After hearing the repeated “Big Lie” that voting machines were tampered with and there were flipped votes in the 2020 election, that caused Donald Trump to lose his presidential re-election, many Republicans have called out to ditch all voting machines.
There is no evidence to support that there was anything wrong with the voting machines. But there is plenty of evidence that the “stop the steal” lie was invented to benefit Trump’s nefarious efforts to overturn the established election results.
Nevertheless, here in Texas the demand to junk the voting machines and switch to hand-counting for ballots has taken root. There are reports that the Travis County Republican Party might decide to adopt a hand count for the March primary. But one county has made that decision, Gillespie County which is a Hill County Republican stronghold of about 30 thousand people.
It should be noted that the Texas Republican Party has also made a lot of noise over the years about voter security and the need to pass tougher voter restriction laws to restore trust in the election system.
But, ironically, adopting the hand count of ballots counters those concerns. It dramatically increases the likelihood for inaccuracies in the count, it’s more expensive and it takes much longer to get the final results. And hand-counting doesn’t remove the possibility of switching of votes. It’s just now done by hand.
But The Gillespie County Republican Party’s experiment could be the future for elections across Texas, depending on how well it works and if Republicans continue to suspect, without evidence, that there’s a rat in the electronic voting system.
Natalia Contreras covers election administration and voting access for Votebeat in partnership with The Texas Tribune.
She has been covering the story.
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