Blog Article
The Dallas County Republican Party Claims It Will Be the First Large County In the Country to Conduct a Hand-Marked, Hand-Counted Primary
In a series of recent meetings, the Dallas County Republican Party has made it clear that it intends to conduct a precinct-specific, hand-marked, hand-counted primary in March 2026. That is very exciting. It is what we all have been waiting for and anticipating. After all, that is what Chairman Allen West promised us during his 2024 primary campaign. But, has anyone seen the DCRP’s plan? Have 3,000+ hand counters been identified and confirmed? How much are they being paid? And perhaps most importantly, has the money been raised and secured to fund the hand-counted primary? According to the DCRP’s last Federal Ethics Commission Report in July 2025, the Party had approximately $137,000.00 in the bank with a monthly burn rate of approximately $23,000.00 a month. A very conservative estimate of the amount needed just to pay the workers in a hand-counted primary far exceeds $800,000.00 and that amount does not take into account the cost of the equipment and supplies.
In fact, a very detailed estimate from Tarrant County in 2023 opined that it would cost between $668,780.00 and $1,894,877.00 for Tarrant County to conduct a hand count primary [1]. Dallas County had about 40,000 less Republican primary voters than Tarrant County in the March 2024 primary, so one might think that the Dallas costs would be a little less [2]. However, the Dallas County ballot had many more races and/or candidates than the Tarrant County ballot in March 2024, which means it would take longer and more workers to count. With redistricting, Dallas County will add several Congressional Districts that include parts of Dallas County in the 2026 March primary that did not exist in 2024. This will add to the length of the Dallas County ballot which will require even more counters and/or time to hand-count the ballots.
All said, the Tarrant County analysis, which is quite thorough and was compiled by very knowledgeable sources, including a Texas Christian University Political Science Professor, is very applicable to the Dallas County situation and closely mirrors the conclusions that the DCRP leadership made in 2023. The Tarrant County analysis concluded that “the almost $2-million dollar cost estimate, which is a large sum in itself, only covers the costs of election workers needed to run the 2024 Republican primary election. It doesn’t include the costs of training the election workers, printing the ballots or any other associated costs …” Some of those costs would include the necessary ballot boxes and cameras required by Texas Statute for each counting location, But it would also include a marketing campaign approved by the Texas Secretary of State to educate voters on where they would have to vote since they would no longer be able to vote wherever they wanted.
The 2026 primary is seven months away. If the Party is going to contract with the Dallas County Elections Department, it must do so in the next three months. It is our understanding that the Dallas County Republican Precinct Chairs are being asked to vote on the Primary method in less than two weeks. Do they have enough information to make such a decision? Yes Gillespie County did it in 2024. It has 18 voting precincts. Dallas County has 798 voting precincts.
We all want precinct-based, hand-marked paper ballots that never touch a machine that is linked to the internet – perhaps a tabulator in the voting center that is not capable of being hacked by outside influences would be more efficient. Is that possible without adding the incredibly difficult and potentially insurmountable costs of hand-counting? Especially in a County the size of Dallas? Prior to the Florida hanging chads, is that not exactly what we had in Dallas County?
Footnotes:
[1] See Report on the Projected Cost of Precinct-only Voting With Hand-marked, Hand-counted Ballots in Tarrant County.
[2] According to the Tarrant County Elections Department, 145,348 Republicans voted in the 2024 Presidential Primary. The Dallas County Elections Department reported that 104,972 Republicans voted in the 2024 Presidential Primary.
