Potter County Republicans Sue to Block Texas Election Certification Unless Every Paper Ballot Is Hand Counted
The federal lawsuit, filed Tuesday in Amarillo and assigned to Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk, concedes no Texas machine has changed a vote — it argues the possibility of hacking and AI manipulation makes the state's sample audits unconstitutional.
A Texas county Republican Party is asking a federal court to stop certification of the state's November 3 election results unless officials first hand count every paper ballot in Texas. The Potter County Republican Party and its chairman, Daniel Rogers, filed the lawsuit on Tuesday against Potter County Elections Administrator Christy Benge, seeking to prevent certification until officials conduct a hand count of every paper ballot cast in every Texas precinct, according to Democracy Docket's report of the complaint.
The case was filed in the Amarillo Division of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas, where it is assigned to U.S. District Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk, a Trump appointee confirmed to the federal bench in 2019, Democracy Docket reported. The plaintiffs ask the court to certify a class of Texas county election administrators, with Benge as their representative, and to bar officials from completing certification until “all paper election records or ballots in all precincts in Texas” have been hand counted — with the hand-count totals to determine the results if they differ from the electronic count.
The 27-page complaint rests on the possibility of hacking, software errors, foreign-made voting machine components and manipulation by increasingly sophisticated artificial intelligence, according to the report. It does not allege that voting machines in Potter County — or anywhere else in Texas — have actually changed votes; the plaintiffs explicitly concede they are not claiming any previous Potter County election was altered or inaccurately reported, and wrote that the federal conditions they cite do “not, alone, establish with certainty that any particular Texas voting machine has miscounted votes in the past.”
Texas already requires post-election hand-count audits of a portion of ballots when electronic voting systems are used; the complaint acknowledges that requirement but argues a sample is insufficient, invoking the Fourteenth Amendment's due process and equal protection guarantees, Democracy Docket reported. The plaintiffs say they do not seek to prevent voting, postpone Election Day or invalidate lawfully cast ballots. The lawsuit was filed seven days before Election Day, and no court order has changed how Texas ballots will be counted or certified.
