Political parties in Texas choose how to run their primaries. Here’s how that causes headaches for voters.
This article was originally published by Votebeat, a nonprofit news organization covering local election administration and voting access.
By Natalia Contreras, Votebeat
Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for Votebeat Texas’ free newsletter here.
By all accounts, the administration of the 2026 primary election in Williamson County was calamitous.
Voters did not know where to vote. Lines were long and chaotic. Election workers made errors and misplaced ballots.
Nearly everyone seems to agree on who’s to blame: the Williamson County Republican Party, which last fall decided to eliminate countywide voting and, for the first time in more than a decade, force all voters to cast ballots at assigned precincts instead. Republicans in Dallas and Eastland counties made the same decision.
The moves set off a chain reaction of problems.
“It was a mess, and I’m not going to deny that it was a mess,” said Michelle Evans, the chair of the Williamson County GOP, at a county commissioners court meeting days after the March election, though she said Republicans weren’t the only ones responsible. The meeting, inside the county courthouse in downtown Georgetown, an affluent suburb of Austin, was packed with upset voters and poll workers, who applauded a line of unhappy speakers.
“I think that the constituents of this county deserve free and fair elections. I’m actually just kind of upset. I can’t believe that I have to sit here and say these things,” one speaker said. “I think we all deserve better.”
Russ Boles, a Republican county commissioner, said neighbors and friends reached out on Election Day, frustrated and frantic because they couldn’t vote.
“I tried explaining to them that this was the parties’ election,” not a decision made by the county, he said during the meeting, still confounded.
“They don’t buy it.”
Believe it or not, it’s true. Texas is the rare state that still gives county political parties the authority to administer primary elections more or less as they please, with taxpayers paying for it. Although early voting is administered by county governments, on Election Day, the parties, under state law, are allowed to decide where voters cast ballots, how they cast them, and how those ballots are counted.
That means that when the executive committee of the Williamson County GOP decided to go back to precinct-based voting, county election officials who saw problems coming could and did warn them — but couldn’t stop them.
Party control of primaries has been the law in Texas for more than 100 years. But experts and officials say it’s caused more problems lately, including the ones that marred last month’s election. They point to changes demanded by some Republicans, influenced by unfounded conspiracies about election technology and practices. Some of those changes, they say, have made elections in some counties less secure, results less accurate, or conditions worse for voters. And those voters have few options to hold the parties accountable.
In Dallas County, where Republicans also forced a switch back to precincts, at least 12,674 confused voters went to the wrong precinct, creating chaos on Election Day. Dozens of voters in Eastland County were also confused by the switch to precincts, and some complained about the party’s decision to switch to hand-marked paper ballots. Meanwhile, hand-counting GOP primary results in Eastland took until deep into the day after the election, and Calhoun County Republicans missed a state-mandated deadline to report results.
Republicans’ decision to count primary results by hand and to eliminate all use of electronic election equipment in Gillespie County has led to errors, and at least two instances where the county’s elections administrator believes some people were permitted to vote twice. And within the past five years, county party officials from both major parties have been charged with misusing the money allocated to them by the state to pay for election costs.
Republicans, though, are pressing for even more power over Texas primaries. In late 2025, they sued the state’s top election official, Texas Secretary of State Jane Nelson, seeking to close the primary and even to create their own voter registration system.
Lawmakers unlikely to intervene in party control
Party control of primaries is enshrined in state law, and only Texas lawmakers can change it. But it’s unlikely that they will. “I’d rather see the parties learn from their mistakes than have the state come in and take any decision-making away from them,” said State Rep. Matt Shaheen, a Republican from North Texas who chairs the House elections committee.
State Rep. John Bucy, an Austin Democrat and the vice chair of the committee, said he is planning legislation that would let each party make independent decisions about countywide voting, so one party can’t force the other into precinct voting against their will.
Taking primary election administration decisions away from the county parties “is a much harder hurdle,” Bucy said. “I’m not saying we shouldn’t have those conversations moving forward so that this doesn’t happen again, but in most counties, both parties work well together and get this done efficiently.”
The current system was created as a response to Jim Crow-era efforts to keep Black Texans from voting in wholly party-controlled primaries. Those efforts ultimately led to three U.S. Supreme Court decisions ruling that primaries are not private activities, but instead, public functions, and therefore, keeping Black voters from participating in them was unconstitutional.
After those rulings, party and county officials began to run the primaries together. For years, parties paid for the costs of the primary with funds from candidate filing fees. Years later, the state began allocating some public money, and by the 1990s, it was paying up to 60% of the costs, with the rest coming from filing fees. In the handful of other states where state law permits parties to run their own primaries, they rarely do it because the laws also require the parties to also pay the expenses if they do.
But in Texas, state law continues to describe primary elections as party-run elections, even as they are now mostly funded by the public. Under this system, lawmakers allocate funding and parties must follow state-mandated requirements, such as providing the required number of workers at polling locations and turning in results no later than 24 hours after polls close.
Outside of this, parties have wide leeway for how to run their elections. Parties can choose whether to run a joint primary with the opposing political party or not. They can also choose whether to contract with the county elections department to run the election, or some aspects of it, or run it entirely on their own.
In a state with 254 counties, that means that by law, on Election Day, the primary can be administered up to 508 different ways across the state.
For a long time, local officials were happy to let the parties take on the chore of running the primaries, particularly as it represented yet another task for county clerks until the 1980s, when a new law allowed counties to create election departments, said Glen Maxey, a former Democratic state lawmaker and lobbyist. These days, more counties have hired professional election administrators, but whether or not they handle administering the primary elections is still up to the parties to decide.
Maxey in the early 2000s helped craft legislation creating the state’s countywide polling place program, which allows voters to cast their ballot at any polling location in the county. The polling locations used under the program are also known as vote centers, and can reduce election costs and staffing needs while offering voters more flexibility in where they can cast ballots.
In order to use the countywide polling place program for the primary, both political parties have to agree, a compromise Maxey said was necessary for the legislation to pass. Otherwise, by law, both parties must use the assigned precinct locations on Election Day.
That’s why, when Republican parties this year in Dallas, Williamson, and Eastland counties rejected countywide polling places after years of using them, Democrats, too, were forced into assigned precincts, sparking mass voter confusion.
Still, “I don’t think there’s any way in hell” state lawmakers will change party control of primaries, Maxey said.
“It would take somebody at the top, the governor, or somebody asking for election reform, or it would take one of their races being affected by a hand count or something,” he said.
Republicans in all three counties have since said they’ll use countywide voting for the May 26 runoff election. But in Dallas County, the decision to switch back sparked a messy backlash that led to the resignation of the party chair and a lawsuit –which was dismissed by the courts— to try to avert the switch.
Ultimately, GOP party chairs said they believe Texas should keep the current system of party control, though some want a few tweaks.
Evans, the GOP chair in Williamson County, took responsibility for the problems there, but also told Votebeat that county election offices should have been more prepared to contend with any choice the county parties make, since they’re within their legal rights to make them.
The GOP chair in Gillespie, Bruce Campbell, also said he believes parties should keep control. But he wants the Legislature to require an audit for hand counts. Under current state law, only machine counts must be audited.
For their part, some Democratic leaders also say the parties should remain involved in their candidates’ nominations and in how primary elections are administered. But Kardal Coleman, the Democratic chair in Dallas County, said he’s open to improvements and learning from other states.
“Everything we do should be for the benefit of voters and to make the process more seamless and easier for them to participate in,” Coleman said.
Parties’ changes have risked election security
Republicans have repeatedly said their election administration choices are aimed at making elections more secure. But it doesn’t always work out that way.
In Gillespie County, home to Fredericksburg in the Texas Hill Country, where Republicans have now chosen to count ballots by hand in the past two primaries, county officials found that some voters cast ballots twice in 2024.
Jim Riley, the county elections administrator, had tried for months ahead of the 2024 primary election to convince Republicans that the county’s electronic voting equipment was secure.
But Republicans didn’t want to use it. And in addition to declining to use the tabulation equipment, the party asked Riley to assemble paper poll books, a substitute for the electronic poll books the county typically uses.
In June, not long after the 2024 runoff election, Riley was manually updating the voting history of voters who’d cast ballots in the election, as required by law.
He saw something that didn’t look right. He paused when he noticed that a voter on one of the lists had been marked as having voted in both the Democratic and Republican primaries on Election Day. Then, he found another one. He also spotted one who’d voted in the Democratic primary and subsequently cast a ballot in the Republican runoff, which is prohibited under state law.
“It should have all been caught,” Riley told Votebeat. But it wasn’t, because Republicans were not using electronic poll books – the equipment that election officials use to quickly check whether a voter has already voted or not. Instead, they were relying on the more cumbersome paper system.
Riley reported what he found to the county sheriff’s office and the county’s district attorney’s office. The sheriff’s office said its investigation is still ongoing.
This year, when Republicans changed longtime election practices in Williamson and Eastland counties, it led to misplacement of some ballots and tally sheets that are necessary to complete election results. In both instances, a court order was necessary to resolve the issue and finish reporting election results.
Public dollars, party choices
Texas taxpayers spend millions on the primaries. The Legislature in 2025 allocated about $21 million in funding for the 2026 primary, and the state expected an additional $5 million from candidate filing fees that would also go toward the costs.
As recently as a decade ago, the state reimbursed party chairs for primary expenses with very little oversight. In 2017, lawmakers approved a change in state law meant to prevent party chairs’ misuse of state funds intended for administering primary elections.
The state now has more oversight over the expenses parties get reimbursed for, such as ballot printing costs, election supplies, polling location rental fees, election worker pay. When the parties choose to contract with county election officials to administer the primary, the state pays the county and voting equipment vendors directly. If the parties choose to handle it themselves, the state pays the party directly. Both county officials and county party chairs are required to submit expense reports with receipts and invoices for state approval.
Still, in recent years, party officials have been accused of stealing thousands of dollars from their party’s primary accounts.
And even funds used for election activities can add up. Gillespie County Republicans’ choice to hand count ballots in 2024 meant that primary cost more than double the 2020 primary, according to public records obtained by Votebeat. That year on Election Day, county Republicans paid more than $40,000 for 355 workers who spent nearly 24 hours hand counting. In the 2020 primary, when the party used the county’s voting equipment to tabulate results, the party employed 45 workers and spent less than $7,000.
The Texas Secretary of State’s Office last year warned party officials multiple times that it wouldn’t cover higher-than-normal costs for the 2026 primary compared with previous years.
Frustrations, but no veto power
At that March meeting in Williamson County, poll worker after poll worker said they were embarrassed and frustrated on Election Day as voters from both parties showed up at the wrong polling location and had to be turned away. Some are now worried that the problems will affect upcoming elections in the county.
“I know how difficult it is to recruit poll workers, and this chaos just made future elections that much more difficult to staff,” one told commissioners at the meeting.
Another demanded answers from county leaders, “Why was the option given to the parties for single-precinct voting? Could the commissioners have stopped it or vetoed it?”
The answer is no.
Shaheen, the chair for the House Elections Committee, said he doesn’t want the state to step in, though he told Votebeat he expects the push by some local GOP parties to eliminate countywide voting and to get rid of voting machines to count ballots by hand won’t last much longer.
Some of those county parties, he said, “are experiencing the pain of some of their decisions and they’re going to learn their lessons.”
“What we need to do is do a better job of explaining to people that our elections in Texas are secure,” he said. “If this is because people are concerned about election integrity, then we need to do a better job at addressing that.”
The Dallas Free Press contributed photos to this article. Visit their site here.
Natalia Contreras covers election administration and voting access for Votebeat in partnership with the Texas Tribune. Natalia is based in Corpus Christi. Contact her at ncontreras@votebeat.org.
Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization covering local election integrity and voting access. Sign up for their newsletters here.