Brazos County election officials are responding to demands from skeptical residents by expanding hand counts and ordering special paper.
Texas voters cast their ballots during Election Day on Tuesday, Nov. 7, 2023. Brazos County officials have taken extra measures to allay residents' fears about voting security.In Brazos County, suspicions about elections burst into the open last fall, just weeks after a visit from an out-of-state group calling for ballots to be hand-counted.
County leaders and election officials have since repeatedly tried to assure residents that elections in Brazos are safe and accurate. They've invited skeptics to help recount ballots themselves. They’re spending more money and investing more time to accommodate the residents’ demands for changes, even if they think the changes won’t make elections any more secure.
The cost is for a special kind of ballot paper that comes preprinted with sequential serial numbers, starting with 1. Voting fraud activists have demanded this kind of paper for years, arguing that it would help officials detect and prevent double-voting.Experts say the preprinted numbering could threaten voters’ ballot secrecy, so Brazos election officials will have to take even more steps to secure the vote.
In Brazos, the movement grew after a group of election conspiracy theorists came to town questioning the validity of electronic voting equipment and promoting hand counts. At a public event,Some Republicans began to echo those concerns at commissioner court meetings. In October, the county commissioners sat through a presentation by Brazos resident Walter Daughterity, a retired computer science professor at Texas A&M University and ally of election conspiracy theorist Mike Lindell.
Done after each election, the partial manual count is a hand count of races from either 1% of a county’s precincts or three precincts — whichever is greater — to verify the accuracy of the results tabulated by the voting equipment. The Texas Secretary of State’s Office designates which races and precincts must be hand counted and then notifies county election officials.
It took the groups of Republican and Democrats an entire day to count more than 1,400 ballots. No discrepancies were found, and the count showed the machines’ results were accurate. How counties across the state comply with these rules depends on the type of voting equipment they use. For instance, some counties, including Brazos, purchase blank ballot paper that voters insert into a touch-screen voting machine called a ballot marking device at the polling place. Once the voter is done making their candidate selections, the device prints the voter’s ballot with a randomized number to preserve ballot secrecy.
In the United States, election departments have voter registration databases, voter histories, and other practices in place that help ensure that each voter is only casting one ballot, said Mitchell Brown, a political science professor at Auburn University and an expert on election administration.
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