BRYAN, Texas — At election time, Trudy Hancock spends a lot of time in her car, delivering equipment to polling sites scattered around Brazos County and visiting poll workers who need her help in the field.

She keeps the car radio on, and always tuned to Christian music.

Recovering from a tiring Election Day last week, the longtime county election administrator recalled hearing one song that resonated with her. It’s called “The Truth,” and opens with the lyrics:

How many times can you hear the same lie

Before you start to believe it?

At her desk that morning, she recited a version of those lyrics as best as she could remember them, softly, haltingly.

“But I know the truth,” she added, as she tried to hold back tears. “It gets hard.”

There are reasons why the song hit home. After decades of working in elections, and years of hearing people lie about them, Hancock and her staff members are starting to sometimes doubt themselves. Like election officials around the country, they’ve repeatedly tried to reassure a small group of right-wing skeptics that the county’s elections are safe and secure. They’ve tried to answer their questions, accommodated their demands, educated them about the law, and offered them opportunities to see firsthand how the process works.

“They won’t accept our answers, because it’s not the answers that they want,” Hancock, 60, said. “There’s just no end to it.”

Election Day in Brazos — a Republican stronghold around 100 miles northwest of Houston, and home to Texas A&M University — went pretty smoothly this time. Minor technical issues were resolved early on. Few locations had long wait times.

Hancock knows the truth. But she also knows that it won’t be enough to quiet the skeptics, who were questioning election processes right up to the start of early voting this year, and haven’t stopped.

Now that the 2024 election is over, Hancock is about to decide whether she can keep doing the job.

The requests keep coming

Since January, Hancock and her staff have hosted at least three public meetings where they’ve gone over, in detail, how the voting equipment works, and every single step of the election process. They’ve explained to the group of concerned residents that voter roll maintenance is done daily by staff members whose sole job is to make sure such lists are accurate.

Following the March primary election, Hancock invited some residents who have been coming to Commissioners Court to take part in the state-mandated partial hand count, which is done by every county after each election to check the accuracy of the voting equipment. The Secretary of State’s office selects the races to be hand-counted.

In an effort to increase transparency, Hancock got state permission to hand-count additional races. One of the critics of her office, resident Catherine Viens, participated in the count, which took a few days to complete and showed no discrepancies.

But the requests kept coming. They asked Hancock to guard against double voting — though there’s no evidence of that happening at large scale — by purchasing special ballot paper that’s preprinted with sequential serial numbers, starting with 1.

The paper cost taxpayers $14,000 and, according to Hancock, doesn’t really improve security. It creates waste, because leftover ballots can’t be reused in the next election. On top of that, the county workers have to spend more time and resources redacting the printed numbers to protect voters’ ballot secrecy.

Hancock agreed to it anyway for the presidential election. But it didn’t seem to bring anyone peace of mind.

During a state-mandated logic and accuracy test of the electronic equipment, which is open to the public, the group repeatedly asked, “Are the machines connected to the internet?” And each time the answer was the same, “no,” said Thomas Cavaness, the Brazos County Democratic Party chair, who participated in the test.

The testing should have taken 45 minutes to an hour, Cavaness said, “but instead it took us three hours to finish, because they kept asking questions.”

False claims fly at an October meeting

The questions have been pouring in for at least a year now, from several Republicans in Brazos who speak out regularly at Commissioners Court meetings. They’ve urged elected officials to take steps that include eliminating the use of electronic voting equipment like ballot-marking machines and electronic poll books. They have falsely claimed the equipment is connected to the internet and vulnerable to hacking.

At an October meeting, days before the start of early voting, four people spoke, asking commissioners again to endorse their efforts. Brazos resident Cynthia Wiley expressed her frustration with what she said was a lack of action.

“You’re our only recourse to express our concerns,” Wiley told the commissioners, citing voter registrations she’s unsuccessfully challenged. “And you guys have direct authority over the election administrator.”

Hancock has said her office is following the legally mandated procedures. Federal law prevents election officials from systematically removing people from the voter rolls 90 days ahead of a federal election. In addition, state law requires election officials to notify voters and give them a chance to respond and correct any errors before they can be removed from the rolls, but Wiley said she wanted the elected officials to instruct Hancock to investigate the registrations of the voters she had challenged right away.

At the same meeting, Viens asserted that the county had no emergency plan in case the power went out. Hancock said that’s false: The county has for years been prepared to handle power outages, violence, or natural disasters on Election Day, and Hancock had generators and other materials ready to go in case something went wrong. Viens has requested a copy of the plan.

Another resident who frequently speaks at the meetings is Walter Daughterity, a retired computer science professor at Texas A&M. Daughterity often appears on the video platform of MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell, well-known as a promoter of election conspiracy theories, and at other venues pushing for hand counting of ballots. Daughterity has asserted that Brazos’ voting machines are connected to the internet and not certified by federal officials. County and state officials have said those assertions are not true.

At the October meeting, he listed six urgent priorities for the Commissioners Court. He did not respond to Votebeat’s request for comment.

Mark Holtzapple, a chemical engineering professor at Texas A&M, has echoed Daughterity’s claims. At that meeting, he claimed that “ballot boxes are insecure,” because “the hinge on the locked box is on the outside, and all you have to do is unscrew one bolt” to get around the lock and security seal on it.

In an email to Votebeat, Holtzapple said he and the other residents are “not accusing anyone of anything. Rather, we are simply concerned citizens who want to improve election security, an essential condition for a properly functioning republic.”

The professors’ advocacy has spurred pushback from some of their colleagues at the university. Hank Walker, a computer science and engineering professor, wrote an email to Hancock in August to thank her and the staff for “performing so professionally with people who question your integrity.”

“I have known Walter and Mark for 30 years,” he said in an email to Votebeat. “They have good intentions, but they are wrong.”

Days after the public meeting where the activists spoke, Brazos County Judge Duane Peters asked Hancock to publicly respond. But when Hancock presented at the following Commissioners Court meeting, none of the residents who had complained were there.

The four residents later requested a separate in-person meeting with Peters and Hancock. She repeated what she had explained earlier. Holtzapple told Votebeat that the hourlong meeting “was not sufficient time to fully resolve the issues and generate an action plan.”

The residents compiled a 50-page document that lays out the issues they brought up at the meeting and how the county responded. They expect another meeting.

Viens said in a text message to Votebeat that her confidence in the process “will not be restored until the county complies with the Texas Election Code.” She specifically wants to see the county eliminate countywide voting, and use only hand-marked paper ballots.

Wiley, who along with Viens worked as a polling place supervisor during elections this year, including during the presidential election last week, said she does not trust the electronic voting equipment. “Once you click or insert your choices on paper into the machinery, who or what is really casting our votes?” she wrote in an email to Votebeat. She also echoed Viens’ request to help restore her confidence in the election process.

Holtzapple acknowledged that Hancock and her staff have made efforts to address the concerns he and others have raised, but said he still wants a more extensive dialogue, more substantive responses to the questions he’s raising about election security, and more responsiveness directly to the people who raise concerns.

For example, when a resident challenges a voter registration, “there should be a closing of the loop, that there should be respect shown from the government to the citizens for taking that time to identify people who possibly should be removed from the voter rolls.”

Peters, the county judge, described some of the residents’ actions and comments as a “constant barrage … I catch it, too,” he said. “And they expect me to change the system and go to something that I think is way less secure than the system we’ve got.”

“So I can understand why Trudy and her staff would be stressed to the limit,” Peters added. “It hasn’t impacted their work ethic, but I know it gets discouraging.”

A demanding Election Day: ‘They don’t understand’

Hancock was born and raised in neighboring Robertson County, and still lives there with her husband. Her first experience in elections was as a poll worker in her community back in the late 1980s, she said.

She spends her free time scrapbooking and screenprinting T-shirts. She often makes those for her staff, featuring messages such as “election squad,” and also makes them for friends and family at their request.

“It’s a fun outlet for me,” Hancock said.

She’s most proud of her two teenage grandchildren. On the night before Election Day, she was exhausted, but agreed to have them over for dinner. She made them pumpkin bread and brought some to the office the next day.

In the early morning hours of Election Day, Hancock had already answered dozens of phone calls from election workers at polling places who needed her help. If they were short on election supplies, she hopped in her small red SUV to deliver them herself, toting extra yellow traffic cones and curbside voting signs. Technical issues with the equipment? She knew whom to call. There was no problem Hancock and her staff did not resolve quickly.

Krystal Ocon and others in Hancock’s office fanned out across the county, and fielded questions from election workers in a text thread that kept her phone dinging throughout the day.

Ocon, 39, is the Brazos County elections coordinator, and unofficially Hancock’s second in command. She was born and raised in Brazos. For the past 20 years, she’s worked on every aspect of elections in the county. She knows the process thoroughly.

Throughout the day, Hancock relied on Ocon to give voters and election workers direction, and to help when needed, such as when a line of college students began to form outside of the polling location at the elections department. Many of them hadn’t updated their voter registration and would have to cast a provisional ballot, which takes more time. There was only a couple of hours left before polls were set to close.

“Look at that line!” Ocon said, before swinging into action.

She quickly gave the waiting students directions: where to stand, what type of ID they needed to have ready, the forms they might need to fill out if they weren’t registered in the county. She told them what their options were and what would happen next.

Collectively, the Brazos County elections department staff has more than 60 years of experience. So Ocon is frustrated by the constant requests and skepticism from the activists. She worries that it could discourage the staff and weaken the department.

“They don’t understand how much time and care it takes to do this job,” Ocon said.

She points out that she’s had to miss Halloween events with her daughter multiple times over the years in order to manage early voting and meet state-mandated election deadlines.

“Do they honestly think that I am going to take time away from my family to hack the machines, change votes, and go to jail?” she said. “Heck no. So yeah, I take all of this very personally.”

Poll watchers act ‘like detectives’

The tension between the small group of Republican activists and the county elections department penetrated decisions over how to best manage polling place staffing during this year’s elections.

Hancock said the Republican Party in Brazos, now led by Ross Ford, refused to collaborate with her staff to assign work sites for election judges, who supervise polling locations.

In the past, Hancock and her staff were able to assign workers appointed by the party to locations where they’d be a good fit. “For example, a location that gets a lot of voters needs an experienced team, and so we’d assign workers based on that,” Hancock said.

This year, the party made those placement decisions on its own, which by law, it’s entitled to do. In some cases, it assigned inexperienced workers to locations staffed only by other inexperienced workers, which led to some delays on Election Day. At one location, election judges were unsure how to process voters with out-of-state IDs or how to process provisional ballots.

And Republican poll workers said they were struggling to deal with the party’s own poll watchers.

“These poll watchers feel more like detectives than observers,” said Bill Edison, a Republican election judge in Brazos who has been a poll worker for more than a decade.

“Nearly all the poll watchers, except for one I had on Election Day, were from the Republican Party. And they’re trolling Republican judges, in a town basically where they own the county politically,” he said. “It doesn’t make any sense.”

Ford, the party leader, said the party has been unhappy with Hancock’s staff’s previous placement of workers at polling sites. “I know she’s very dedicated, but we feel like we need to assert ourselves and make sure that we’re doing things right,” Ford said.

The activists say they’re working on behalf of voters who lack confidence in the process. Most voters Votebeat spoke with on Election Day didn’t express such doubts.

At the Brazos Center, one of the busiest polling locations in the county, voters cast their ballots within minutes. Voters walking out and back to their cars said they had confidence in the election process. They were unaware of any issues between conservative activists and the elections department, they said.

“Things are working the way they’re supposed to,” said Brazos voter John Borden.

“The process was smooth and fast. The workers are friendly,” said Omero Lara.

Amanda Cross, who said she hasn’t always had confidence in the outcome of past elections, said she trusts how the process is handled locally. When asked if she’d heard of any problems with the elections office or anyone questioning the reliability of the voting equipment, she said “never.”

It was Donald Trump who helped fuel a movement of election suspicion after his loss in the 2020 presidential election. Hancock doubts his 2024 victory will slow that movement down. Just the day after the election, Hancock was hearing more questions from Daughterity.

“This is the new normal, and that scares me,” Hancock told Votebeat that day. “The distrust in our process and our people. The distrust in everything.”

When asked how she planned to move forward, she said, “by retiring.”

The timeline for that will depend on the results of a stress test she had scheduled for this month, after the election.

“No matter how much I love this job, you’ve got to decide whether it’s worth risking your mental and physical health,” she said. “And that’s where I am.”

Natalia Contreras covers election administration and voting access for Votebeat in partnership with the Texas Tribune. Contact Natalia at ncontreras@votebeat.org

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization covering local election integrity and voting access. Sign up for their newsletters here.

An election clerk in San Antonio was allegedly assaulted late Thursday and the suspect, a voter, was arrested, officials said.

The suspect was arrested on suspicion of injury to an elderly person, a felony.

The incident is believed to be the first instance of reported violence against an election worker this fall. Early voting began Monday in Texas.

According to a sheriff’s report, the suspect, 63-year-old Jesse Lutzenberger, walked into the polling location on San Antonio’s west side, wearing a Make America Great Again hat in support of former President Donald Trump, which is considered electioneering and against the law in Texas. The poll worker, 69, asked Lutzenberger to remove the hat, which he did, officials said. Lutzenberger went on to cast his ballot.

While still inside the polling location, Lutzenberger put the hat back on as he walked toward the door. The poll worker approached him to tell him that was unacceptable and then began to escort him out as they were approaching the doors of the location.

Bexar County Sheriff Javier Salazar said a surveillance video showed Lutzenberger “throw an arm back toward the victim,” he said. “The victim seemed to push off of the suspect. At that point, the suspect then turned and threw several punches right at the face of the victim.”

Salazar urged residents to keep calm while voting.

“Nothing is worth going to jail for,” Salazar said.

Emergency medical personnel responded to the incident and treated the election worker. His injuries were not life-threatening, Salazar said. Bexar County Sheriff’s deputies said they were able to find Lutzenberger at a residence, where he identified himself as “I am the person you’re looking for.”

Lutzenberger was booked into the Bexar County jail and was released on a $30,000 bond Friday. He is facing a third-degree felony charge.

This week deputies have had to respond to calls of people wearing clothing in support of political candidates at the polling place, said Salazar, though none of the others have resulted in violence or arrest. Voters are not allowed to wear any type of clothing that shows support for a political candidate or measure within 100 feet of a polling location.

Bexar County elections administrator Jacquelyn Callanen said in a statement that she wants Bexar County voters to “remain calm and realize that more than 200,000 early voters have cast their ballot this past week, and the majority of experiences have been positive” Callanen said.

Election officials have been ready to respond to violence at the polls for some time. Those efforts have become a priority in the midst of a contentious presidential election year.

This summer, during its annual state-wide training for election officials, the Texas Secretary of State’s office emphasized safety and emergency preparedness.

The agency’s elections division featured table top exercises and workshops on de-escalation, incident response and emergency preparedness.

Counties across the state, including Bexar, Dallas and Harris have an emergency and incident plan in place and have made it part of their poll worker training.

A May survey of election administrators by the Brennan Center found that 40% of respondents had taken steps to increase the physical security of election offices and polling locations since 2020, and 38% reported experiencing harassment or abuse. Across the country, election offices are doing things like investing in “panic buttons” and training poll workers in de-escalation techniques as a result.

Natalia Contreras covers election administration and voting access for Votebeat in partnership with the Texas Tribune. Contact Natalia at ncontreras@votebeat.org

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization covering local election integrity and voting access. Sign up for their newsletters here.

This article was originally published by Votebeat, a nonprofit news organization covering local election administration and voting access.

FREDERICKSBURG, Texas — Jim Riley and his team spent weeks preparing for a forum he hoped would remind the public that elections in Gillespie County are “safe, accurate and dependable.”

The new county elections administrator expected more than 50 people. He asked a more experienced election official from a neighboring county to be there, in case he needed help clarifying election laws he’s less familiar with. He planned for a mock election, setting up voting equipment that the audience could use.

But fewer than two dozen people came. And some — county Republicans and local tea party members — walked out before his presentation ended. They’re the same people who Riley believes no longer want him in the job and who have disrupted the way elections are run in the county.

“Yeah, I’m disappointed. But the word will get out. They’ll go out and say that ‘he’s still there. He’s still standing’,” Riley said.

Riley, 76, intends to stay standing, even if it means standing up to the pressure of local right-wing activists who want him to radically change the way Gillespie elections are run. It’s more pushback than he expected when he took the job in August.

“I was just surprised. But I am dealing with it,” Riley said. “I’m not quitting.”

That’s no small commitment, considering Gillespie’s recent history. A little more than a year ago — following years of harassment by local right-wing activists fueled by unsupported claims of election malfeasance and conspiracy theories — the entire elections department in this Hill Country county quit.

Six months into his new role, Riley has signaled that he will not easily bend to the activists’ demands to fix county election problems that don’t exist. Since before he took the job, they have been mounting a pressure campaign to convince local officials to get rid of its electronic election equipment and switch to checking in voters on paper and counting votes by hand.

“If they thought that I was one who would follow along on this, then they were badly misinformed,” Riley said. “I stand by what I said: a hand count will not make elections in Gillespie better.”

A Republican and a semi-retired Presbyterian minister, Riley said when he sees a need, he turns to it and serves.

“In my own personal walk with Jesus, I want to be doing things that would be considered worthwhile. And right now that seems to be this job,” he said.

“Thrown into a hornet’s nest”

Although Riley says he’s got what it takes to endure the big election year ahead of him, some residents worry the county may be at risk of losing yet another election director.

After the entire elections staff quit in the summer of 2022, county officials spent months looking for a new elections director. Riley had been a precinct judge — tasked with supervising polling locations — for the local Republican Party for years, which meant he was familiar with how elections in the county were run. While the job was vacant, he helped manage early voting during the November 2022 midterm election and helped the county clerk in the months that followed. County officials encouraged him to apply for the job; he did so in June.

Meanwhile, some Republicans and activists had been organizing an effort aimed at convincing county executives to ditch electronic voting equipment and instead use volunteers to hand-count ballots.

“We can do this in Gillespie and in the surrounding Hill Country because we’re small enough and we have enough people who want to know the truth,” Angela Smith, a poll watcher and a founder of the Fredericksburg Tea Party, said in July at an event featuring out-of-state election conspiracy theorists promoting hand counting – a method experts say is inaccurate and far more costly.

More than 20,000 registered voters live in Gillespie and about 80% are Republican.

Although county executives dismissed the push to hand count, by the time Riley was appointed to his new position, Republicans had decided they’d hand count in the March primary election – a move state officials had warned would require double the amount of workers and volunteers, of resources and a risk of legal challenges from candidates, but a decision the party was legally allowed to make.

Mo Saiidi, then the chairman of the county’s Republican Party, resigned last fall following his opposition to the party’s decision to hand-count ballots in the primary election.

“Anybody who would have come into that job would have been thrown into a hornet’s nest, to be honest with you,” Saiidi said.

Saiidi was a member of the election commission that appointed Riley. He said the county was left scrambling when former elections administrator Anissa Herrera — who’d run elections there since 2019 — and her staff quit. He’s concerned that it could happen again.

“It’s the same now with Jim there,” Saiidi said. “The same barrages of baseless complaints. This is not healthy, we’ve gotta do something. We need to let them do their jobs.”

“The will of the people”

Texas law allows the political parties to choose the ballot counting method for the primary elections. For the March 5 primary, Republicans in Gillespie have decided they’ll hand count all ballots cast during early voting and on election day.

The party is also taking an additional step to make its election more analog. On election day, the party will ditch electronic poll books, used to check voters in at the polls. Instead, they’ll use printed voter rolls prepared by Riley’s staff.

But during early voting, under Texas law, it’s Riley who gets to decide how to check in voters at the polls during that two-week period. And he has insisted on using the county’s electronic poll book – a system he says is reliable and more efficient in what is typically a high-turnout election.

That’s upset the local activists, who falsely believe election officials can use the electronic poll books to manipulate election results.

For weeks, Republicans and Tea Party members who opposed using the electronic poll books have sent out a ‘call to action’ for residents, asking them to write letters to county Judge Daniel Jones and other county commissioners in hopes they will tell Riley to change his mind.

Over a week ago, Republican precinct chairs Tom Marschall and David Treibs created a 20-minute video about Riley’s decision to “do something other than what the people want,” posting it on social media. In the video, they also suggested that residents ask the county to get rid of the elections administrator position entirely and give those duties to an elected official, such as the county clerk or the tax assessor-collector. Marschall told Votebeat that if Riley were to “abide by the will of the people” he wouldn’t have raised these issues.

“We just want to do it the old fashioned way and do it on paper, and nobody’s going to be able to add 1,000 names to that list when I’m sitting there, guarding it,” Treibs — who could not be reached for comment — said in the video. “Nobody’s gonna mess with that stuff when I’m there. I can guarantee you that.”

In the video, he went on to say that because Riley isn’t elected, “Jim Riley doesn’t answer to anyone and I don’t think that’s a good thing. But we want to try to pressure him and… be nice of course.”

Election administrators are nonpartisan positions appointed by an election commission made up of the county clerk, the tax assessor-collector, the chairs of the local political parties and the county judge.

“Right now, I’m experiencing a mess”

So far, Riley hasn’t budged on the demands from the activists. Instead, he’s been focused on rebuilding trust and learning as much about elections as possible. In January, he attended a conference and training for Texas election administrators, networking with other election directors across the state and with staff at the Texas Secretary of State’s Office.

He says he often calls election directors from neighboring counties for advice and doesn’t shy away from admitting that he still has a lot to learn. He takes tips and examples on what he can do to rebuild trust in local elections. The lightly attended public forum was one such attempt.

With the pressure of learning the ins and outs of elections, in a state where laws are often changing, and in a county where election officials have in the past found the job to be too much, some election administrators say support from county commissioners — who control the county’s budget and resources allocated for the elections department — goes a long way.

In Llano County, about 30 miles north of Gillespie, Andrea Wilson has been the elections administrator for over a year. She quickly learned that the job required her to become an election law expert, a record-keeping expert, a logistical manager, a trainer for election workers, a budget strategist and an office administrator to keep track of supplies, among other duties.

And the hours of work are extensive. Wilson’s kept track: The two weeks of early voting now covers 115 hours that election administration staff must be present in the office and an additional 17-plus hours on election day, she said.

“With all of that resting on your shoulders, could you then imagine having to fight with your county commissioners for the staff necessary to support that mission or a budget to pay for all the necessary supplies?” Wilson said. “Or even worse is adding to your already overflowing plate the spread of misinformation.”

Without support, Wilson said she wouldn’t have lasted a year on the job in Llano. She said it should be “the standard” for all counties to provide that kind of support to their elections departments.

When Herrera, the previous elections administrator in Gillespie quit, in her resignation letter she told county officials that “the threats against election officials and my election staff, dangerous misinformation, lack of full-time personnel for the elections office, unpaid compensation,” had in part made the job “unsustainable.”

Her staff was made up of one more full-time employee and a part-time employee. She’d asked county officials for two more full-time employees but the county only approved one and it’s unclear whether it was filled or whether the county plans to allocate funding to pay for additional workers in the future. Gillespie County Judge Daniel Jones did not respond to Votebeat’s multiple requests for comment about how the county plans to support its elections department and to help retain election staff in Gillespie.

The number of people working in the Gillespie elections department remains the same: two full-time employees, including Riley, and one part-time employee.

Although at times he admits the pressures of the job can be overwhelming and frustrating, Riley told Votebeat he is confident he has the support of Jones and other county commissioners. And he relies on his faith often to keep at it, any time he’s discouraged, he said. But he’s committed to running elections in the county as long as he can.

“In the midst of everything that is just kicking you in the butt. If you spend a little time in the word, spend time in prayer and you seek it through Jesus. You’ll be amazed at what he allows you to experience,” Riley said. “So, right now, I’m experiencing a mess, but I haven’t felt alone in it at all.”

Natalia Contreras covers election administration and voting access for Votebeat in partnership with the Texas Tribune. Contact Natalia at ncontreras@votebeat.org.

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization committed to reporting the nuanced truth about elections and voting at a time of crisis in America.

Responsibility for running elections in Kerr County has shifted among three different people in the past two months. The first two officials bailed on the job after a months-long effort by one Republican county official to rid the county of electronic voting equipment and begin hand counting all ballots. The push has divided the overwhelmingly Republican county — a verdant stretch of the Hill Country split by the Guadalupe River — and will cost taxpayers around $250,000 due to the many changeovers.

So far, the effort has failed. Still, Kerr County Republican Party Chair Paul Zohlen told Votebeat the effort — led largely by Republican County Commissioner Rich Paces — has “single-handedly taken a wrecking ball to one of the finest election departments in the state.”

“This had never happened before,” Zohlen said. “And now the county clerk will have to put together a team and impart the 10 to 15 years of experience they need by March of 2024.”

Until late August, elections in Kerr County, home to Kerrville and with a population of more than 50,000 people, were managed by the tax assessor’s office. Bob Reeves, a Republican elected to the role in 2018, told Votebeat he refused to continue the work because of the growing distrust in elections there, which made an already time-consuming, stressful, and low-paying job nearly impossible.

“I was put between a proverbial rock and a hard place,” Reeves said. The recent demands for hand counting stemming from baseless suspicions about the security of the current system, he said, made the work seem hopeless.

The duties, therefore, were transferred to Jackie Dowdy, the county clerk. She, too, refused and resigned her position entirely. Her chief deputy, Ian Collum, was appointed as interim clerk while the county conducts the search for her replacement. He and others in that department, which has not handled elections in more than a decade, will now be placed in charge of helping Kerr County’s 40,000 registered voters cast their ballots in 2024.

Fueled by misinformation and baseless claims that electronic voting equipment is manipulated to change election results, the push to hand count ballots in Kerr County is similar to other efforts happening across Texas and elsewhere. Communities that have recently embraced hand counting of ballots — a method that election administration experts have said and studies have shown is less accurate, more costly, and less secure — have become hotly divided. In some cases, such as Cochise County, Arizona, it has pushed election officials out of their jobs and fractured trust in local elections.

Experts told Votebeat it may take years to undo the chaos and to restore the erosion of trust in elections that the effort to hand count has created in Kerr and elsewhere.

“These communities are spending an incredible amount of time trying to solve a problem that doesn’t exist. And as a result, creating a whole series of new very real problems,” said Justin Grimmer, a professor in the department of political science and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University who is currently conducting research on efforts to hand count ballots in counties across the country.

Only a small handful of counties in Texas — all with populations of fewer than 10,000 residents — hand count their election results. In West Texas’ Glasscock County, which has fewer than 800 registered voters, it made little sense to buy expensive equipment for a job that could easily be done by hand, for example. Their small numbers and short ballots allow these counties to complete and submit vote totals within 24 hours of the polls closing on Election Day.

Right now, the effort to hand count ballots in Kerr County has reached a stopping point. This fall, a vote to change the county’s counting process ahead of 2024 failed. But neither Paces nor county election officials believe this fight is over.

“This was just the first skirmish,” Paces told Votebeat.

Behind a counter of clerks who help residents update their vehicle registration, their property taxes, file paperwork for various licenses and update their voter registration is Bob Reeves’ small office. It’s often hard to see the surface of his desk, covered as it is in stacks of paperwork. The bookcase behind him holds even more stacks — reflecting the amount of work Reeves has had to handle as the county’s tax assessor and election official, with multiple, back-to-back state-mandated deadlines he has to meet to fulfill both roles.

Reeves said that over the years he and his staff knew of some in the community with questions or perhaps a general distrust of the elections process. “But we always tried to the best of our ability to help people understand,” he said.

Defending the process, and his job, however, became a lot more difficult when the distrust came from someone like Paces, a man seated at the commissioners’ court dais.

In the past eight months, Reeves kept finding himself constantly having to pull away from the stacks of motor vehicle registration, property tax and elections paperwork he had to complete in order to prepare for the next commissioners court meeting where the voting equipment he uses would be questioned — often without regard for facts.

The prospect of hand counting put Reeves, he told Votebeat, in what he perceived to be legal jeopardy. If the county were sued over the results of a future election, or if a lawsuit questioned the accuracy of hand counting, he would not be able to defend the practice in a courtroom. He also had no confidence that hand counting could be done in the time set under law, which requires counties to report results 24 hours after polls close. He also would not be able to explain why commissioners disagreed on whether to trust electronic vote-counting equipment even though he says he has confidence in the machines.

“Without their unanimous support I could not do my job properly,” Reeves told Votebeat after he resigned his election duties in August. By law, unless the county creates an elections department and appoints an elections administrator, the county clerk must serve as the county elections officer. The Texas Election Code allows the county commissioners, however, to transfer the election administration duties from the clerk to the tax-assessor collector, if needed – and if both departments are in agreement — which Kerr County did in 2008.

Jackie Dowdy, the county clerk who resigned in September, did not respond to Votebeat’s requests for comment about the reason behind her resignation. During a public meeting two weeks after Reeves announced he’d relinquish his duties, Dowdy appeared frustrated about the last-minute change to her department and said Reeves never reached out to her about his decision.

Under the transition plan for elections, Reeve’s office will continue to handle voter registration duties and only one of Reeves’ staffers would move over to Dowdy’s former department. “Having only one position move means I’ll only have one experienced person and that is not good,” Dowdy told the commissioners, requesting three additional staff members. “This is also going to affect the entire staff. I need space, I need desks, desktop computers, so, it’s an expense.”

The estimated cost the commissioners budgeted for such expenses comes to around $250,000, which will be borne by Kerr County taxpayers.

Paces ran for his seat on the Kerr County Commissioners Court last year with a campaign focused on frugal spending and election integrity. An Ohio native and retired engineer, Paces and his wife moved to the Texas Hill Country in the early 2000s.

After being on the job for less than a month, he began to receive text messages from local right-wing activist Alicia Bell, who said she was at the Capitol for an “election integrity legislative briefing.” The event featured Bob Hall, a Dallas-area senator who has for years pushed to eliminate electronic voting equipment; Texas GOP Vice Chair Dana Myers, who led efforts to remove Texas from an effective voter list maintenance tool; and Russ Ramsland, a Texas businessman who is widely known to spread false election conspiracies.

“Can you put voting on the agenda?” Bell asked Paces via text message, according to records obtained by the news outlet the Kerr County Lead and shared with Votebeat. “The whole presentation was jaw dropping.” Bell has been a thorn in the side of Kerr County government since she moved to the area from California. She’s a frequent speaker at commissioners court meetings who has denied that the COVID-19 pandemic is real and is against vaccine mandates.

“We are here to govern the local community. We’re not here to listen to what’s on the internet, or what’s on Fox News,” Kerr County Judge Rob Kelly — who declined Votebeat’s multiple requests for comment on this story — told Bell in 2021 after she claimed doctors were trying to scare the public by inflating positive cases of COVID-19. “I know you’re new from California, and you don’t understand how Texas local government works. We’re required to abide by and follow the law.”

Less than a month after Bell sent Paces that text message, in February, he added the topic of elections as an item on the commissioners court agenda. He proposed hosting an election integrity workshop, where the public and the other county commissioners could hear from “experts’’ first-hand.

The commissioners agreed to host the workshop, and the first took place in March at the county commissioners court. Reeves was asked to be on hand to explain the relevant laws and existing procedures, and a representative from Texas-based election machine vendor Hart Intercivic went over the company’s security features that protect voting machines from tampering. Then, Paces brought on Mark Cook, an election conspiracy theorist and self-described IT expert from Colorado who has for months without success tried to persuade Texas counties to get rid of their voting equipment while driving a branded RV from county to county. He’s been to Uvalde, Nueces, Bexar, Fort Bend, Montgomery, Denton and Gillespie Counties, among others, where county leaders and election officials have rejected his proposals.

Days after the event, Paces traveled to Waco for former president Donald Trump’s first 2024 presidential campaign rally.

Meanwhile, Reeves tried other ways to show Paces and the other commissioners that hand-counting the ballots of the county’s more than 38,000 registered voters would not be feasible. With the help of county workers, Reeves tested how long it would take to count 100 ballots from Kerr County’s March 2020 Republican primary: “With fresh eyes, it took an hour to count 32 ballots,” Reeves said.

He also warned that the county already struggles to find enough election workers and the facilities for the 20 polling locations for each election. In order to hand count, the county would likely need to double the number of poll workers, the funds to pay them and larger spaces to conduct hand counts based on the number of ballots. “That’s more than 200 people that we’d need to work nonstop,” Reeves said.

None of the evidence Reeves or others showed to Paces changed his mind.

The records shared with Votebeat show that activists from local far-right political action committee We The People and other voter fraud activists from neighboring counties have helped drive this momentum. He also had the help of national names in the “election integrity” movement, such as Seth Keshel, that has grown out of the lies about the outcome of the 2020 election.

In August, around 300 people showed up to an Election Integrity Town Hall that Paces organized, packing the expo hall at the county’s fairgrounds in Kerrville. The event lasted nearly six hours.

Many were there to see Tina Peters, the former Mesa County Colorado clerk who was indicted last year on felony and misdemeanor charges related to election equipment tampering after she allowed unauthorized people break into her county’s election system in hopes of finding evidence of fraud. As she walked in, Peters received a standing ovation from the crowd of mostly senior citizens. The crowd fell silent when she took the stage, listening as she explained why the voting machines and government officials — including those who arrested her — could not be trusted. She also denied any wrongdoing on her part related to criminal charges against her, and provided no evidence that Kerr County’s elections were flawed.

“These are Democrats and Republicans, Marxists and globalists who want to take your country,” Peters said before promoting her website, her live streamed video show and an upcoming documentary about her. “They put the people in [office] that they want. They are selected, not elected.”

Other speakers included Keshel, Hall, and Cook, who is connected to self-proclaimed “election integrity” groups across the country, and to clerks who have tried to illegally obtain access to voting systems. He described hand counting as a type of salvation for towns seeking to boost election confidence.

Cook told the crowd that government and election officials are using electronic voting equipment to tally votes because “they think we, the citizens, the peasants are too dumb to count their own votes. Not anymore,” Cook said. The crowd cheered, with a handful of onlookers shouting “Amen!”

Records show Paces arranged travel and personally paid expenses for Peters and Cook. Both stayed as guests in his home east of the county.

In September, he formally proposed the county hand count ballots for the upcoming November general election.

The vote failed to move forward after no other commissioners, also all Republicans, would second the motion. Its failure, though, was not indicative of a lack of enthusiasm in the county — the room was filled to capacity, and more waited outside the room in order to be heard on the measure.

Most of those who showed up to speak were Republicans — 75% of the county voted for former President Donald Trump in 2020. They were divided by the prospect of hand counting ballots.

Bill Ragsdale, a Kerr County justice of the peace, reminded those present that hand counting will slow the process tremendously, potentially impacting the entire state of Texas. In the 80s, he said, he assisted during an election where “Kerr County held up the entire state’s election for three days because we were hand-counting,” he said. “[Counters] worked all night long, through the next day and through the next day to try and count all the votes. Know how accurate that count was? I don’t know. We were all ready for it to be over.”

For those in favor of hand counting, objections about cost and time didn’t make much of a difference. “There is no trust right now in our current system and we need to fix that,” said Roger Hall, a resident of Ingram who told the crowd he was in favor of hand counting and did not trust voting machines. “That’s what a lot of people here today are here for.”

Paces has also taken this show on the road.

In Medina County, a small county two hours south of Kerr County, he and Cook took the stage days after his August event in Kerr, to advocate they, too, take up hand counting. Paces, who has never worked an election, led a group of people to demonstrate how a hand count would be done. Four people sat around a table and pulled out ballots from cardboard bankers boxes and started tallying.

Paces encouraged those who attended the demonstration to gather around the table to see how it’s done up close. “You’ll see this is very transparent,” he told the crowd and reassured them the counting would be done quickly.

“My plan is to have people come in to start counting ballots at 2 in the afternoon. Five hours worth. You’re done by the time the polls close. It’s a matter of getting enough people,” he said.

It’s not clear what Paces’ next move is, though he told Votebeat he is committed to enacting this change, regardless of the damage it does to the county. He rejects the assertion that hand counting would cost more money and take substantially more time with less confidence in the final results, despite having no supporting evidence to offer. He says he’d gotten hundreds of people signed up to volunteer to hand count in Kerr.

“And more people are calling me and telling me, ‘hey, sorry it didn’t work, but I’ll hand count, put me on the list,’ and more will come forward,” Paces said. “It’s almost like a movement of civic pride, and that’s great.”

Correction, Oct. 13, 2023: An earlier version of this article misspelled the name of the Kerr County deputy clerk. His name is Ian Collum.

Natalia Contreras covers election administration and voting access for Votebeat in partnership with the Texas Tribune. Contact Natalia at ncontreras@votebeat.org

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