Natalia Contreras, Votebeat, and The Texas Tribune

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Key Texas lawmakers are reviving legislation that would require election officials to respond within set time frames to requests to explain “election irregularities” from certain party officials and election workers.

If the complainants aren’t satisfied, the bill would let them take their requests to the Texas Secretary of State’s Office, which would have to decide whether to investigate further and conduct an audit.

State Sen. Paul Bettencourt, a Houston Republican who authored the bill, said it will help clear up “any misunderstanding” about elections.

But experts and local election officials said Texas already has policies in place that have increased election transparency and security.

The bill, they said, could instead undermine voters’ trust if election officials have to prioritize an influx of meritless complaints. The measure would also add to the burdens on election officials who are already contending with a flood of public records requests, questions from residents worried about election integrity, and voter challenges, while also trying to comply with strict election deadlines set by state and federal laws, experts said.

“It’s difficult to see how this is anything other than just a really cumbersome administrative process that’s just going to in a lot of ways throw sand in the gears of election administration,” said Daniel Griffith, senior director of policy at Secure Democracy, a nonprofit organization that produces research and analysis focused on voting and elections.

Bettencourt first filed a similar bill in 2021 and reintroduced it in 2023. Both times, it passed in the Senate but not the House. Senate Bill 505, which he filed last month, is identical to his 2023 legislation.

The bill would allow candidates, county party chairs, election or alternate judges — election judges are tasked with supervising polling locations — and leaders of political action committees to request that election officials “provide an explanation to election irregularities or violations of the law and to provide supporting documentation” of such.

Bettencourt said problems during Harris County’s November 2022 election prove such a measure is needed.

The county, home to Houston, is the state’s most populous. During that election, the county’s elections department failed to provide sufficient paper to two dozen of the county’s more than 700 polling locations. There were also reports of malfunctioning equipment at various locations, long lines and polling locations that had late openings.

Citing the problems, multiple losing Republican candidates challenged the results of that election. A judge ordered a redo of the election for one race. After that election, Bettencourt championed legislation that abolished the Harris elections administration department and returned election duties to the county clerk, an elected official.

Bettencourt said that for months after that election, county election officials “refused to answer questions.” The bill would help prevent that, he said. He also pointed to more recent incidents in Dallas County, another Democratic stronghold, involving false claims by Dallas County Republican leaders who said that the voting equipment had not been certified by state officials. Bettencourt said “miscommunication” between the party and the elections office fueled the problems, and he thinks his bill would help in situations like that.

“This sets up an organized structure for people to ask questions, get answers, and then if the answers aren’t suitable or not getting any answers they can go to the secretary of state,” Bettencourt said.

The latest bill is part of a legislative package — which includes other election measures, such as penalties for election officials who fail to comply with election laws and one that would prevent the distribution of unsolicited voter registration cards — supported and written by seven other Republican senators: Brandon Creighton, Joan Huffman, Lois Kolkhorst, Mayes Middleton, Tan Parker, Angela Paxton, and Charles Perry. Several have been members of the Senate State Affairs Committee.

The committee discusses and helps decide which election legislation moves forward in the Senate chamber.

Bill requires election audits, fines in certain cases

According to the legislation, once party officials or election workers submit a request, election officials would have 20 days to respond. If that person isn’t satisfied with the response, the bill states, they can ask for more information. The election official at that point would have 10 additional days to respond further.

Then, if a requester is still not satisfied, they “may issue a request to the secretary of state for an audit of the issue.” Such a request for an audit must include copies of communications and responses provided by the election official.

The secretary of state will then determine if the information provided “sufficiently explains the irregularity identified,” the bill says. If the secretary of state concludes it isn’t, that office must “immediately begin an audit of the identified irregularity at the expense of the county or other authority conducting the election.”

The secretary of state’s office is already required to audit the elections of four counties that are randomly selected every two years. Elections in Harris County have been audited twice recently by the agency.

The Secretary of State’s Office declined to comment on the legislation.

In a fiscal note about Bettencourt’s 2023 bill, the Secretary of State’s Office anticipated multiple audits would require “substantial document review and analysis, labor ­intensive work, and travel to the applicable locations.” In addition, according to the fiscal note, the office would need six additional full-time employees.

Bettencourt told Votebeat a new cost analysis would have to be done next year as the bill moves through the legislative process.

There would also be additional costs to county taxpayers if the secretary of state finds violations of election law. In such cases, the office would then be permitted to appoint a conservator to oversee elections in the county, at the county’s expense. And if county election officials do not remedy the violations, they could incur fines starting at $500 per violation, the bill states.

How Bettencourt’s bill would impact election officials

Election officials are already required to keep detailed documentation for nearly every step of the election process. Human error, technical problems, and minor irregularities occur during every election in some form, and officials are required to identify the issues and respond.

Election administrators answer to bipartisan election boards and commissions. They have to respond to questions from members of the counties’ commissioners court, who set the budgets for election departments. Election officials respond to public records requests submitted by members of the public, which also have to be fulfilled within a specific time frame by law.

And the law already allows the Texas secretary of state, who is the chief election officer, to report any legitimate evidence of illegality or malfeasance to the Texas Attorney General’s Office for investigation.

Nonetheless, in recent years, election officials across the state report contending with streams of requests from organized conservative activists who have claimed laws aren’t being followed, or the process is flawed. No matter what information they provide, they said they are sometimes unable to satisfy people.

That’s why some election officials said, as it stands now, the bill’s effort to increase transparency would instead create additional hardships.

During the March 5 primary election, Bruce Sherbet, the Collin County elections administrator, was also preparing for a city school district election happening in May and the primary runoff election that same month. The county had another election looming in June.

Sherbet said he can’t fathom how election officials could handle more requests for information in the midst of such election preparations.

He added that depending on the type and timing of requests, some documentation may not be available for public inspection, may need redactions, or simply may not exist.

“I can see it as an invitation for abuse and both parties could be a part of that abuse,” Sherbet said. “Where does it stop? And where do you have time to do the job that you have to do?”

For his part, Bettencourt said his intent is not to create more work for election officials. He said that’s why the bill limits who can submit the requests to individuals involved with the election, including election judges and alternate judges. Those are the individuals responsible for supervising polling locations.

Those categories, though, still include substantial numbers of people. During the Nov. 5 election 117 judges and 117 alternate judges worked in Collin County. The bill would allow all of them to submit requests at any point during the election, Sherbet said. “It’s going to cause bigger mistakes to happen, or noncompliance,” he said.

He’s also concerned that this could further undermine trust in the process. The complaints and requests made to election officials would also become public record. Voters would have access to all of them whether or not they have merit.

“It’s not building confidence at all. What it’s doing is further harming the confidence of the election that we’re trying to turn a corner and get back on track again from the 2020 election,” Sherbet 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

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization covering local election integrity and voting access. Sign up for their newsletters here.

This story was originally published by Votebeat

Bruce Campbell, chairman of the Gillespie County Republican Party in Texas, 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. (Maria Crane / The Texas Tribune)

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.

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. (Maria Crane / The Texas Tribune)

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. (Maria Crane / The Texas Tribune)

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.”

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. (Maria Crane / The Texas Tribune)

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. (Maria Crane / The Texas Tribune)

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.

"Stock Photo: A Man Who Voted Holds Up His Voting Badge Lapel Pin." on Shutterstock: http://tinyurl.com/m4mu8gu

"Stock Photo: A Man Who Voted Holds Up His Voting Badge Lapel Pin." on Shutterstock: http://tinyurl.com/m4mu8guMan who voted holds up his voting lapel pin (Shutterstock)

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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.

“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.

“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.

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization committed to reporting the nuanced truth about elections and voting at a time of crisis in America.

This coverage is made possible through Votebeat, a nonpartisan news organization covering local election administration and voting access. The article is available for reprint under the terms of Votebeat’s republishing policy.

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.

Disclosure: Rice University and Texas Secretary of State have been financial supporters of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in the Tribune's journalism. Find a complete list of them here.