Republicans across Texas are pushing to change voting procedures to require hand-counting of ballots in next March's primary elections, NBC News reports.
In Texas, party officials are allowed to control primary voting procedures. Typically, both Republicans and Democrats rely on county election officials to administer elections, but GOP leaders in several counties are moving to run their own elections at the precinct level and hand-count ballots on Election Day.
Republicans in Dallas, Hays, Eastland, and Gillespie counties have already approved plans to hand-count primary ballots. Orange County Republicans approved a similar plan over the summer.
"This is something that, all across Texas and all across the nation, people are starting to be interested in," said Allen West, chair of the Republican Party in Dallas County, the largest county in the state pursuing hand-counting.
West said vote-counting machines have proven unreliable.
"We have seen catastrophic failures of the electronic systems up here in Dallas County" during preelection testing, he said.
"I cannot fix the machine," added West. "I do not know about algorithms and all of these things that consistently continue to happen, so I think the pure definition of insanity is to continue to do the exact same thing and think you are going to get a different result."
Texas officials, including Republican Attorney General Ken Paxton, maintain that the state's vote-counting machines are reliable.
Kendall Scudder, chair of the Texas Democratic Party, told NBC News that changes to election procedures are difficult to implement and can cause confusion among voters.
"It is a huge duplicative process that should not have to happen," Scudder said.
"What will happen in Dallas County is both parties will have to recruit about 2,300 election workers each, and they will each have to have about 500 different locations for people to vote in."
He went on to predict that "Republicans will have to recruit an additional 3,600 people to try to get the ballots counted within 24 hours."
"And because they're doing it by hand, instead of doing it by optical scan, they will have human error in their counts, where we won't," added Scudder.
Theodore Bunker ✉
Theodore Bunker, a Newsmax writer, has more than a decade covering news, media, and politics.
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