The March 5 primary was largely business-as-usual in much of Texas, but in Fredericksburg, it was very different. A very old method was trotted out for the primary. The Republican party of Gillespie County decided to count the ballots by hand.
One of the Lone Star State's election peculiarities is that the Republican and Democratic parties each run their own election. In this primary, Gillespie County’s Republican Party decided not to use voting machines.
“The issue with machines is you don't know how that machine is counting the votes,” said Tom Marschall, District 1's county judge. “If there's a problem, that machine can't go into court and say, ‘this is how I counted the votes.’ ”
Marschall said the big issue is accountability: “This was a result of the Republican Executive committee, the precinct chairs and the county chair getting together and deciding to conduct this primary election using hand counted paper ballots.”
Marschall said the paper trail disappears in the machine.
“We cannot see it. Nobody can see it. There is a quote unquote ‘test’ that's supposed to indicate how it's done, but there's no guarantee that is how it's done,” he said. “So that is the problem with the machines. We don't know that there has been malfeasance in this county. That's not the issue. The issue is we need to know, and we don't know with the machines.”
He also explained the process: “We have two ballot boxes. One is in use when one is waiting to be used. When the hand-counting team is ready to start counting ballots, we will close up the ballot box that is currently being used and put the one that Is currently waiting, put that in use. We'll take the ballot box with the ballots to a counting area and open that box and empty out the ballots.”
Marschall said that every step of the way, several people will verify by name the process.
“Once we have 50 ballots that have been screened, we will take this form here and we will put the precinct on it. We will identify it as a batch, and we'll say that we've got 50 ballots in this batch,” he said.
The election process in Gillespie County has been particularly volatile in recent years, culminating in Gillespie County’s entire three-person elections department resigning in 2022. A controversy fueled by disinformation there made employees feel threatened.
Marschall said this decision removing voting machines is the latest attempt to respond to claims by critics that corruption was possible.
“To say that we're the testing ground, what we're testing is if we can go back in time. We don't like the use of the machines because we cannot see the ballot. We cannot see the vote. There's no way to verify it,” he said.
Democratic Election Judge Lee Wilson said Democrats have full confidence in the machines they use. “We think they're efficient, safe, accurate. And they make our job a lot easier,” he said.
He said the voting machine controversy is a tempest in a teapot. He said the voting machines are not connected to the internet, so they can’t be altered by hackers elsewhere. Wilson noted that even the iPads used to communicate with election headquarters weren’t connected to the internet.
“We are using a kind of equipment called a poll pad, which allows us to check a voter to make sure they are registered to vote and that they're voting in the right place. This equipment is not connected to the internet. It's basically fraud proof,” Wilson said.
The speed and accuracy of the hand count may determine its viability for use in the general election next fall.
