ELECTIONS
After weighing a separate election with handcounted ballots and precinct- based voting, the Hays County Republican Party chose to partner with the Hays County Elections Office for the March primary. The move to have separate primaries would have impacted many processes, according to Hays County Elections Administrator Jennifer Doinoff.
The Daily Record reached out to the Hays County Republican Party multiple times for comment but did not receive a response as of time of press. However, the publicly- available newsletter issued by the organization does have the “Resolution to Conduct a Separate Hays County Republican 2026 Primary Election,” which gives the reasons the party was considering it. The newsletter stated that the Countywide Polling Program, which allows voters to vote at any polling location in the county, was problematic in several ways, including that it violates a voter’s right to a secret ballot and that voter turnout has decreased since its inception.
“Public confidence in elections requires citizen involvement and a transparent, simple, secure and verifiable accurate process of casting and counting votes,” the HCRP stated in the newsletter. “Handmarked paper ballots with precinct-based voting and hand counting uphold these principles and are a legally permissible method of conducting elections in Texas.”
The HCRP stated in the newsletter that the “CALL-IT-65” method for hand counting ballots has been approved by the Secretary of State and is being used in Gillespie County. According to the Texas Hand Counts website, the method is selfcorrecting, with tally sheets that allow hand counters to “be in a constant state of reconciliation” and catch “errors in real time.” The handcounting team has five members: a Caller, an Observer, an Echo/Tallier and two additional Talliers.
Doinoff said the county has held joint primary elections for the entirety of her ten-year tenure and has been doing so before she was hired. In a joint election, the parties share everything, including equipment, polling locations and employees. The voters go to one location and request either a Democratic or a Republican ballot.
“It serves the voters a lot better because voters are not always sure about each different type of election and what they need to do. This kind of keeps it more consistent and standardized with all our other elections,” Doinoff said. “Voters would be the most impacted, because they wouldn’t know exactly where to go or what that meant, and it wouldn’t look like what they are used to seeing in our Primary Election.”
This wouldn’t just impact Republican voters, Doinoff said. Democrats would have been required to vote at their assigned precincts as well.
“Something to keep in mind is that we’re doing redistricting right now, so some of these voters don’t even know right now what their precinct is,” Doinoff said. “They won’t get a new voter card until after sometime here in January, when we’re able to send those out. So that could cause a lot of confusion.”
Doinoff said handcounted votes would have delayed the results.
“We usually have our results by 10, 10:30 or 11 p.m. [on Election Day],” she said. “With hand counting, it may have been the next day before some results would have been released.”
Doinoff said the county does several tests to ensure polling machine accuracy. There is a test done with both parties appointing representatives. That is open to the public and occurred on Jan. 14.
“We actually take the election at hand, and we run paper ballots, we vote those ballots, and then we run them through the electronic system. Then we automatically tabulate them, so that we can hand count them and read the automatic tabulation to make sure that they’re counted the way that we voted them manually,” Doinoff said.
“We also test … the software that was certified to make sure that the software that we’re running on our machines is the same software that was certified by the EAC at the federal level when they certified the equipment,” she said. “So we make sure that nothing in the software has been tampered with or changed,” Doinoff said those same tests are also run before and after the ballots are tabulated on election day. After the election, there is a post-election handcount audit, where both parties appoint people to come in and physically count the ballots from three polling locations for in-person votes and three precincts for mail-in ballots.
Doinoff said separate primaries can be costly as well. The amount of locations would need to be expanded, along with the amount of personnel. Hand-counting is a longer process, and would therefore, equate to more pay for hourly employees.
The contracts from both parties have been signed for a joint primary for the 2026 election, so countywide polling and machine-counted votes will be continue to be utilized.
