Top Tarrant County Republican leaders want to hand-count ballots in the March primary — a move that would require voters to cast ballots in their own precinct, rather than at the polling location of their choice across the county.
The potential change was mentioned in a Tarrant County GOP newsletter on Saturday. If enacted, it would mean turning away from the voting machines the county has used since 2019, in favor of a process critics say is time-consuming, expensive and less accurate.
The proposal drew criticism from members of both parties, as the changes would vastly increase the cost of running both party’s primaries as well as the complexity of voting and counting ballots.
“We have computers for a reason — they can do things more accurately and faster,” said Janet Mattern, president of the League of Women Voters of Tarrant County, a nonpartisan organization devoted to increasing civic engagement and voter education. “This would be a whole different process.”
Those who support hand-counting say such measures are feasible and more secure, despite there being no evidence of widespread or coordinated election fraud under Tarrant County’s current system.
“When you see the actual paper, and you’ve counted that actual paper, you know what the count is,” said Beverly Foley, who leads efforts across North Texas to convince GOP leaders to switch to hand-counting and precinct-level voting. “And with machine results, you don’t really know that.”
The Republican executive committee could make the change without approval from the Tarrant County Elections Office or Commissioners Court, as partisan primary elections are controlled by the political parties.
However, if Republicans change their process, the Democratic Party would be forced to make the switch to precinct-level voting as well, according to a state law aimed at preventing voter disenfranchisement within the system. The Democratic Party would not be required to hand-count ballots.
Republicans in both Dallas and Denton counties recently pushed for the switch, partly in coordination with Foley, who runs a class teaching GOP leaders how to start hand-counting ballots.
Foley told the Report that she’s audited more than 250,000 ballots, and said she’s confident that hand-counting is both safe and feasible.
Foley said she recently helped draft a proposed executive order for President Donald Trump that could attempt to mandate hand-counting ballots across the country in 2026. Such a move would likely be challenged in courts, she conceded, as the power to regulate elections is constitutionally given to the states.
The county’s GOP is hosting “speed tests” on Wednesday and Thursday to assess how fast volunteers can accurately tally ballots. In promoting the tests, Dallas attorney Sidney Powell, who in 2023 pled guilty to conspiring to intentionally interfere with the performance of election duties in the 2020 presidential election, called them “imperative to end use of machines.”
“Can we process batches of 50 ballots with accuracy in under one hour? Help us establish the new standard for secure and auditable elections!” the sign-up sheet for the event reads.
Mattern, from the local League of Women Voters, said the precinct-level voting would confuse a county already geared for countywide voting. Additionally, hand-counting ballots leads to results that are open for human error and are expensive to calculate, she added.
Early voting for the primary would still be countywide if the Election Day changes were made.
GOP’s proposed changes difficult, costly
Unless the parties consolidate Tarrant County’s precincts, they’d need about 700 polling locations — one for each precinct. This is a significant increase over the nearly 200 polling locations in the March 2024 primary election.
The parties must staff each location with a Spanish speaker and a Vietnamese speaker, according to state law.
Foley was skeptical if Tarrant County Republicans had time to work out the change fast enough, but said the county’s best bet would be consolidating precincts similar to how Republicans did in her home county of Denton during the 2024 primaries. At the time, they consolidated 240 precincts into about 85 locations, according to county reports.
Election Day results must be reported within 24 hours under state law. In March 2024, about 69,000 Republicans cast votes in Tarrant County on Election Day as did about 36,000 Democrats. The 2022 primary saw about 61,000 Republicans cast ballots on Election Day and almost 36,000 Democrats.
Clint Ludwig, Tarrant County Elections administrator, said he can’t estimate how many precincts the county could theoretically be consolidated into, as that’s ultimately up to the parties.
Ludwig declined to lay out a timeline on how soon the changes would need to be made before the March election.
“I would be guessing off of what it takes to do a normal election and, obviously, it wouldn’t be a normal election,” Ludwig said. “Everything would be different.”
While political parties foot the cost to run a primary, Texas partially reimburses them. In 2023, the state warned county party chairs that it wouldn’t absorb higher-than-normal costs for the primary compared with previous years. This means the price hike would fall to the parties.
The county has not explored or estimated the cost of hand-counting ballots, Ludwig said.
Foley said the additional cost could be offset by using unpaid volunteers to count the ballots, as well as by not paying for the county’s voting machines.
The county’s voting machines cost about $1,000 per polling location, according to election invoices sent to the city of Fort Worth and reviewed by the Report.
The changes would come on the heels of a November Election Day that saw over 100 locations cut.
Before the election, Tarrant County commissioners voted along party lines to reduce polling sites, particularly in urban areas more likely to vote Democratic. While opponents argued the move amounted to suppressing the votes in Black and Latino neighborhoods, Republican commissioners argued the reduction would save about $1 million.
Despite the cuts, the Nov. 4 election saw heightened voter turnout compared to previous odd-year elections, with 17% of the county’s registered voters participating.
“I would think that both the Republicans and the Democrats would be against this, especially since I thought they were wanting to make sure we had less expensive elections,” Mattern said.
Tarrant County election security contention since 2020
Calls to hand-count ballots have grown louder since 2020, with multiple Texas local GOP parties outside of Dallas-Fort Worth making the decisive step to try out the measure in their primaries, amid skepticism and misinformation campaigns about machines used for voting and tabulating ballots.
Foley said even though no widespread voter fraud has been prosecuted in Tarrant County, she believes machine-tabulating ballots leaves the door open for election meddling to occur.
“To me, that’s the worst piece of equipment right there,” she said of ballot-marking machines, alleging the machines don’t show voter intent like hand-marking does.
Her goal is to eventually push for hand-counting ballots and precinct-level voting to be approved at the county level for May and November elections, she said.
Tarrant County Republican commissioners have historically been talked out of hand-counting and precinct-level voting because of the cost, said Kat Cano, lead ballot board judge for the Tarrant County Democratic Party.
In 2022, following Trump’s persistent denial of his loss in the 2020 election, Republican Tarrant County Judge Tim O’Hare ran on the promise to increase the county’s election security. He repeated throughout his campaign unsubstantiated claims that “mail ballot harvesting” and “Democrats cheating” contributed to Trump losing Tarrant County in the 2020 election.
Shortly after O’Hare’s election, Tarrant County’s then-election administrator Heider Garcia resigned after months of facing death threats that stemmed from lies about the outcome of the 2020 election. Heider was the election administrator when the county rolled out the use of the voting machines it still uses today — machines that he repeatedly defended over his tenure as being secure and reliable.
While O’Hare has launched multiple initiatives to tighten election security, he has stopped short of suggesting the GOP’s newly floated changes.
O’Hare most notably established the Election Integrity Task Force, which investigates complaints of voter fraud. In the nearly three years since launching, the task force’s investigations haven’t led to any charges or prosecutions.
O’Hare’s office did not respond to the Report’s requests for comment.
According to the GOP’s newsletter, calling for the change to hand-counting ballots was one of the last actions of outgoing Tarrant County GOP Chairman Bo French, who resigned Nov. 12 to seek election as Texas railroad commissioner.
French, who often posts incendiary commentary, has promoted the idea that Tarrant County’s elections are insecure and often see fraud, despite the county’s investigations into reported fraud bearing no fruit.
French did not respond to the Report’s requests for comment.
After Democratic leaders decried the proposal, French said in a Saturday social media post that Democrats are scared of precinct voting and paper ballots because it “reduces their ability to cheat.”
Local Republicans will decide French’s successor Nov. 22. Whether the GOP moves forward with the changes to their elections will largely depend on who is elected as chair.
Democrats decry changes to elections
Cano said she doesn’t think the Republican Party is prepared for the amount of strain that hand-counting and precinct-level voting would put on their budget and staff.
Every election, officials audit results by hand-counting. These audits often result in incorrect and unreliable tallies, as many people lose count over the long process of hand-tallying, she said.
Hand-counting would also result in needing about twice as many staff in each polling location as usual, Cano said. The typical goal is to have five people per location, depending on the location’s size and business.
Most historically used locations would be ineligible, as well, since state law mandates that hand-counted ballots be tallied in a room separate from where people are voting.
“There’s a contingent of people who are making it seem like it’s possible when they don’t actually understand the logistics,” Cano said.
Allison Campolo, chair of the Tarrant County Democratic Party, said legislative changes are needed so the Democratic Party is no longer tied to the Republican Party’s election decisions.
“We cannot be beholden to a party that’s trying to shackle us to things which are inefficient, which disenfranchise voters, which are wildly expensive, which slow down results,” she said.
Drew Shaw is a government accountability reporter for the Fort Worth Report. Contact him at drew.shaw@fortworthreport.org or @shawlings601.
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