Texas Republicans in at least a half-dozen are proposing to hand-count election ballots, reviving a right-wing, conspiracy-tinged idea that took root after Donald Trump lost the 2020 election. In their view, hand-counting ballots would stop voting machines secretly run by Venezuelan socialists or whatever from flipping your vote to the Democrat in the race.
Republicans in five counties—Dallas, Denton, Eastland, Hays, and Gillespie—have reportedly already approved hand-counting for next year’s midterm primaries, while another, Orange County, is moving that way.
The Texas GOP is able to do this because political parties—and not the government—run Election Day voting in the state’s primaries. But in moving toward hand-counting, these Texas Republicans are overlooking the fact that they already tried this on a smaller scale last year, and it was a disaster.
Here’s the thing. Humans are bad at repetitive things like counting thousands ballots, while machines are quite good at it. And counting via machines costs much less since manually counting ballots requires jurisdictions to hire people to do the counting.
Did we mention that Texas requires all ballots to be counted within 24 hours of when polls close?
Voting machines used in the 2020 elections.
Some counties that have signed onto this idea are relatively small, but Dallas County is home to over 2.6 million people. Dallas County GOP Chair Allen West—yes, that Allen West—says the party would need 360 polling places, with three workers managing each site and at least an additional three to hand-count the ballots at every polling place.
If you’re doing the math, that’s at least 2,160 people for Dallas County alone. And Dallas County is recruiting by offering around $15 per hour for this.
Another county planning a hand-count is Gillespie, which is minuscule compared with Dallas County, and has under 28,000 residents. You might think a much smaller jurisdiction would have more success with a hand count, but you would be wrong.
In 2024, Gillespie tried a hand-count for a primary with about 8,000 votes. Almost every precinct had errors, and one election judge realized he’d miscounted in seven different races. It took all weekend to reconcile vote totals, only to find that 12 of the county’s 13 precincts had reported incorrect totals.
Nonetheless, the people who think hand-counting is great still think it’s great. Take David Treibs, who pushed for the hand-count, helped with the hand-count, and made errors during the hand-count, but nonetheless bragged about how great things went.
“So there were two ballots, and I just didn’t add them up,” he said. “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. 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.”
These people have been howling from the rafters for half a decade about how votes are stolen and elections are riddled with errors, but when faced with their own actions that result in votes actually being miscounted, it’s just shruggie-guy-emoji time.
It isn’t just Texas that has flirted with this idea. Nye County, Nevada, tried this as a “test” in 2022, and the initial hand-count was off by an estimated 25%. Seems bad.
No amount of failure will convince conspiracy-prone types that hand-counting is a bad idea, but at least the rest of us will get to watch the spectacle of Texas Republicans turning their own primaries into a catastrophe.
