Albeit inconveniently scheduled at 9 am on a Monday, the courtroom at the Gillespie County Courthouse in Fredericksburg, Texas was standing room only, with the crowd pouring out into the foyer. A large number of the attendees hand-counted votes at the Republican primary election in March 2024. Their experiences leading up to the primary brought them to volunteer, and their passion brought them to this meeting to have their voices heard. Approximately 80% of voters in Gillespie County are registered Republicans.
“On November 3, 2020, as a poll watcher, I witnessed the opening of a sealed ballot box that contained approximately 300 stuffed ballots.
Ever since then, I have become more concerned about election integrity in Gillespie County,”
-Tom Marshall
In March, legacy media overwhelmingly covered the hand-counting outcome as “costly.” VoteBeat.org, which claims to be non-partisan, focused on the errors (which were found and corrected) and referred to Mike Lindell in an article as “a known election conspiracy theorist.”
The ballots were lengthy containing some 28 races and 13 propositions. Just under 300 volunteers showed up that day, some staying until 4:30 am to make sure the job was complete. According to officials and some of the tabulators from that day, checks arrived unexpectedly in the mail from the Gillespie Republican Party to pay them for their work. Approximately one-third of the volunteers tore up the checks or donated them back to the party.
County Judge Daniel Jones called the court to order. Addressing the filled courtroom following the invocation and pledges to the flags of the USA and Texas (followed by the customary, Texas “yeehaw!”), the judge announced that 13 attendees had filled out forms requesting to speak. After a brief discussion with the other commission members, he proclaimed that due to the large number of requests, each speaker would be afforded 4 minutes.
Below are some highlights, but you can view the entire hearing here, and I highly recommend doing so.
“What better way to eliminate the risk of electronic voting machines than to have the people of Gillespie County step up and become part of the solution as hand counters? Better yet, to have like-minded citizens from all political parties unite and work together to ensure all of our votes count. If there are concerns about human errors, you need to be educated on the Echo 65 System and attend training sessions and see how easy and foolproof it is. . .It’s not about man versus machine, it’s about taking proactive steps to reduce risk and protect election integrity.”
David Nash
Gregory Porter described himself as a former Democrat. He worked as a hand counter in two polls. He urged everyone to check out https://blackboxvoting.org/fraction-magic-video/ to learn about the well-documented changing of fractions of votes. “It’s not a conspiracy theory,” Porter said.
“If it costs us 50% more to do this, and it took four more hours to count the votes, and we know it's secure, that's the decision that we should make. And so I think that this is an opportunity for Gillespie County to create an example of something that we feel confident we can ship off to Travis County and know that it's not going to be predicted so far. just want to thank you all for listening to these arguments and i would strongly encourage you to consider exercising your authority to approve Echo 65 for the November primary.”
Gregory Porter
Jenny McCombs, owner of Full Moon Inn, is coming up on the one-year anniversary of her move to the area. She jumped right in as a volunteer last spring.
On the day of the primary, I volunteered from 9.30 in the morning until 1 o'clock in the morning. And then I was shocked to get a check in the mail for $146. Because it is my duty as an American, as somebody that loves this country, to not just stand up for what is right, but to also fight for what is right.
We have had hand counting for hundreds of years. And then when the machines came out and it was something new and shiny, virtually everybody switched over to that. . . .
We have the manpower to do it. If we are willing to do it, then we should be allowed to do it. I believe in common sense politics, and I hope that you will allow us the opportunity to hand count the general election in November to prove once again that the system that we have in place is accurate, and can go through any kind of audit and no mistakes will be made.”
Jenny McCombs
Scott Neverland, a West Point graduate and retired U.S. Army Colonel took the podium as one of the few dissenters in the room.
“With the hand count process, there is no audit to verify the election. By contrast, the hand counting method is much more prone to human error and a much more costly approach.
During the Republican primary, we discovered that there were reporting errors on election night, causing all precinct chairs to report during the canvassing session to correct reporting errors totaling 952 votes in the precincts alone. Additionally, we paid out over $30,000 in pay to hand counters and another $2,500 to the facility where we accomplished the trainings.
The current process used by the county election administrator is safe, secure, and the most cost-effective way to conduct elections in Gillespie County. It ensures voter integrity and everyone's vote counts in accordance with the intent of the voter, not an election judge or a headcount team.”
Scott Neverland
After the 13 speakers who requested the floor by filling out a form before the hearing was brought to order got their 4 minutes each, Judge Jones added some commentary and then went on the give the floor to several more passionate citizens as well as his fellow commissioners.
“First of all, I believe that everybody is here because they are here with the best intentions, which is to put Gillespie County in a position to have fair and trustworthy elections. We've got people on all different sides of this issue, and really the elections issue in general, but I feel that everybody is here with their best intentions.”
Judge Daniel Jones
Although the Gillespie County Commission, in general, did seem quite hesitant to commit or move forward on the issue, the amount of floor time given to the large crowd of citizens was impressive as far as free speech and public servanthood goes.
Some of the commissioners have already been voted out. After this hearing, more seats could be in danger.
Judge Jones deferred to getting some clarification from the Secretary of State’s office and implementing a partial hand-counted audit as a way to meet in the middle. He’s quite the diplomat.
“I have an inquiry into the Secretary of State's office. . . I've not gotten a response yet this morning. I was hoping I would have it before today's meeting, but I don't. One of my inquiries was into the Echo 65 system, whether they have reviewed that, what their position is on that, whether it conforms with Texas Election Code. I made inquiries into what's referred to as the partial manual count. Gillespie County uses paper ballots. You hand mark your ballots here.
We don't use an electronic voting machine where you enter your vote onto a screen or something like that.You use a paper hand marked ballot. Those ballots are then fed into a, I believe it's called an electronic tabulating machine in the code, which is essentially a scanner that scans those hand marked ballots, tabulates that information. When you conduct an election with that system in place and after the election a partial manual count is done, it can be at least 1% or up to three precincts.
Depending on the election, either the election's administrator makes that determination or the Secretary of State's office determines which precincts are counted immediately thereafter. The intent of that is to audit or do a partial audit of the tabulation machines. The way I read that statute is there may be some room to interpret that to be broader than 1% or three precincts.
And so I have asked the Secretary of State's office to clarify whether we could conduct partial manual counts immediately after the election that would be greater than 1% or three precincts.
Again, I know that's not a complete hand count, but it would maybe put us closer to having hand count verification immediately after the electronic tabulation to try to bridge this gap a little bit in the meantime until we can figure out what we're going to do long term in Gillespie County.”
Judge Daniel Jones
He went on to say “I'm not convinced that we have an entire voice of the community here today. I know we have a segment of the community that feels a certain way about this issue, but I'm sure that there are others that may have other thoughts or input that are not here today. They're welcome to be here. It's an open meeting.”
A petition of 50 local business owners who support hand counting was presented to the court. Maybe a general petition would be more convincing?
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