Current Events > TX county ditches vote technology; experiences delays, overrun costs, inaccuracy

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FREDERICKSBURG 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 theyd 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 wasnt 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.
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 couldnt 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 theyd 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 constables 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.
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 weeks 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 hed withhold judgment on whether the count was accurate because he didnt have eyes and ears in the rooms where it happened.
For their part, the Democrats conducted their primary with the help of the county using the same machines theyve 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 sheriffs race.
Campbell said the partys original goal was to have enough volunteers that we finished counting before the Democrats did.
Clearly, that didnt 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 thats 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 precincts election results Precinct 13, held at an auction house at about 2 a.m. The counting of 450 ballots wasnt hard at all, he said. Figuring out the paperwork and reconciliation forms was more of a challenge. Its not like we do this every day, he said, though he added that hes 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.
Campbell, speaking to Votebeat at 4 a.m. at the countys election office, was more reserved he said he couldnt say whether the hand count went well. Youd have to ask those 300 people who worked and counted, he said, including in his count poll workers who operated the polls but didnt count ballots. Youd have to ask the voters.

Hes also not sure the party could recruit enough people for a high-turnout general election in November. Wed need double the workers, he said. Itll be double the number of hours.

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 Texass 254 counties, Gillespie was second to last to report its results. Harris County the states 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.

Republicans in Gillespie County began advocating for hand counting last summer, when the local partys 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, whod 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.
Gillespie was the only sizable county in the state whose Republicans attempted a full hand count of their results, though Travis Countys 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 Gillespies finished counting around midnight, with quality checks continuing throughout Wednesday.