Under Texas law, if one party hand-counts ballots, both parties must abandon countywide Election Day voting at vote centers and require voters to cast ballots at assigned neighborhood precincts. Democrats had planned to use voting equipment to tabulate their results, but would have been forced into precinct-only voting if Republicans proceeded with a hand count. It’s unclear if the GOP’s intention to use precinct-based voting would lock Democrats into the same arrangement; the Dallas County Elections Department has not responded to requests for more information.

Republicans in Dallas County and elsewhere have pushed in recent years to count ballots by hand as President Donald Trump and others have decreased trust in voting machines by spreading unfounded claims about their reliability. However, election officials and voting experts have repeatedly warned that hand-counting ballots at scale is costly, labor-intensive, slower to produce results and more prone to human error than machine tabulation. State law also does not require audits of hand-counted ballots and severely limits public observation of the counting process.