Dallas County GOP drops plan to hand-count paper ballots

Dallas County plans to hand count primary ballots

Dallas County voters will see some big changes in the March primary. The Dallas GOP plans to hand count results and have fewer polling locations.

DALLAS - Dallas County Republicans won’t move forward with a plan to hand-count paper ballots during the March primary election. 

Unexpected Challenges

What's new:

On Tuesday, Dallas County GOP Chair Allen West shared an official statement on the party’s Facebook page.

West said the Hand Count Task Force had identified several issues that would make counting paper ballots by hand more challenging than expected, including financial, logistics, and personnel issues.

"The logistics challenges involved the demand for additional tables and chairs, as well as ballot printing due to the high number of races. This leads to the second issue—personnel. We are currently tapped out at approximately 1,300–1,500 individuals for hand counting. With only 63 days until the election, that number is woefully short of what is required. The greatest risk would be to continue without having trained, qualified, and ready counters, which would place our election judges in an untenable legal position," he wrote.

The Republican Party will still host its March primary election separate from the Democratic Party.

West believes the non-joint election gives Republicans better control of the process.

Hand-Counted Ballots

The backstory:

Earlier this month, the Dallas County Elections Department began preparing for Republicans and Democrats to have separate elections for the March primary.

Parties control their own primaries. While it has been standard for a while that parties have joint elections, they do not have to.

Dallas County Republicans wanted to try hosting an election with about 100 fewer polling locations and paper ballots that would be counted by hand.

The change would have only applied to the March primary on election day, not early voting, which is controlled by the county. 

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Dallas County Republicans to vote on paper, hand-count ballots for 2026 Primary Election

Dallas County Republican voters will notice a change in the voting process for the 2026 Primary Election in March.

What they're saying:

"I think when you consider Albert Einstein, when he said the pure definition of insanity is to continue to do the exact same thing and think you're going to get different results. And so why would we not want to look at some other course of action? And that's what we came up with. To say, let's go back and see," West said at the time.

While he did not allege any voter fraud, he cited failures with electronic voting. An electronic pollbook gave thousands of Dallas County voters the wrong ballot during the 2024 presidential election.