All Hat, No Cattle: After Big Talk, Dallas GOP Drops Ballot Hand Count Plans [View all]

[LetMyPeopleVote]

I have been volunteering in voter protection efforts since 2004. I have been an election judge a couple of times and have been a poll watcher at the central counting office. As a favor to the county election administrator, I have been the election judge for the GOP primary in my precinct (gop voters can be assholes and a good number insisted on slowing the process down by using their gun permits to vote instead of driver licenses which can be checked far more quickly). I have been at the certification and testing of voting machines before elections a couple of time (a very boring job). Counting ballots by hand is just plain crazy. I was amused to see the Dallas GOP assholes claim that they were going to hand count ballots and I was not surprised to see these assholes back down

All Hat, No Cattle: After Big Talk, Dallas GOP Drops Ballot Hand Count Plans www.democracydocket.com/news-alerts/...

— Ultimate Voter Guide (@ultimatevoterguide.bsky.social) 2025-12-31T21:36:58.444Z

https://www.democracydocket.com/news-alerts/all-hat-no-cattle-after-big-talk-dallas-gop-drops-ballot-hand-count-plans/

When Dallas County Republicans announced they would hand count every ballot cast in the upcoming GOP primary election in March, state party chairman Allen West described the effort as a “highly visible initiative to restore confidence in an electoral process.”

“Not only are the eyes of Texas upon us, but the eyes of America,” West said in a social media post earlier this month. The former GOP congressman concluded by quoting Gene Kranz, “a famed Texan” and the NASA flight director who oversaw the moon landing: “failure is not an option.”

On Tuesday, the nation looked on as West admitted that failure was very much an option, announcing that the Dallas County Republican Party (DCRP) will now forgo the hand count.....

When he announced the hand count decision three weeks ago, West said the party had raised $400,000 for the count and had 1,000 volunteers at the ready. But on Tuesday, he cited lingering concerns over staffing, funding, and the logistics of finding enough “additional tables and chairs,” to go through with the laborious undertaking.

Under state law, counties are required to report results within 24 hours of the polls closing — an additional hurdle that a hand count would struggle to clear. .....

“Party can’t even get enough volunteers to hand count it’s [sic] own small, simple ballots. Now imagine trying to hand count more than 50 million ovals, in Dallas County alone, in bipartisan teams,” he wrote. “Sorry guys. It’s not going to happen.”