Texas Republicans Want Every Ballot Hand-Counted Before Results Are Final. The Deadline Is Nov. 17.

Here’s a simple question a group of Texas Republicans has put in front of a federal judge: if a machine counted your ballot, shouldn’t someone check the machine?

The Potter County Republican Party, based in Amarillo, and its chairman, Dan Rogers, sued in late October. They want every paper ballot cast in Texas in the Nov. 3 midterm counted by hand and compared with the machine totals before any federal result is made final, according to the Amarillo Tribune. If the hand count and the machines disagree, they want the hand count to win.

What the lawsuit says

Texas already requires a hand-count spot check after every election: 1% of precincts, or three polling locations, whichever is greater. The Republicans say that’s not enough anymore.

“In light of the new threat posed by clever AI programs of potentially illegal (and especially foreign) hacking electronic systems to change the final election results, a limited audit of a tiny fraction of the citizen cast ballots is an insufficient Constitutional safeguard,” the lawsuit states.

The suit also points to voting-machine parts “manufactured by foreign adversaries” such as China, the Texas Tribune reported. It is careful about what it does not claim. It does not say any votes were changed. “Nor do Plaintiffs allege that any past Potter County election results were altered, or inaccurately reported,” the complaint says. The argument is about protection going forward, not a charge of fraud.

The case asks for a class covering every county election administrator in Texas, with Potter County’s Christy Benge as the stand-in, so one ruling would apply statewide.

Monday’s pushback

On Monday, Potter County commissioners authorized County Attorney Scott Brumley to defend Benge, and Brumley filed a motion to dismiss. He argued the Republicans lack standing to sue and that their claimed harm is “speculative rather than imminent, and it is not fairly traceable to any conduct by Defendant Benge,” the Amarillo Tribune reported.

The county’s filing called it an “eleventh-hour lawsuit” that seeks “a sweeping statewide intervention” based on “no more than theoretical possibility,” according to Democracy Docket, which quoted the motion. The county said the right place to change the audit rules is the Legislature.

National Democrats have jumped in too. The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, the NAACP’s Texas chapter and the League of Women Voters of Texas have asked to join the case on the county’s side. “It is not possible to accurately hand count millions of ballots under Texas’s post-election timelines,” the two Democratic committees told the court. Early counts show at least 9.9 million Texans voted.

The judge and the clock

The case landed with U.S. District Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk, a Trump appointee and the only federal judge in Amarillo. He has not ordered any hand count.

Time is short. Texas counties must finish their official canvass, the formal step that makes results final, by Tuesday, Nov. 17. Potter County plans to canvass its own votes Friday morning. The Republicans’ lawyers asked to push the deadline for their emergency request to Thursday, and as of Monday the judge had not ruled on that, the Amarillo Tribune reported.

Why it matters

Whatever Kacsmaryk decides, the Amarillo Republicans have put a real question on the table: should Texas trust a 1% spot check when the machines carry parts from China and the hacking tools keep getting smarter? Supporters of paper-ballot hand counts have been asking that for years. This week, a federal court has to answer it.