a collection of tiny homes for rent, and is a popular destination for weddings. Its logo — a take on the popular “Come and Take It” flag — is a sideways corkscrew labeled “Come and Taste it.”

It was not the Republican Party’s original choice for this process, which had been slated to occur at a local church. Practice sessions, however, revealed the acoustics of the church were not conducive to several groups working separately at the same time. By contrast, the winery provided significant space with plenty of tables, designed purposefully for separate groups to gather at once. The party made the change early last week, surprising winery staff who were told the winery would be closed all day on Tuesday to accommodate the hand count. The winery reopened as scheduled at 11 a.m. Wednesday.

One of the owners of the space, Mickey Poole, is a former Republican candidate for city council. In 2020, a Gillespie County grand jury charged him with illegal voting and tampering with a government document, though the charges were dropped in 2023. Poole called the charges politically motivated. They stemmed from a ballot he cast in a 2019 referendum on fluoride in the county water system, despite having a homestead exemption in a different county and being registered to vote at his business address — a local Comfort Inn & Suites.

Poole had not responded to a request for comment submitted to the winery.

Republicans in Gillespie County began advocating for hand counting last summer, when the local party’s executive committee — mostly members of the Fredericksburg Tea Party — voted to ditch all electronic voting equipment used to tabulate votes.

That vote had been sparked by out-of-state election conspiracy theorists, who’d made rounds across the state attempting to persuade local leaders to hand count ballots based on unsubstantiated claims of broad election malfeasance. Among them: tabulation equipment was being manipulated by local election officials to change results.

Most Texas county leaders dismissed the claims. But many Republican party chairs in counties across the state — from large ones such as Dallas and Bexar to rural counties such as Uvalde in South Texas — considered hand counting before determining it would be more costly, logistically chaotic, and require around double the number of election workers or more.

Ballot boxes sit on a table inside of a winery in Fredericksburg on Tuesday.

Gillespie was the only sizable county in the state whose Republicans attempted a full hand count of their results, though Travis County’s party leadership opted to hand count mailed ballots — a fraction of total votes cast. With just under 2,000 such ballots to count, the party — which is significantly larger than Gillespie’s — finished counting around midnight, with quality checks continuing throughout Wednesday.

Travis Party officials worked with the secretary of state’s office and the Travis County Elections department to quality-check its count. Campbell did not immediately respond to a question about whether Gillespie Republicans took similar steps to quality-check their count. Travis County also video recorded its hand count process, a step that the Gillespie County GOP did not take.

A small number of counties with populations of only a few hundred also always count by hand, but rarely have large numbers of ballots or candidate choices, as Gillespie did.

Some of the Gillespie Republican Party’s candidates and emissaries were enthusiastic about the change.

“We love hand counting,” said Barbi Biedermann, whose husband, Kyle, was running to unseat Republican state Rep. Ellen Troxclair.

“I believe it’s a foolproof system,” she said on Tuesday “I think we are going back to how it was. If it’s not broken, why fix it?”

Her husband, with whom she owns two hardware stores in the county, stood campaigning in front of a precinct near downtown. He had been endorsed by those party members who’d advocated for hand counting. “I agree with everything my wife said,” he told Votebeat, declining to comment further.

When unofficial results were released on the Texas Secretary of State’s website, Kyle Biedermann was shown losing to Troxclair by 9 points. Of the five counties in the state House district, results show Biedermann won only Gillespie County.

Gillespie County voters had more of a mixed reception.

Dudley Kiefer, a longtime resident of Fredericksburg, cast his ballot at Precinct 7, housed at the county’s Farm Bureau. Keifer, who has been voting in the Republican primary for 19 years, said he preferred casting his ballot on a machine, citing ease and reliability. “With the population we have, we have to take advantage of our technology.”

Susan Boone — who also cast her ballot at Precinct 7 on Tuesday — said she didn’t oppose it, but called hand counting “unnecessary.” So did Tim Bowyer, who voted at Precinct 4, without any issues and not much of a wait. “I didn’t distrust the machines,” he said.

Natalia Contreras is a reporter for Votebeat in partnership with the Texas Tribune. Contact Natalia at ncontreras@votebeat.org. Jessica Huseman is Votebeat’s editorial director and is based in Dallas. Contact Jessica at jhuseman@votebeat.org.

Ongoing conspiracies pushed out the elections staff in this Texas county. The new director won’t budge.

2024-02-22T10:55:00+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for our free newsletters here.

FREDERICKSBURG, Texas — Jim Riley and his team spent weeks preparing for a forum he hoped would remind the public that elections in Gillespie County are “safe, accurate and dependable.”

The new county elections administrator expected more than 50 people. He asked a more experienced election official from a neighboring county to be there, in case he needed help clarifying election laws he’s less familiar with. He planned for a mock election, setting up voting equipment that the audience could use.

But fewer than two dozen people came. And some — county Republicans and local tea party members — walked out before his presentation ended. They’re the same people who Riley believes no longer want him in the job and who have disrupted the way elections are run in the county.

“Yeah, I’m disappointed. But the word will get out. They’ll go out and say that ‘he’s still there. He’s still standing’,” Riley said.

Riley, 76, intends to stay standing, even if it means standing up to the pressure of local right-wing activists who want him to radically change the way Gillespie elections are run. It’s more pushback than he expected when he took the job in August.

“I was just surprised. But I am dealing with it,” Riley said. “I’m not quitting.”

That’s no small commitment, considering Gillespie’s recent history. A little more than a year ago — following years of harassment by local right-wing activists fueled by unsupported claims of election malfeasance and conspiracy theories — the entire elections department in this Hill Country county quit.

Six months into his new role, Riley has signaled that he will not easily bend to the activists’ demands to fix county election problems that don’t exist. Since before he took the job, they have been mounting a pressure campaign to convince local officials to get rid of its electronic election equipment and switch to checking in voters on paper and counting votes by hand.

“If they thought that I was one who would follow along on this, then they were badly misinformed,” Riley said. “I stand by what I said: a hand count will not make elections in Gillespie better.”

A Republican and a semi-retired Presbyterian minister, Riley said when he sees a need, he turns to it and serves.

“In my own personal walk with Jesus, I want to be doing things that would be considered worthwhile. And right now that seems to be this job,” he said.

On Feb 6, 2024 Gillespie County elections administrator, Jim Riley, tells residents how difficult it would be to steal a ballot by going over the chain of custody process and what election workers and county officials do to ensure that ballots are kept secure.

“Thrown into a hornet’s nest”

Although Riley says he’s got what it takes to endure the big election year ahead of him, some residents worry the county may be at risk of losing yet another election director.

After the entire elections staff quit in the summer of 2022, county officials spent months looking for a new elections director. Riley had been a precinct judge — tasked with supervising polling locations — for the local Republican Party for years, which meant he was familiar with how elections in the county were run. While the job was vacant, he helped manage early voting during the November 2022 midterm election and helped the county clerk in the months that followed. County officials encouraged him to apply for the job; he did so in June.

Meanwhile, some Republicans and activists had been organizing an effort aimed at convincing county executives to ditch electronic voting equipment and instead use volunteers to hand-count ballots.

“We can do this in Gillespie and in the surrounding Hill Country because we’re small enough and we have enough people who want to know the truth,” Angela Smith, a poll watcher and a founder of the Fredericksburg Tea Party, said in July at an event featuring out-of-state election conspiracy theorists promoting hand counting – a method experts say is inaccurate and far more costly.

More than 20,000 registered voters live in Gillespie and about 80% are Republican.

Although county executives dismissed the push to hand count, by the time Riley was appointed to his new position, Republicans had decided they’d hand count in the March primary election – a move state officials had warned would require double the amount of workers and volunteers, of resources and a risk of legal challenges from candidates, but a decision the party was legally allowed to make.

Mo Saiidi, then the chairman of the county’s Republican Party, resigned last fall following his opposition to the party’s decision to hand-count ballots in the primary election.

“Anybody who would have come into that job would have been thrown into a hornet’s nest, to be honest with you,” Saiidi said.

Saiidi was a member of the election commission that appointed Riley. He said the county was left scrambling when former elections administrator Anissa Herrera — who’d run elections there since 2019 — and her staff quit. He’s concerned that it could happen again.

“It’s the same now with Jim there,” Saiidi said. “The same barrages of baseless complaints. This is not healthy, we’ve gotta do something. We need to let them do their jobs.”

“The will of the people”

Texas law allows the political parties to choose the ballot counting method for the primary elections. For the March 5 primary, Republicans in Gillespie have decided they’ll hand count all ballots cast during early voting and on election day.

The party is also taking an additional step to make its election more analog. On election day, the party will ditch electronic poll books, used to check voters in at the polls. Instead, they’ll use printed voter rolls prepared by Riley’s staff.

But during early voting, under Texas law, it’s Riley who gets to decide how to check in voters at the polls during that two-week period. And he has insisted on using the county’s electronic poll book – a system he says is reliable and more efficient in what is typically a high-turnout election.

That’s upset the local activists, who falsely believe election officials can use the electronic poll books to manipulate election results.

For weeks, Republicans and Tea Party members who opposed using the electronic poll books have sent out a ‘call to action’ for residents, asking them to write letters to county Judge Daniel Jones and other county commissioners in hopes they will tell Riley to change his mind.

Over a week ago, Republican precinct chairs Tom Marschall and David Treibs created a 20-minute video about Riley’s decision to “do something other than what the people want,” posting it on social media. In the video, they also suggested that residents ask the county to get rid of the elections administrator position entirely and give those duties to an elected official, such as the county clerk or the tax assessor-collector. Marschall told Votebeat that if Riley were to “abide by the will of the people” he wouldn’t have raised these issues.

“We just want to do it the old fashioned way and do it on paper, and nobody’s going to be able to add 1,000 names to that list when I’m sitting there, guarding it,” Treibs — who could not be reached for comment — said in the video. “Nobody’s gonna mess with that stuff when I’m there. I can guarantee you that.”

In the video, he went on to say that because Riley isn’t elected, “Jim Riley doesn’t answer to anyone and I don’t think that’s a good thing. But we want to try to pressure him and… be nice of course.”

Election administrators are nonpartisan positions appointed by an election commission made up of the county clerk, the tax assessor-collector, the chairs of the local political parties and the county judge.

A poll pad with an ID check-in is active prior to Gillespie County residents checking in for the mock election hosted on Feb. 6, 2024. The poll pad is used for voter check-in and verification for county and precinct.

“Right now, I’m experiencing a mess”

So far, Riley hasn’t budged on the demands from the activists. Instead, he’s been focused on rebuilding trust and learning as much about elections as possible. In January, he attended a conference and training for Texas election administrators, networking with other election directors across the state and with staff at the Texas Secretary of State’s Office.

He says he often calls election directors from neighboring counties for advice and doesn’t shy away from admitting that he still has a lot to learn. He takes tips and examples on what he can do to rebuild trust in local elections. The lightly attended public forum was one such attempt.

With the pressure of learning the ins and outs of elections, in a state where laws are often changing, and in a county where election officials have in the past found the job to be too much, some election administrators say support from county commissioners — who control the county’s budget and resources allocated for the elections department — goes a long way.

In Llano County, about 30 miles north of Gillespie, Andrea Wilson has been the elections administrator for over a year. She quickly learned that the job required her to become an election law expert, a record-keeping expert, a logistical manager, a trainer for election workers, a budget strategist and an office administrator to keep track of supplies, among other duties.

And the hours of work are extensive. Wilson’s kept track: The two weeks of early voting now covers 115 hours that election administration staff must be present in the office and an additional 17-plus hours on election day, she said.

“With all of that resting on your shoulders, could you then imagine having to fight with your county commissioners for the staff necessary to support that mission or a budget to pay for all the necessary supplies?” Wilson said. “Or even worse is adding to your already overflowing plate the spread of misinformation.”

Without support, Wilson said she wouldn’t have lasted a year on the job in Llano. She said it should be “the standard” for all counties to provide that kind of support to their elections departments.

When Herrera, the previous elections administrator in Gillespie quit, in her resignation letter she told county officials that “the threats against election officials and my election staff, dangerous misinformation, lack of full-time personnel for the elections office, unpaid compensation,” had in part made the job “unsustainable.”

Her staff was made up of one more full-time employee and a part-time employee. She’d asked county officials for two more full-time employees but the county only approved one and it’s unclear whether it was filled or whether the county plans to allocate funding to pay for additional workers in the future. Gillespie County Judge Daniel Jones did not respond to Votebeat’s multiple requests for comment about how the county plans to support its elections department and to help retain election staff in Gillespie.

The number of people working in the Gillespie elections department remains the same: two full-time employees, including Riley, and one part-time employee.

Although at times he admits the pressures of the job can be overwhelming and frustrating, Riley told Votebeat he is confident he has the support of Jones and other county commissioners. And he relies on his faith often to keep at it, any time he’s discouraged, he said. But he’s committed to running elections in the county as long as he can.

“In the midst of everything that is just kicking you in the butt. If you spend a little time in the word, spend time in prayer and you seek it through Jesus. You’ll be amazed at what he allows you to experience,” Riley said. “So, right now, I’m experiencing a mess, but I haven’t felt alone in it at all.”

Natalia Contreras covers election administration and voting access for Votebeat in partnership with the Texas Tribune. Contact Natalia at ncontreras@votebeat.org.

Texas Republicans want to hand count 2024 primary ballots. Experts say it’s “a recipe for disaster.”

2023-12-21T11:00:00+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S.

When Gillespie County Republicans conduct their primary in March, they will count votes in an ill-advised way: by hand, using scores of volunteers, without any machines.

Even if they can pull off their expensive, labor-intensive plan, they risk being sued by losing candidates or reprimanded by the state. And they may run up a huge bill of unnecessary costs.

“Hand-counting is a recipe for disaster,” said Bob Stein, a political science professor at Rice University and election administration expert. He and most other experts agree on this, and studies back them up: The method is time-consuming, costly, less accurate, and less secure than using machines to tally votes.

The factors that led Gillespie Republicans to this plan are not unique to this rural county of nearly 30,000 people, west of Austin in Texas’ Hill Country. This summer, leaders of the GOP in counties as large as Dallas and as small as Uvalde in South Texas seriously considered hand-counting ballots for their primary elections, according to public records and interviews with election officials.

The phenomenon has been a shock to Stein, who said the effort could undermine confidence in the outcome of the election.

“It will not be reliable nor valid. It’ll cost an enormous amount of money and everyone, every candidate, will be challenging the count,” he said.

Party leadership in larger counties have, so far, resisted a full hand count. In Dallas County, leadership determined it would be impossible with present resources. In Travis County, the local GOP decided on a significantly watered-down hand-counting plan, focusing on a small percentage of primary ballots cast.

Gillespie County Republicans, though, must now recruit and train 100 additional election workers to do the election day tasks that normally fall to county election workers.

Then there’s the enormous job of manually tallying the votes in the roughly dozens of races on the more than 3,000 ballots expected to be cast in the primary, racing against the clock to finish before the state’s 24-hour deadline for reporting results.

But party official David Treibs, a precinct chair who’s been leading the hand-count planning, doesn’t think it will be much of a hassle.

“It’s not anything that’s really complicated. If you go ‘1, 2, 3, 4, 5′ then you can do it,” Treibs, who has no experience hand-counting ballots, told Votebeat. “So it’s not like calculus, you know? If you have a good attention span, then I think most people can do it.”

Ben Adida, executive director for VotingWorks, a nonprofit voting system vendor, which helped the state of Georgia perform a hand-counted audit of the state’s 2020 presidential results, agreed that hand-counting was nothing like calculus. But, he said, it was also nothing like counting to five.

“Imagine being asked to count the number of sheets in a large ream of paper, the kind you get from Staples,” he said. Mistakes aren’t allowed, nor are programs like Excel. Plus, “You have to do it 80 times, because there are 40 contests with 2 candidates each.”

Adida said he understands why hand-counting sounds easy, but once you’ve done it, you quickly realize it’s a daunting process with dozens of steps.

Citing his opposition to hand-counting ballots, Gillespie County GOP Chair Mo Saiidi resigned in September. Days after his departure, the remaining members of county Republican leadership finalized their decision to move forward.

“I could not in good conscience continue presiding over an election using a method that I did not feel was the right process to go through,” Saiidi said. “And I felt it was flawed. I felt it was not well thought out. I didn’t think it was the right thing for the community.”

Things have been spiraling out of control in Gillespie elections for nearly two years. In 2022, the county’s entire elections department quit following harassment and threats from far-right voter fraud activists. This year, voter fraud activists in the county were hosting events featuring well-known conspiracy theorists, pushing for hand counts.

Jim Riley, who was hired earlier this year to lead the decimated elections department, did not respond to Votebeat’s multiple requests for comment.

Bruce Campbell, the Gillespie County Republican Party chair who replaced Saiidi, told Votebeat last week there’s “no effort or willingness” from the party to back out of hand-counting. Texas election administrators see the end of the year as the drop-dead deadline for making such decisions, so it’s likely too late to back out.

“We’re pretty much on that path now,” Campbell said. Volunteers have been practicing hand-counting and he’s certain they’ll be ready on election day. “Everybody that’s going to do it will have done it enough that it won’t be new to them,” he said.

Under Texas law, during a primary election — which lasts for two weeks and through the Friday before election day, March 5 — county governments operate early voting, though parties can choose their counting method. On Election Day, the political parties are free to run voting and the counting method in any way they choose so long as it’s legal.

Across the state, county parties select from a variety of options, ranging from contracting the entirety of the process out to the county elections department — to use county-owned voting and tabulation equipment — to retaining complete party control. The operational costs of the primary election varies based on the method of counting the parties decide to use.

In 2020, Dallas County’s Republican Primary — contracting for county services on election day only — cost more than $300,000, records show. This included hourly payments to more than 750 election workers. In Travis, Republicans paid more than $70,000 for 450 hourly workers on election day. In Gillespie, the same day cost more than $8,000, including 45 workers. Experts say these costs would more than double under hand-counting regimes because the method requires more people, in some cases additional polling locations, more space, and far more time.

Records show that Republican county party leaders, including Gillespie County GOP leaders, had only a fleeting notion of what the financial or legal requirements for operating election day voting and tabulation entailed when they began their advocacy for hand-counting.

“Now we need help! We have to run two elections all by ourselves,” Treibs, the Gillespie precinct official, wrote in an August email to the secretary of state’s election division in reference to the primary and the runoff election. The secretary of state’s office received similar emails, calls, and text messages from other county Republican leaders throughout the summer from across the state, records show.

State law requires a minimum of three poll workers at each polling location. To hand-count, at least three additional workers are required. By law, these workers are paid by the hour, and though parties can recruit unpaid volunteers, state officials advise against it to prevent legal disputes. Hand-counting often takes days rather than hours, stretching the limitations of unpaid work. Records show county officials didn’t recognize how quickly costs and responsibilities would mount until they’d already told constituents hand-counting was a real possibility.

“We are choosing to not use any electronic devices during the 2024 election year,” Uvalde County GOP Chair Rhonda Vigil wrote in an August email to the secretary of state’s election division. “Please send me the information needed so I can show anyone that I ask that everything that I’m doing is perfectly legal. Thank you very much for your help and your time. God bless.”

As party chairs have slowly debated their plans for running their primaries, some county election administrators were left to fret.

“Dallas County is anxious to obtain the Secretary of State’s guidance regarding conducting a hand count during a Primary Election,” Dallas County elections administrator Michael Scarpello wrote in an October email. “Not having that information is significantly hampering our efforts to plan for the Primary with both the Democratic and Republican parties.”

Dallas County Republicans would ultimately decide against hand-counting because there was almost no way for the party to recruit and train more than 1,000 election workers and to gather the additional supplies needed to pull it off. After weeks of investigating the feasibility, the party determined it was not possible under current law, Jennifer Stoddard Hajdu, the Dallas County GOP chair, told Votebeat.

For instance, to count by hand in a county that size, the party would have had to purchase 2,400 ballot boxes — special boxes that meet state law requirements to keep ballots secure — that cost $150 each, she said. Stoddard Hajdu says now the party has created a task force to research what changes the Legislature could make to make it easier to pursue a hand count.

Following the various emails and calls with questions the secretary of state’s office received about hand counting, it warned officials that it may not have enough money to reimburse every county party that chooses to hand-count, due to the high costs.

The state currently has about $22 million allocated to reimburse political parties and counties for their primary and runoff election expenses. About $5 million of that comes from candidate filing fees.

At an Austin gathering of more than 500 local party chairs in September, Christina Adkins, the state’s elections division director, warned the costs might quickly spiral out of control.

“It is entirely possible that your costs may exceed our ability to pay for the primary election,” she said, standing behind a podium inside a large hotel ballroom. For over an hour, Adkins went through slide after slide of a presentation detailing rules, procedures, and logistical requirements of a hand count. “If everybody in the state goes to hand-counting, we may not have the funds to pay for everything.”

That caused discomfort and surprise in the room. It also left many of the attendees with more questions. “What if we underestimate the number of people we have to hand-count and we don’t make the 24-hour deadline?” one person asked, referencing the length of time under law each county has to return results.

A Dallas-area activist expressed concern over possible costs. “We need to know how much money you’re going to authorize because the number we have right now is high,” she told Adkins.

Adkins directed every party chair in the room considering a hand count to take a look at how much a previous similar election cost them and to consider the fact that additional workers, additional hours, and additional supplies would be required.

She also did not waver on one point: No county will get a pass on following the law because of the logistical difficulties of hand-counting.

“The law spells out exactly how a hand count has to occur. I cannot give you a dispensation. That’s the word that keeps coming up: ‘Well, can you give us a dispensation to do this a different way?’” Adkins said to the crowd in September. “I cannot. You have to follow state law.”

While other large county Republican parties — such as those in Dallas and Bexar — briefly entertained hand-counting before rejecting it as too costly, Travis County’s GOP resisted calls from both the county and Democrats in the county to make a final choice until this week. Instead of doing a full hand-count — which party leadership had publicly toyed with — they’ll count only mail-in ballots by hand.

There are still several questions left unanswered about how they’ll carry out this plan, and Travis County GOP did not respond to questions about whether they are concerned about potential delays and errors. In an email, party chair Matt Mackowiak said “we have a motivated group that will recruit the necessary workers. We are seeking to use existing state law to increase transparency and confidence in the election. That’s our goal.” .

Given Texas’s restrictive laws around who can legally cast a mailed ballot — mostly voters over the age of 65 and those casting absentee ballots — these ballots will make up only a fraction of primary ballots.

Nonetheless, experts say hand-counting even 1,000 mail-in ballots may be challenging to pull off.

“Depending on when they begin to process mail ballots, hand-counting might delay reporting final vote totals on election night,” said Stein.

The indecision and drama was largely new for Travis County. For years there, Democrats and Republicans have run a joint primary election, sharing the cost of contracting with the county to use its polling locations, equipment, and workers. The months of delays this year, Democrats say, brought their own planning to a standstill.

Katie Naranjo, Travis County Democratic Party Chair said that if Republicans move forward with their plan to hand-count ballots they’ll be tampering with their own election because of the potential delays and errors.

“Republicans have made their intent clear: to erode trust in our election process, and disenfranchise voters – not just Democratic voters, but Republican voters too,” she said in a statement. “While the joint primary contract today does not infringe upon Democrats’ right to hold our own primary election, the process and results of the Republican Primary are still very uncertain.”

Natalia Contreras covers election administration and voting access for Votebeat in partnership with the Texas Tribune. Contact Natalia at ncontreras@votebeat.org

Push to hand count ballots throws a Texas county’s election administration into chaos

2023-10-13T09:58:00+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for our free newsletters here.

Responsibility for running elections in Kerr County has shifted among three different people in the past two months. The first two officials bailed on the job after a months-long effort by one Republican county official to rid the county of electronic voting equipment and begin hand counting all ballots. The push has divided the overwhelmingly Republican county — a verdant stretch of the Hill Country split by the Guadalupe River — and will cost taxpayers around $250,000 due to the many changeovers.

So far, the effort has failed. Still, Kerr County Republican Party Chair Paul Zohlen told Votebeat the effort — led largely by Republican County Commissioner Rich Paces — has “single-handedly taken a wrecking ball to one of the finest election departments in the state.”

“This had never happened before,” Zohlen said. “And now the county clerk will have to put together a team and impart the 10 to 15 years of experience they need by March of 2024.”

Until late August, elections in Kerr County, home to Kerrville and with a population of more than 50,000 people, were managed by the tax assessor’s office. Bob Reeves, a Republican elected to the role in 2018, told Votebeat he refused to continue the work because of the growing distrust in elections there, which made an already time-consuming, stressful, and low-paying job nearly impossible.

“I was put between a proverbial rock and a hard place,” Reeves said. The recent demands for hand counting stemming from baseless suspicions about the security of the current system, he said, made the work seem hopeless.

The duties, therefore, were transferred to Jackie Dowdy, the county clerk. She, too, refused and resigned her position entirely. Her chief deputy, Ian Collum, was appointed as interim clerk while the county conducts the search for her replacement. He and others in that department, which has not handled elections in more than a decade, will now be placed in charge of helping Kerr County’s 40,000 registered voters cast their ballots in 2024.

Fueled by misinformation and baseless claims that electronic voting equipment is manipulated to change election results, the push to hand count ballots in Kerr County is similar to other efforts happening across Texas and elsewhere. Communities that have recently embraced hand counting of ballots — a method that election administration experts have said and studies have shown is less accurate, more costly, and less secure — have become hotly divided. In some cases, such as Cochise County, Arizona, it has pushed election officials out of their jobs and fractured trust in local elections.

Experts told Votebeat it may take years to undo the chaos and to restore the erosion of trust in elections that the effort to hand count has created in Kerr and elsewhere.

“These communities are spending an incredible amount of time trying to solve a problem that doesn’t exist. And as a result, creating a whole series of new very real problems,” said Justin Grimmer, a professor in the department of political science and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University who is currently conducting research on efforts to hand count ballots in counties across the country.

Only a small handful of counties in Texas — all with populations of fewer than 10,000 residents — hand count their election results. In West Texas’ Glasscock County, which has fewer than 800 registered voters, it made little sense to buy expensive equipment for a job that could easily be done by hand, for example. Their small numbers and short ballots allow these counties to complete and submit vote totals within 24 hours of the polls closing on Election Day.

Right now, the effort to hand count ballots in Kerr County has reached a stopping point. This fall, a vote to change the county’s counting process ahead of 2024 failed. But neither Paces nor county election officials believe this fight is over.

“This was just the first skirmish,” Paces told Votebeat.

Officials reach a breaking point

Behind a counter of clerks who help residents update their vehicle registration, their property taxes, file paperwork for various licenses and update their voter registration is Bob Reeves’ small office. It’s often hard to see the surface of his desk, covered as it is in stacks of paperwork. The bookcase behind him holds even more stacks — reflecting the amount of work Reeves has had to handle as the county’s tax assessor and election official, with multiple, back-to-back state-mandated deadlines he has to meet to fulfill both roles.

Reeves said that over the years he and his staff knew of some in the community with questions or perhaps a general distrust of the elections process. “But we always tried to the best of our ability to help people understand,” he said.

Defending the process, and his job, however, became a lot more difficult when the distrust came from someone like Paces, a man seated at the commissioners’ court dais.

In the past eight months, Reeves kept finding himself constantly having to pull away from the stacks of motor vehicle registration, property tax and elections paperwork he had to complete in order to prepare for the next commissioners court meeting where the voting equipment he uses would be questioned — often without regard for facts.

The prospect of hand counting put Reeves, he told Votebeat, in what he perceived to be legal jeopardy. If the county were sued over the results of a future election, or if a lawsuit questioned the accuracy of hand counting, he would not be able to defend the practice in a courtroom. He also had no confidence that hand counting could be done in the time set under law, which requires counties to report results 24 hours after polls close. He also would not be able to explain why commissioners disagreed on whether to trust electronic vote-counting equipment even though he says he has confidence in the machines.

“Without their unanimous support I could not do my job properly,” Reeves told Votebeat after he resigned his election duties in August. By law, unless the county creates an elections department and appoints an elections administrator, the county clerk must serve as the county elections officer. The Texas Election Code allows the county commissioners, however, to transfer the election administration duties from the clerk to the tax-assessor collector, if needed – and if both departments are in agreement — which Kerr County did in 2008.

Kerr County tax assessor-collector Bob Reeves sits in his office located inside the Kerr County Courthouse and goes over local election procedures on Sept. 11, 2023.

Jackie Dowdy, the county clerk who resigned in September, did not respond to Votebeat’s requests for comment about the reason behind her resignation. During a public meeting two weeks after Reeves announced he’d relinquish his duties, Dowdy appeared frustrated about the last-minute change to her department and said Reeves never reached out to her about his decision.

Under the transition plan for elections, Reeve’s office will continue to handle voter registration duties and only one of Reeves’ staffers would move over to Dowdy’s former department. “Having only one position move means I’ll only have one experienced person and that is not good,” Dowdy told the commissioners, requesting three additional staff members. “This is also going to affect the entire staff. I need space, I need desks, desktop computers, so, it’s an expense.”

The estimated cost the commissioners budgeted for such expenses comes to around $250,000, which will be borne by Kerr County taxpayers.

How the hand-count movement came to Kerr County

Paces ran for his seat on the Kerr County Commissioners Court last year with a campaign focused on frugal spending and election integrity. An Ohio native and retired engineer, Paces and his wife moved to the Texas Hill Country in the early 2000s.

After being on the job for less than a month, he began to receive text messages from local right-wing activist Alicia Bell, who said she was at the Capitol for an “election integrity legislative briefing.” The event featured Bob Hall, a Dallas-area senator who has for years pushed to eliminate electronic voting equipment; Texas GOP Vice Chair Dana Myers, who led efforts to remove Texas from an effective voter list maintenance tool; and Russ Ramsland, a Texas businessman who is widely known to spread false election conspiracies.

“Can you put voting on the agenda?” Bell asked Paces via text message, according to records obtained by the news outlet the Kerr County Lead and shared with Votebeat. “The whole presentation was jaw dropping.” Bell has been a thorn in the side of Kerr County government since she moved to the area from California. She’s a frequent speaker at commissioners court meetings who has denied that the COVID-19 pandemic is real and is against vaccine mandates.

“We are here to govern the local community. We’re not here to listen to what’s on the internet, or what’s on Fox News,” Kerr County Judge Rob Kelly — who declined Votebeat’s multiple requests for comment on this story — told Bell in 2021 after she claimed doctors were trying to scare the public by inflating positive cases of COVID-19. “I know you’re new from California, and you don’t understand how Texas local government works. We’re required to abide by and follow the law.”

Less than a month after Bell sent Paces that text message, in February, he added the topic of elections as an item on the commissioners court agenda. He proposed hosting an election integrity workshop, where the public and the other county commissioners could hear from “experts’’ first-hand.

The commissioners agreed to host the workshop, and the first took place in March at the county commissioners court. Reeves was asked to be on hand to explain the relevant laws and existing procedures, and a representative from Texas-based election machine vendor Hart Intercivic went over the company’s security features that protect voting machines from tampering. Then, Paces brought on Mark Cook, an election conspiracy theorist and self-described IT expert from Colorado who has for months without success tried to persuade Texas counties to get rid of their voting equipment while driving a branded RV from county to county. He’s been to Uvalde, Nueces, Bexar, Fort Bend, Montgomery, Denton and Gillespie Counties, among others, where county leaders and election officials have rejected his proposals.

Days after the event, Paces traveled to Waco for former president Donald Trump’s first 2024 presidential campaign rally.

Kerr County Commissioner Rich Paces, speaks to a crowd at an Election Integrity Town Hall he hosted at the Hill Country Youth Event Center on Aug. 22, 2023.

Meanwhile, Reeves tried other ways to show Paces and the other commissioners that hand-counting the ballots of the county’s more than 38,000 registered voters would not be feasible. With the help of county workers, Reeves tested how long it would take to count 100 ballots from Kerr County’s March 2020 Republican primary: “With fresh eyes, it took an hour to count 32 ballots,” Reeves said.

He also warned that the county already struggles to find enough election workers and the facilities for the 20 polling locations for each election. In order to hand count, the county would likely need to double the number of poll workers, the funds to pay them and larger spaces to conduct hand counts based on the number of ballots. “That’s more than 200 people that we’d need to work nonstop,” Reeves said.

None of the evidence Reeves or others showed to Paces changed his mind.

Right-wing celebrities draw a crowd

The records shared with Votebeat show that activists from local far-right political action committee We The People and other voter fraud activists from neighboring counties have helped drive this momentum. He also had the help of national names in the “election integrity” movement, such as Seth Keshel, that has grown out of the lies about the outcome of the 2020 election.

In August, around 300 people showed up to an Election Integrity Town Hall that Paces organized, packing the expo hall at the county’s fairgrounds in Kerrville. The event lasted nearly six hours.

Many were there to see Tina Peters, the former Mesa County Colorado clerk who was indicted last year on felony and misdemeanor charges related to election equipment tampering after she allowed unauthorized people break into her county’s election system in hopes of finding evidence of fraud. As she walked in, Peters received a standing ovation from the crowd of mostly senior citizens. The crowd fell silent when she took the stage, listening as she explained why the voting machines and government officials — including those who arrested her — could not be trusted. She also denied any wrongdoing on her part related to criminal charges against her, and provided no evidence that Kerr County’s elections were flawed.

“These are Democrats and Republicans, Marxists and globalists who want to take your country,” Peters said before promoting her website, her live streamed video show and an upcoming documentary about her. “They put the people in [office] that they want. They are selected, not elected.”

Other speakers included Keshel, Hall, and Cook, who is connected to self-proclaimed “election integrity” groups across the country, and to clerks who have tried to illegally obtain access to voting systems. He described hand counting as a type of salvation for towns seeking to boost election confidence.

Cook told the crowd that government and election officials are using electronic voting equipment to tally votes because “they think we, the citizens, the peasants are too dumb to count their own votes. Not anymore,” Cook said. The crowd cheered, with a handful of onlookers shouting “Amen!”

Records show Paces arranged travel and personally paid expenses for Peters and Cook. Both stayed as guests in his home east of the county.

In September, he formally proposed the county hand count ballots for the upcoming November general election.

Mark Cook, an election conspiracy theorist and self-described IT and cybersecurity expert from Colorado speaks to a crowd at an Election Integrity Town Hall in Kerrville on Aug. 22, 2023.

The vote failed to move forward after no other commissioners, also all Republicans, would second the motion. Its failure, though, was not indicative of a lack of enthusiasm in the county — the room was filled to capacity, and more waited outside the room in order to be heard on the measure.

Most of those who showed up to speak were Republicans — 75% of the county voted for former President Donald Trump in 2020. They were divided by the prospect of hand counting ballots.

Bill Ragsdale, a Kerr County justice of the peace, reminded those present that hand counting will slow the process tremendously, potentially impacting the entire state of Texas. In the 80s, he said, he assisted during an election where “Kerr County held up the entire state’s election for three days because we were hand-counting,” he said. “[Counters] worked all night long, through the next day and through the next day to try and count all the votes. Know how accurate that count was? I don’t know. We were all ready for it to be over.”

For those in favor of hand counting, objections about cost and time didn’t make much of a difference. “There is no trust right now in our current system and we need to fix that,” said Roger Hall, a resident of Ingram who told the crowd he was in favor of hand counting and did not trust voting machines. “That’s what a lot of people here today are here for.”

Paces has also taken this show on the road.

In Medina County, a small county two hours south of Kerr County, he and Cook took the stage days after his August event in Kerr, to advocate they, too, take up hand counting. Paces, who has never worked an election, led a group of people to demonstrate how a hand count would be done. Four people sat around a table and pulled out ballots from cardboard bankers boxes and started tallying.

Paces encouraged those who attended the demonstration to gather around the table to see how it’s done up close. “You’ll see this is very transparent,” he told the crowd and reassured them the counting would be done quickly.

“My plan is to have people come in to start counting ballots at 2 in the afternoon. Five hours worth. You’re done by the time the polls close. It’s a matter of getting enough people,” he said.

It’s not clear what Paces’ next move is, though he told Votebeat he is committed to enacting this change, regardless of the damage it does to the county. He rejects the assertion that hand counting would cost more money and take substantially more time with less confidence in the final results, despite having no supporting evidence to offer. He says he’d gotten hundreds of people signed up to volunteer to hand count in Kerr.

“And more people are calling me and telling me, ‘hey, sorry it didn’t work, but I’ll hand count, put me on the list,’ and more will come forward,” Paces said. “It’s almost like a movement of civic pride, and that’s great.”

Correction, Oct. 13, 2023: An earlier version of this article misspelled the name of the Kerr County deputy clerk. His name is Ian Collum.

Natalia Contreras covers election administration and voting access for Votebeat in partnership with the Texas Tribune. Contact Natalia at ncontreras@votebeat.org

What brought down one Texas county’s entire elections department? It was something in the water.

2022-08-29T10:15:00+00:00

Last November’s sleepy constitutional amendment election nearly came to blows in Gillespie County, a central Texas county known for its vineyards. A volunteer poll watcher, whose aggressive behavior had rankled election workers all day, attempted to force his way into a secure ballot vault.

The burly man was repeatedly blocked by a county elections staffer. Shouting ensued. “You can’t go in there,” the staffer, Terry Hamilton, insisted to the man, who towered over Hamilton. “We can see anything we want!” the poll watcher and his fellow election integrity activists yelled, according to an election worker who witnessed the scene. They accused Hamilton and Elections Administrator Anissa Herrera of a variety of violations of the state elections code, which they quoted, line by line.

“Oh Lord, they can cite chapter and verse,” recalled Sue Bentch, a Fredericksburg election judge who saw the confrontation that night. “But you know, just as the devil can cite scripture for its own purposes it seemed to me that it was often cited out of context and misinterpreted.”

“Finally, I called the sheriff’s officer,” said Bentch. The officer barred the activists from the vault. “Poor Terry was coming to fisticuffs.”

Previous elections had been no better. In 2020, a poll watcher called the cops on Herrera and filmed election employees in a dark parking lot. The same year, Herrera received a clutch of obscene, often racist, emails. And in 2019, a group of activists filed suit after Fredericksburg voters overwhelmingly rejected an obscure public-health ballot measure. That election, the activists argued, had been irrevocably tainted by fraud.

Three years of these hostilities were clearly enough for Herrera, who resigned this month.

The rest of the office staff — one full-time employee and one part-time employee — also departed, leaving the elections office completely vacant.

Recent media coverage of the exodus attributed it to threats of the type that have become common since the 2020 presidential election. In fact, Votebeat’s review of court documents, emails, and social media postings show Herrera and others struggling to combat fringe election conspiracy theories in Gillespie County long before former President Donald Trump encouraged his supporters to question the integrity of the 2020 vote.

In Gillespie County in 2019, the fringe was focused on fluoride.

The city charter amendment that sparked a crusade against Herrera, only months after she took the post as elections director, was a proposal to remove fluoride from Fredericksburg’s water system. The measure failed, and the activists behind it suspected malfeasance. Members of the group insisted they’d been unlawfully prevented from closely observing a recount of votes and sued the city’s then-mayor.

Then, as Trump’s rhetoric began to heat up closer to November 2020, the Gillespie County Republican Party brought energy and structure to what was, up to that point, a small local movement. In the two years since, as lawmakers rewrote Texas’s election laws and Herrera’s working hours ballooned, she found it impossible to lead a normal working life in the elections office.

“The threats against election officials and my election staff, dangerous misinformation, lack of full time personnel for the elections office, unpaid compensation, and absurd legislation have completely changed the job I initially accepted,” Herrera wrote in her resignation letter, dated August 2. “The life commitment I have given to this job is unsustainable.”

Born and raised in Gillespie County, Herrera and her family have been active members of the community for generations. Herrera’s grandmother established the county’s first Mexican restaurant in the 1970s. In 2019, when the county first created a standalone elections office, separating it from the clerk’s office where Herrera had worked for years assisting with elections, she took the reins. She was excited to be selected for “her dream job,” those who know her said.

Records and interviews show that, in the three years that followed, the job quickly consumed her life.

Herrera herself wouldn’t talk about it. “I am done with this career, unfortunately,” Herrera told Votebeat last week, declining to comment further.

But in contrast with the rancor from activists, county officials spoke highly of Herrera’s work ethic.

“She’d given everything to this job,” said Cathy Collier, the chair of the county’s Democratic party and member of the county’s elections commission.

“That’s a lot of work—a tremendous amount of work that she does,” said county Sheriff Buddy Mills, an elected Republican. “As far as I can tell you, everything is top notch.”

“I don’t think anyone is under the assumption that the election would be as smooth as if we still had Anissa,” said Mark Stroeher, the county judge, also an elected Republican. “I don’t think it’ll be that easy to find someone.”

The county next door, Blanco, has been without an elections director for two years.

A fracas over fluoride

Anti-fluoride groups have been active in the United States for decades, but have experienced a bump in popularity in recent years. By 2018, more than 70 cities in the United States had banned adding fluoride to their water systems, including some in Texas. Fredericksburg, the largest city in Gillespie County, held its own vote in 2019.

For years, Texas’s most vocal critic of fluoridated water has been Laura Pressley of Williamson County, a perennial candidate for office in central Texas who has yet to win a race. Local press often highlights her advocacy of disproven conspiracy theories. She has appeared on Alex Jones’ programming, and has said that “something was planted” in the World Trade Center on Sept. 11. In recent years, she has become a self-styled poll watching expert and vocal opponent of electronic voting systems, training hundreds of people across the state in what election administrators say are disruptive practices that harm election integrity.

“Our elections are the representation of free will, and if we can’t trust that our free will is being represented legally and accurately, then God’s will is being thwarted,” she said at a meeting in Hood County in 2021. In recent years, she’s filed unsuccessful lawsuits against counties across the state over a variety of alleged voting problems.

Pressley did not respond to requests for an interview.

Records show Pressley became involved in a small anti-fluoride movement in Fredericksburg, teaming up with several locals, including Jeanette Hormuth and Jerry Farley. Their group — Clean Water Fred — began a campaign to remove fluoride from the city’s water, gathering enough signatures to prompt a special election on the issue, held in November of 2019.

In a low-turnout election, Fredericksburg residents soundly rejected the measure in an initial count of 1,258 votes to 742.

It wasn’t a close result, but Clean Water Fred suspected fraud, and they gathered enough signatures to force a recount. The Dec. 2, 2019 recount confirmed the results, even adding three “no” votes to the original total.

Pressley came to town for the recount, and affidavits filed in the group’s lawsuit and interviews with people present detail behavior by Pressley that was disruptive. The affidavits — filed by Pressley, Hormuth, and Farley — also show she instructed others in the group to engage in similar behavior, and they did as she instructed.

Pressley, for example, told Farley to join her in repeatedly saying, “I challenge the result” after the counting of each ballot. When the pair was asked to stop, he and Pressley instead said it under their breath. After Pressley was admonished by county staff for hovering near the table where volunteers were counting, at one point sitting down alongside them, she told Hormuth to call the secretary of state’s office to complain. Hormuth did so.

Hormuth declined to comment for this piece, citing the pending litigation.

The group remained unsatisfied even after the recount, and Hormuth and Farley filed a lawsuit on Dec. 31.

The Gillespie County courthouse in Fredericksburg, Texas.

The lawsuit contends that because of “so many material mistakes, illegalities, irregularities, and potential fraud that occurred in the administration of the election and the tabulation of election results” that “the true outcome of the election cannot be ascertained.”

Pressley was the group’s go-to expert for election questions. “She was ‘coaching’ that group in the election with the fluoride issue,” Stroeher wrote in a 2020 email to the county attorney.

Records and interviews suggest the group’s behavior continued in 2020 and beyond.

Angela Smith, a local activist who wrote an affidavit in support of the group’s 2019 lawsuit, served as an early voting poll watcher in October of 2020. When early voting ended for the day, Smith was not allowed back into the elections building. In an email to the county attorney and county judge, Herrera wrote that Smith then called local police before parking outside of the office and beginning to film.

“Ms. Smith was blatantly filming 5 of my temporary elections clerks without their consent as they left the building, making them feel uncomfortable and intimidated,” Herrera wrote to other county officials. “I am concerned one or more of my temporary clerks may not return due to this incident.”

Smith declined to comment for this story.

County Attorney Steven Wadsworth forwarded the email to local police. “Sadly, I think that having some extra patrols around [the counting facility] tonight and tomorrow is prudent,” Wadsworth wrote the day before the 2020 election. “I think having some extra patrols around the courthouse area and all polling locations - sadly - is also prudent.”

Wadsworth did not respond to multiple requests for an interview.

The battles even made local news.

A report by KXAN shows Hormuth and Smith explaining that they were prevented from poll watching in 2019 and 2020, and had filed a complaint with the secretary of state regarding the matter. The station identified the pair as Republicans. The TV station reached out to Herrera, Hamilton (the full-time hourly worker in the office), Stroeher and Wadsworth for comment but they declined. An email obtained by Votebeat through a public records request suggests it’s because they thought Pressley might be behind the story.

“I do not know who made the complaint, but if Ms. Pressley did so, be aware that she has a history of making these types of complaints and then filing a civil lawsuit as well,” Wadsworth wrote. “I think it would be prudent to approach the situation as if litigation is pending.”

The result was a one-sided news story that offered no defense from the county. The secretary of state took no action against the office as a result of the complaint, but hate mail flowed into Herrera’s inbox from across the country anyway.

“Fucking Anissa! Go back to Mexico bitch! You are obstructing the election process and will be prosecuted!” wrote one emailer, the day after the KXAN segment aired. He did not respond to a request for comment.

The same week, a woman who said she was from California emailed Herrera, linking to the piece. “BITCH !! YOU GOT CAUGHT IN A LIE,” she wrote. “LEARN TO OBEY STATE AND FEDERAL LAW … OR GO TO JAIL!” Days later, the woman emailed again. “WE JUST TURNED YOUR NAME IN TO THE LT. GOVERNOR’S OFFICE FOR INVESTIGATION,” she wrote. The day before, Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick had offered a cash bounty for proof of voter fraud.

“AND BY THE WAY … YOU’RE IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA NOW. TRY TO REMEMBER THAT … OK?” she concluded. The emailer did not respond to an emailed request for comment.

“I guess I will be receiving these daily,” Herrera wrote, forwarding the woman’s complaints to county leadership. “Any idea who I report them to?”

By the time the local news piece aired, emails show Moe Saiidi, the chair of the county GOP, had begun repeatedly contacting Herrera to complain about poll worker treatment and demand changes to procedure that were not allowed under state law. They’d also recruited poll watchers, warning them to watch out for fraud. Saiidi did not respond to multiple requests for an interview.

A pro-Trump sign on a truck parked on West U.S. Highway 290, heading into Fredericksburg.

“They lost an election, so they probably think there’s something wrong,” Mills, the sheriff, said in an interview after Herrera’s departure this month. Smirking, he looked under a stack of paperwork on his desk and found a copy of the film “2000 Mules,” created by Texas group True the Vote with conservative firebrand Dinesh D’Souza. It purports to “expose” fraud in the 2020 election, but has been soundly debunked and roundly criticized. He said someone mailed the DVD to him from Houston.

Mills said he watched the movie. He didn’t believe the underlying claims, but said he understood how others would.

Only days before Herrera’s final day as elections administrator, the local GOP hosted a watch party for the movie. In July, they’d hosted an informational event that cost guests between $5 and $20. It was a speech by Alan Vera — a widely known Republican activist on election issues who helped found True the Vote.

Low pay, long hours

Herrera is one of a growing number of elections officials who have walked away from their jobs since the 2020 election, and the reasons offered in her resignation letter echo concerns ratcheting around the country. The wave of departures among capable, dedicated election staff is seen by many experts as a looming problem with repercussions for future elections. In Texas, nearly 40 election administrators have quit in the last two years.

Those who worked with Herrera said she and her staff routinely voiced frustrations with the long hours, which had grown even longer and more stressful since Texas began further restricting voting regulations and stepping up penalties for administrative errors after the 2020 election.

“People don’t realize just how much the job takes,” said Collier. “They work until late at night. They’re there early in the morning, on holidays. Anissa would send out something I needed to know and I would notice that the email was sent out at like 1 o’clock in the morning.”

The Gillespie County elections office in Fredericksburg.

The county posted a three-page job opening for Herrera’s position this week. The starting salary is listed at about $54,000. At the time of her resignation, Herrera made just over $45,000, though she was offered a raise to the listed rate, which would have taken effect in October had she stayed. Gillespie officials said Herrera’s sole full-time employee, Hamilton, who’d nearly come to blows with poll watchers, made $15.19 an hour. The only other staffer, who worked part time, made $11.67 an hour. The cost of living in Fredericksburg — a Hill Country hotspot popular for bachelorette parties and wine-fueled vacations — comes at a premium. One ranking recently named it the most unaffordable city in the state.

Before she resigned, Herrera had asked the county for two additional full-time employees. Only one was approved, and it would not be advertised until well after the time counties are expected to have begun preparing for the November election.

The first staffer to quit, according to Stroher, was the part-time employee. Then, Hamilton resigned to run as a write-in candidate for county treasurer. That left Herrera faced with running the upcoming election entirely on her own. It was, it seems, the last straw.

David Becker is the executive director and founder of Center for Election Innovation & Research. His nonprofit works with election officials nationwide and provides legal assistance to election officials who are threatened with frivolous criminal prosecution, harassment, or physical violence, though he hasn’t yet worked with Gillespie County.

“It’s not surprising that some of them are saying, ‘Enough’ and ‘I can’t do this anymore’. ‘I’m inadequately resourced, inadequately paid and the requirements that are being placed upon me are not helping voters. They’re not helping elections be more secure,’” he said.

With the midterms less than three months away, the outlook for Gillespie County’s elections looks shaky. The secretary of state’s office will have to step in to train other county employees, only some of whom have previously worked elections, to manage voting in November — a far cry from the years of elections management experience Herrera brought to her position. And in a county now packed with dozens of angry activists scrutinizing every move the county makes, experts say controversy there is unlikely to die down simply because Herrera resigned.

“If you lose your professional election officials who are experienced in these procedures, who understand the equipment, understand the records, who understand the legal requirements, you can end up in a really bad place,” Becker said. “I do worry about what voters are going to find when they go to the polls if there aren’t experienced professional election administrators.”

Collier, the chair of the county Democratic Party, is also worried.

“If you know any county clerk or elections administrator, you know that these people are fanatics about making things absolutely accurate and absolutely fair. It’s their passion and their job and Anissa was no different than that, nor was her staff,” she said.

“She was meticulous about getting the job done. It’s going to be very difficult to replace her.”

Natalia Contreras is a reporter for Votebeat in partnership with the Texas Tribune. Contact Natalia at ncontreras@votebeat.org.

Votebeat editorial director Jessica Huseman contributed research to this report.