An hour after Gillespie County Republican Party Chairman Bruce Campbell declared the hand-counted primary election results completely accurate and certified them as final, he found another discrepancy.
“It’s my mistake for not catching that,” he said, sitting in front of his laptop inside the Gillespie County election administration office Thursday. “I can’t believe I did that.”
The late catch meant that Campbell had to ask the early voting ballot board chair, who had already left and lives 30 minutes away, to return to the elections offices, figure out how the error happened, and fix it.
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At least one precinct judge acknowledged mistakes were made during the count but said they were caught and corrected that night. Campbell said he has full confidence that the tallying of the votes was accurate, and the party will not voluntarily conduct an audit or recount to verify the results.
But not everyone feels that way. Scott Netherland, the election judge for Precinct 6, turned in all of the necessary paperwork to the elections office just before midnight on election night, believing it all checked out. When he woke up the next day, he decided to double-check the results. He told Votebeat that 197 voters had cast ballots at his precinct on election day. For each race on the ballot, the total number of ballots cast should have totaled to 197, including, for example, instances when a voter skipped a race. But in one race, he’d reported only 160 votes. In another, 157. As he went down the list, he noticed he had 207 votes reported for a third race.
“My heart sank,” Netherland said. He’d miscounted the totals in seven separate races.
Netherland said he immediately contacted Campbell, then rushed to the elections office to review tally sheets. In doing so, he realized that multiple other precincts also had reported clearly inaccurate totals.
If he hadn’t done that, “we’d be still sitting on mistakes,” Netherland, who’s been working elections in Gillespie for more than a decade and did not support the hand count effort, told Votebeat.
Netherland said he still isn’t confident the election results are accurate, based on the errors that he and others have found.
On Thursday, Netherland said the Republican Party in Gillespie has introduced human error into the election process with the hand count.
“We took something that worked and now broke it,” Netherland said. “We failed to guard the purity of the election with this hand count. What we just did is evidence that this hand count was not accurate.”
Other Republicans continue to tout the effort as a success.
One of them was David Treibs, a member of the Fredericksburg Tea Party who helped lead the effort to hand count. In a video interview posted on a social media platform created by Mike Lindell — a well-known election conspiracy theorist and the CEO of bedding company MyPillow – Treibs acknowledged he’d made errors but said they weren’t a problem.
“So there were two ballots, and I just didn’t add them up. So I would have had to add 450 and two, and it would have been 452 and I didn’t. I just forgot to fill it in,” Treibs said in the video posted last week. “So I don’t really think that’s something that’s going to shut down the election and it’s like, ‘oh my gosh, he didn’t add 450 and two and come up with 452 and now that means the whole election was a failure.’ Well, that’s ridiculous.”
For his part, Campbell said he spent all weekend before the canvass going over tally sheets and double-checking vote totals on documents called precinct return sheets — reconciliation forms that election workers fill out with the number of votes cast for each race on election day. He repeatedly found errors. All but one of the county’s 13 Republican precincts had reported incorrect totals on the official reconciliation forms.
See here for the background. The types of errors that occurred according to the story were the result of bad penmanship, transposing digits, mis-adding the totals, and so on. You know, exactly the sort of errors you don’t get with a machine count. Luckily for Gillespie County Republicans, none of the races there were close enough to be potentially affected by these shenanigans – well, unless you apply Harris County Republican logic, where literally any aberration is enough to overturn a result no matter the margin – and no candidate has filed a challenge. Maybe they’ll get “randomly” audited by the Secretary of State and we’ll find even more errors, but for now at least they can close the books on this experiment and hand out trophies to everyone for participating in it.
The actual good news is that as things stand right now, they can only engage in this kind of foolishness in their primary, where the vote totals are relatively small and Democrats aren’t affected. I for one can’t understand how these dum-dums who can see conspiracy theories in a takeout menu can call such a clown show a success, but clearly I just don’t get it. It’s all fun and games until someone sues. Good luck when that happens.
Clown Car County.
I mean, there’s a reason people have been trying to remove or at least reduce human error in vote tabulation, as well as the time it takes to do it, for over 150 years through the use of machines and later, computers. The first US patent on a voting machine designed for a general multi-item election was awarded in 1881.
I guess some people needed to learn that lesson again.
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