The Case for Voting by Precinct
And How Precinct-Voting Protects Ballot Secrecy While Ensuring Auditable Results and Speedy Recounts
Context Surrounding Use of Voting Precincts, Undue Influence from NGOs, and the Inorganic Progression of Countywide Vote Centers Across American Elections
Voting Precincts, also known as an election district or polling district, is the smallest administrative unit, or political subdivision, into which cities or towns are divided for electoral purposes. Each precinct contains a specific polling place where residents cast their ballots.
The primary purpose of voting precincts is to organize voters into manageable geographic areas, ensuring efficient administration of elections, proper auditability and accountability for all expected voters. This structure facilitates accurate voter registration, distribution of ballots, and tallying of votes. By dividing larger electoral regions into smaller precincts, election officials can better manage polling location records and resources, helping to prevent overcrowding and reduce wait times for voters.
All U.S. states utilize precinct-based polling places, including the Distrtict of Columbia. However, the adoption of vote centers has introduced an alternative model. Traditionally, most U.S. states have utilized precinct-based polling places for county elections. However, the adoption of vote centers has introduced an alternative model.
In Texas, non-governmental organizations, or NGOs, like the Texas Association of Election Administrators and the Texas Association of County Election Officials were part of the support and push towards Countywide Vote Centers through the members comprising the body of the organization.
These bodies are mostly made up of state executive branch and county election officials. Support for Countywide Vote Centers from these state-level NGOs, and others like them, is taken as endorsement from industrty experts. Their outward support for the adoption of Countywide Vote Centers has been admitted to as well as witnessed in both public forum and lobbying efforts at the state and local levels.
Most recently, Heider Garcia, former Tarrant County, Texas Election Administrator and current Dallas County, Texas Election Administrator, in a Lake Highlands Republican Club Forum, was asked if the NGOs he is a member of, specifically the Texas Association of County Election Officials, is pushing for the continued use of Countywide Vote Centers. To this question, Heider responded, “Of course, we support them, you know that.”
These NGOs hold destination conferences 100% sponsored by voting system vendors who also push the use of Countywide Vote Centers, and lobby for them after providing the best selling points in presentations at said destination conferences.
Countywide Vote Centers necessarily require electronic poll books, connected to the internet, capable of adding and removing voters remotely, in order to track voter turnout live across the county.
This is why most counties have invested in elecronic poll books,this is a necessary prerequisite to eliminating voting by paper ballot on a paper poll book. This explains the push for Countywide Vote Centers from voting system manufacturers influencing election officials at destination conferences.
Our report is an endorsement against Countywide Vote Centers in favor of the lawful return to casting ballots by precinct, and offers a proposal to assist county government and state legislatures to facilitate backing out of Countywide Vote Centers and all of the associated concerns.
The Case for Precinct-Level Election Reporting:
Ensuring Transparency, Accuracy, and Trust
Election integrity is a cornerstone of our constitutional representative republic form of self-governance. The systematic reporting of election results at the precinct level serves as a foundational practice that ensures transparency, facilitates audits, and enhances public confidence in electoral outcomes. This report examines the necessity of precinct-level reporting, the legal mandates governing the process, and the operational mechanisms that ensure its effectiveness in recounts, audits, and accurate election reporting.
Legal Framework and Mandates
Precinct-level election reporting is legally mandated in most U.S. states to ensure compliance with both federal and state laws governing electoral processes. Several key legal provisions underscore its importance:
Help America Vote Act (HAVA) (2002): Establishes standards for election administration, including record-keeping and auditing procedures, secret ballots, provisional ballots and full access to election records as public records.
Federal law mandates election record retention for at least 22 months for the purposes of requested audits and recounts. The preservation period exists for this purpose, the preservation period is not a barrier to the records preserved.
Voting Rights Act of 1965: Ensures that reporting practices do not enable voter suppression or discrimination.
State Election Codes: Most states require results to be reported at the precinct level before aggregation at the county and state levels, accounting for all potential voters and participating voters, which also allows for speedy audits and cost-effective recounts.
Conceptual Benefits of Precinct-Level Reporting
1. Enhanced Accuracy in Vote Tabulation
Precinct-level reporting ensures that errors in ballot counting can be quickly detected and rectified. By breaking down election results into smaller, localized units, election officials can pinpoint discrepancies more effectively than when relying solely on aggregated county or state data.
2. Facilitating Accurate Audits
When election results are contested, precinct-level data serves as the foundation for recounts and audits. The granular reporting structure allows officials to isolate issues within specific locations rather than undertaking costly and time-consuming statewide recounts.
3. End to Risk-Limiting Audits (RLAs)
These are not real audits, and only limit risk for voting system vendors being found out to have inaccuracies in their tabulation equipment, which is why the same organizations push both RLAs and computerized voting systems.
With precinct-based voting, there is no need to rely on suspect samples with no recourse for issues identified, as discrepancies are easily identified and remedied.
4. Simplified, Speedy Manual Recounts
In cases where electronic voting systems or tabulation methods are questioned, precinct-level reporting provides a clear reference point for hand recounts.
5. Boosting Public Trust and Transparency
One of the primary objectives of precinct-level reporting is to instill confidence in the electoral system. By making vote tallies available at the precinct level, stakeholders—including voters, candidates, and election monitors—can independently verify the reported results.
Public Access to Data: Preservation of ballot secrecy eliminates the need to redact what are mandated to be secret ballots. Voters and candidates are offered full auditability of election records.
Ballot Secrecy: Precinct-based voting guarantees voters the right to ballot secrecy by casting all ballots of a precinct in one ballot box.
The switch to countywide vote centers both exacerbated the existing ballot secrecy issues associated with voting Early countywide and voting Absentee/ by Mail, as well as eliminated the final guarantee for voters to case a secret ballot by precinct on election day.
Voters now must wait to see whether their ballot will be publicly available, after election records are released to the public, based on whether any other voter from their precinct voted at the same location.
6. Detecting and Preventing Fraud
While instances of voter fraud are statistically rare, and though TBTR Strategies has identified what appears to be the facilitation of widespread election fraud without detection on the administrative level, state legislatures must strive to draft election security measures which ensure every vote is counted accurately.
Precinct-level reporting helps detect irregularities, such as unexplained surges in voter turnout or inconsistencies between reported votes and voter check-in records.
Accurate Chain of Custody: Proper documentation at the precinct level ensures that ballots are tracked from the time they are cast until they are counted and reported.
Cross-Referencing Voter Rolls: Election officials can compare precinct-level turnout with registration data to detect anomalies that may warrant further investigation.
Practical Benefits and Operational Considerations in Precinct-Based Voting
To maximize the effectiveness of precinct-level reporting, election officials must adhere to best practices in ballot processing, tabulation, and record-keeping:
Standardized Reporting Procedures: Easy to report and confirm precinct-level results across a county or district.
Paper Poll Books Save Money: Paper Poll Books with the list of voters authorized to vote in a precinct polling location are much more affordable that electronic poll books which connect to the internet and have been reported to add voters into the voting location remotely, without the clerks processing the voter in-person.
Paper Ballot Systems Made Simple: Federal and state statutes mandate paper ballots as the official record of the election.
Challenges and Considerations
While precinct-level reporting is ideal for transparency and accuracy, it also presents challenges that must be addressed:
Privacy Concerns in Countywide Voting: In locations with low voter turnout, precinct-level results could inadvertently reveal individual voter choices.
States may mitigate this by redacting what should be public information, when simply casting ballots of a precinct into one ballot box would mitigate the issue countywide without redacting what are mandated to be secret ballots.
Provisional Ballot Use Mandated: Provisional Ballots are available to any voter attempting to vote in a location where their name does not appear on the voter list. If the voter is a lawful voter of a county, the ballot is counted.
Voting Rights Activists may argue that assigning voters to a polling place near the voter’s home is a violation of their civil rights, because it could potentially be inconvenient.
Federal Law prevents a voter from being denied a ballot, and any voter who wishes to vote at a location to which they are not assigned may cast a provisional ballot, or limited ballot, to be counted later once the voter’s eligibility is verified.
The voter retains the right to cast a regular ballot at a polling location they are assigned to within a reasonable distance from their house as determined by the state legislature and county election officials.
Logistical Complexities in Large Elections: Managing thousands of precincts requires robust infrastructure and coordination between local, county, and state election offices. Some counties may have eliminated many precinct-level locations in the switch to Countywide Vote Centers, and for those counties we offer the TBTR Strategies Combined Precinct Solution where feasible.
The solution is shown in the form of an interactive map of Tarrant County, Texas. Where legislation is needed to facilitate this solution, TBTR Strategies is available to help with drafting the language.
This solution is only to authorize the combination of adjacent precincts into nearby polling locations, to save the county from having to obtain polling locations and staff in every single precinct in the county.
Conclusion
Precinct-level election reporting remains one of the most effective mechanisms for ensuring transparency, accuracy, and public trust in elections. By facilitating recounts, enabling audits, and allowing for real-time monitoring, this approach strengthens the electoral process and enhances voter confidence. While challenges exist, adherence to best practices and the continued development of secure, standardized reporting procedures can further solidify the integrity of constitutional representative republic elections. The mandate for precinct-level reporting is not merely a procedural requirement but a fundamental safeguard for democracy.
Recommendations
Strengthen Legal Protections for Precinct-Level Reporting: Legislatures should ensure robust laws requiring precinct-level reporting, ballot secrecy and speedy, cost-effective recounts.
Reorganize Election Infrastructure: States and localities should use the TBTR Strategies Combined Precinct Solution to swiftly return to precinct-based voting to ensure secure, efficient, and accurate precinct-level tabulation.
Expand Public Access to Precinct Data: Increasing transparency through online precinct-level result publication can boost public trust in elections, including polling location reports for all precincts assigned to each location.
Improve Election Worker Training: Standardized training programs should be implemented to reduce errors in precinct-level reporting.
By maintaining and improving precinct-level reporting standards, election administrators can uphold the principles of constitutional representative republic governance, ensuring that every vote is counted and verified with the highest degree of accuracy and integrity.
Proposed Solution:
TBTR Strategies Combined Precinct Solution
At TBTR Strategies, we examined the issues and determined that counties who have opted in to using Countywide Vote Centers have often reduced polling locations, no longer having locations in each precinct.
We suggest that, where possible, Texas counties and counties in other states take the position that, due to funding and staffing concerns and restraints, counties must be authorized to assign voters to polling locations by combining voting precinct polling locations for adjacent precincts, up to a certain number of voters per location. For example, take this map of Tarrant County, Texas polling locations. In Texas, the law for combining polling locations was recently muddied, and is currently being amended for further clarification. The law caps polling locations at either 5,000 or 10,000 assigned voters, so the TBTR Strategies Combined Precinct Solution errs on the side of caution and combined voting precinct locations up to 8,000 voters, with most under 5,000. I eliminated over twenty currently staffed polling locations, which could be opened to reduce all locations to under 5,000 voters.
TBTR STRATEGIES COMBINED PRECINCT SOLUTION INTERACTIVE MAP AND CUSTOM MAPPING FORMULA
Each marker on each polling location shows which precincts are assigned to the location and the total number of voters assigned to that location. We propose using the same locations for the same precincts throughout Early Voting and on Election Day, with legislative authorization if necessary.
This map comes with our custom mapping formula, which allows TBTR Strategies to quickly rearrange precincts to other polling locations and to immediately adjust the number of expected voters for that location based on the assigned precincts and their registered voters.
This interactive map and custom mapping forumula by TBTR Strategies is hard, irrefutable proof that county voters can be adequately, lawfully and satisfactorily served when assigned to a nearby polling location.
This is proof that voters in counties who cast ballots by precinct are not disenfranchised, but the opposite is true. They are guaranteed speedy audits, recounts and are also guaranteed ballot secrecy. Call your representatives and ask them to contract with TBTR Strategies to swiftly navigate this nuanced issue, and not continue to be hoodwinked by this “Big Elections” lobbying machine.
See our report on the ECHO 65 Method for Hand Counting Hand-Marked Paper Ballots for our recommended method of voting, which is necessary to be conducted by precinct. However, ePoll Books can be bound by precinct(s) and ballot-on-demand printers can be used in EHCO 65 if the county is unable to back out of contracts with voting system vendors.
Because counties who adopt Countywide Vote Centers, counties across the United States, especially counties who wish to return to casting ballots by precinct for ballot secrecy and auditability purposes, must be authorized to combine polling locations when it was feasible to do so.
To help your county restore accountability, ballot secrecy, auditability, access to public records, and trust to your elections, please send them this report, and urge them to contact TBTR Strategies for additional information. We are available for contract to ensure this procedure is authorized in the most efficient manner without undue influence or improper practice.
TBTR Strategies does not work to disenfranchise any voter, but to ensure accurate elections while guaranteeing ballot secrecy, for auditable records without retribution or retaliation for ballot selections. We seek to establish proper representation for all Americans, adhering to existing state and federal laws providing for just that.
Thank you, Patriots
Aubree
Founder
TBTR Strategies
Tbtr.us