From The Texas Tribune:
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.
