A GOP primary in Texas has sparked concerns over attempts to move away from electronic ballots.

Republican efforts to hand count ballots in a seemingly low-profile Texas county primary election has led to a number of errors.

Gillespie County Republicans, led by Chairman Bruce Campbell, decided months ago to hand-count more than 8,000 ballots for the county GOP primary on March 5. Campbell then declared the results completely accurate and certified before, less than an hour after that certification, reversing course and saying discrepancies were found.

“It’s my mistake for not catching that,” Cambell said on Thursday while sitting inside the county election administration office. “I can’t believe I did that.”

The kerfuffle over ballot counting comes after a November rematch between President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump was solidified in primaries last week.

  • Socsa
    1·
    8 months ago

    I still don’t see any reason you can’t do this and have a machine count to compare. Redundancies are never a bad idea, and basically every study which has ever been done on the topic shows that hand counts are generally more error prone than hand audited machine counts.

    • CountVonEnglish
      1·
      8 months ago

      Any increase in accuracy would not be worth the tradeoff. The current system in Canada is very simple and very visible. Scrutineers for every candidate can watch the votes being counted and immediately understand what is happening. No amount of trust is required for the system to work.

      A machine that counts votes would be a black box to observers of the election. Most would need to trust that the machines are operating correctly. When machine counts and manual counts disagree, even slightly, it sows confusion and discord. The mere existence of voting machines and machine counts in the US has been sufficient to give rise to numerous conspiracy theories. In my view they are part of the rot besetting American democracy, and I don’t want them where I live.