Brazos County election officials feel the strain of unrelenting scrutiny from right-wing skeptics

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BRYAN — At election time, Trudy Hancock spends a lot of time in her car, delivering equipment to polling sites scattered around Brazos County and visiting poll workers who need her help in the field.

She keeps the car radio on, and always tuned to Christian music.

Recovering from a tiring Election Day last week, the longtime county election administrator recalled hearing one song that resonated with her. It’s called “The Truth,” and opens with the lyrics:

How many times can you hear the same lie

Before you start to believe it?

At her desk that morning, she recited a version of those lyrics as best as she could remember them, softly, haltingly.

“But I know the truth,” she added, as she tried to hold back tears. “It gets hard.”

There are reasons why the song hit home. After decades of working in elections, and years of hearing people lie about them, Hancock and her staff members are starting to sometimes doubt themselves. Like election officials around the country, they’ve repeatedly tried to reassure a small group of right-wing skeptics that the county’s elections are safe and secure. They’ve tried to answer their questions, accommodated their demands, educated them about the law, and offered them opportunities to see firsthand how the process works.

“They won’t accept our answers, because it’s not the answers that they want,” Hancock, 60, said. “There’s just no end to it.”

Election Day in Brazos — a Republican stronghold around 100 miles northwest of Houston, and home to Texas A&M University — went pretty smoothly this time. Minor technical issues were resolved early on. Few locations had long wait times.

Hancock knows the truth. But she also knows that it won’t be enough to quiet the skeptics, who were questioning election processes right up to the start of early voting this year, and haven’t stopped.

Now that the 2024 election is over, Hancock is about to decide whether she can keep doing the job.

The requests keep coming

Since January, Hancock and her staff have hosted at least three public meetings where they’ve gone over, in detail, how the voting equipment works, and every single step of the election process. They’ve explained to the group of concerned residents that voter roll maintenance is done daily by staff members whose sole job is to make sure such lists are accurate.

Following the March primary election, Hancock invited some of the residents who have been coming to Commissioners Court to take part in the state-mandated partial hand count, which is done by every county after each election to check the accuracy of the voting equipment. The Secretary of State’s office selects the races to be hand-counted.

In an effort to increase transparency, Hancock got state permission to hand-count additional races. One of the critics of her office, resident Catherine Viens, participated in the count, which took a few days to complete and showed no discrepancies.

But the requests kept coming. They asked Hancock to guard against double voting — though there’s no evidence of that happening at large scale — by purchasing special ballot paper that’s preprinted with sequential serial numbers, starting with 1.

The paper cost taxpayers $14,000 and, according to Hancock, doesn’t really improve security. It creates waste, because leftover ballots can’t be reused in the next election. On top of that, the county workers have to spend more and time resources redacting the printed numbers to protect voters’ ballot secrecy.

Hancock agreed to it anyway for the presidential election. But it didn’t seem to bring anyone peace of mind.

During a state-mandated logic and accuracy test of the electronic equipment, which is open to the public, the group repeatedly asked, “Are the machines connected to the internet?” And each time the answer was the same, “no,” said Thomas Cavaness, the Brazos County Democratic Party chair, who participated in the test.

The testing should have taken 45 minutes to an hour, Cavaness said, “but instead it took us three hours to finish, because they kept asking questions.”

False claims fly at an October meeting

The questions have been pouring in for at least a year now, from several Republicans in Brazos who speak out regularly at Commissioners Court meetings. They’ve urged elected officials to take steps that include eliminating the use of electronic voting equipment like ballot-marking machines and electronic poll books. They have falsely claimed the equipment is connected to the internet and vulnerable to hacking.

At an October meeting, days before the start of early voting, four people spoke, asking commissioners again to endorse their efforts. Brazos resident Cynthia Wiley expressed her frustration with what she said was a lack of action.

“You're our only recourse to express our concerns,” Wiley told the commissioners, citing voter registrations she’s unsuccessfully challenged. “And you guys have direct authority over the election administrator.”

Hancock has said her office is following the legally mandated procedures. Federal law prevents election officials from systematically removing people from the voter rolls 90 days ahead of a federal election. In addition, state law requires election officials to notify voters and give them a chance to respond and correct any errors before they can be removed from the rolls, but Wiley said she wanted the elected officials to instruct Hancock to investigate the registrations of the voters she had challenged right away.

At the same meeting, Viens asserted that the county had no emergency plan in case the power went out. Hancock said that’s false: The county has for years been prepared to handle power outages, violence, or natural disasters on Election Day, and Hancock had generators and other materials ready to go in case something went wrong. Viens has requested a copy of the plan.

Another resident who frequently speaks at the meetings is Walter Daughterity, a retired computer science professor at Texas A&M. Daughterity often appears on the video platform of MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell, well-known as a promoter of election conspiracy theories, and at other venues pushing for hand counting of ballots. Daughterity has asserted that Brazos’ voting machines are connected to the internet and not certified by federal officials. County and state officials have said those assertions are not true.

At the October meeting, he listed six urgent priorities for the Commissioners Court. He did not respond to Votebeat’s request for comment.

Mark Holtzapple, a chemical engineering professor at Texas A&M, has echoed Daughterity’s claims. At that meeting, he claimed that “ballot boxes are insecure,” because “the hinge on the locked box is on the outside, and all you have to do is unscrew one bolt” to get around the lock and security seal on it.

In an email to Votebeat, Holtzapple said he and the other residents are “not accusing anyone of anything. Rather, we are simply concerned citizens who want to improve election security, an essential condition for a properly functioning republic.”

The professors’ advocacy has spurred pushback from some of their colleagues at the university. Hank Walker, a computer science and engineering professor, wrote an email to Hancock in August to thank her and the staff for “performing so professionally with people who question your integrity.”

“I have known Walter and Mark for 30 years,” he said in an email to Votebeat. “They have good intentions, but they are wrong.”

Days after the public meeting where the activists spoke, Brazos County Judge Duane Peters asked Hancock to publicly respond. But when Hancock presented at the following Commissioners Court meeting, none of the residents who had complained were there.

The four residents later requested a separate in-person meeting with Peters and Hancock. She repeated what she had explained earlier. Holtzapple told Votebeat that the hourlong meeting “was not sufficient time to fully resolve the issues and generate an action plan.”

The residents compiled a 50-page document that lays out the issues they brought up at the meeting and how the county responded. They expect another meeting.

Viens said in a text message to Votebeat that her confidence in the process “will not be restored until the county complies with the Texas Election Code.” She specifically wants to see the county eliminate countywide voting, and use only hand-marked paper ballots.

Wiley, who along with Viens worked as a polling place supervisor during elections this year, including during the presidential election last week, said she does not trust the electronic voting equipment. “Once you click or insert your choices on paper into the machinery, who or what is really casting our votes?” she wrote in an email to Votebeat. She also echoed Viens’ request to help restore her confidence in the election process.

Holtzapple acknowledged that Hancock and her staff have made efforts to address the concerns he and others have raised, but said he still wants a more extensive dialogue, more substantive responses to the questions he’s raising about election security, and more responsiveness directly to the people who raise concerns.

For example, when a resident challenges a voter registration, “there should be a closing of the loop, that there should be respect shown from the government to the citizens for taking that time to identify people who possibly should be removed from the voter rolls.”

Peters, the county judge, described some of the residents’ actions and comments as a “constant barrage… I catch it, too,” he said. “And they expect me to change the system and go to something that I think is way less secure than the system we've got.”

“So I can understand why Trudy and her staff would be stressed to the limit,” Peters added. “It hasn’t impacted their work ethic, but I know it gets discouraging.”

A demanding Election Day: "They don’t understand"

Hancock was born and raised in neighboring Robertson County, and still lives there with her husband. Her first experience in elections was as a poll worker in her community back in the late 1980s, she said.

She spends her free time scrapbooking and screenprinting T-shirts. She often makes those for her staff, featuring messages such as “election squad,” and also makes them for friends and family at their request.

“It’s a fun outlet for me,” Hancock said.

She’s most proud of her two teenage grandchildren. On the night before Election Day, she was exhausted, but agreed to have them over for dinner. She made them pumpkin bread and brought some to the office the next day.

In the early morning hours of Election Day, Hancock had already answered dozens of phone calls from election workers at polling places who needed her help. If they were short on election supplies, she hopped in her small red SUV to deliver them herself, toting extra yellow traffic cones and curbside voting signs. Technical issues with the equipment? She knew whom to call. There was no problem Hancock and her staff did not resolve quickly.

Krystal Ocon and others in Hancock’s office fanned out across the county, and fielded questions from election workers in a text thread that kept her phone dinging throughout the day.

Ocon, 39, is the Brazos County elections coordinator, and unofficially Hancock’s second in command. She was born and raised in Brazos. For the past 20 years, she’s worked on every aspect of elections in the county. She knows the process thoroughly.

Throughout the day, Hancock relied on Ocon to give voters and election workers direction, and to help when needed, such as when a line of college students began to form outside of the polling location at the elections department. Many of them hadn’t updated their voter registration and would have to cast a provisional ballot, which takes more time. There was only a couple of hours left before polls were set to close.

“Look at that line!” Ocon said, before swinging into action.

She quickly gave the waiting students directions: where to stand, what type of ID they needed to have ready, the forms they might need to fill out if they weren’t registered in the county. She told them what their options were and what would happen next.

Collectively, the Brazos County elections department staff has more than 60 years of experience. So Ocon is frustrated by the constant requests and skepticism from the activists. She worries that it could discourage the staff and weaken the department.

“They don’t understand how much time and care it takes to do this job,” Ocon said.

She points out that she’s had to miss Halloween events with her daughter multiple times over the years in order to manage early voting and meet state-mandated election deadlines.

“Do they honestly think that I am going to take time away from my family to hack the machines, change votes, and go to jail?” she said. “Heck no. So yeah, I take all of this very personally.”

Poll watchers act "like detectives"

The tension between the small group of Republican activists and the county elections department penetrated decisions over how to best manage polling place staffing during this year’s elections.

Hancock said the Republican Party in Brazos, now led by Russ Ford, refused to collaborate with her staff to assign work sites for election judges, who supervise polling locations.

In the past, Hancock and her staff were able to assign workers appointed by the party to locations where they’d be a good fit. “For example, a location that gets a lot of voters needs an experienced team, and so we’d assign workers based on that,” Hancock said.

This year, the party made those placement decisions on its own, which by law, it’s entitled to do. In some cases, it assigned inexperienced workers to locations staffed only by other inexperienced workers, which led to some delays on Election Day. At one location, election judges were unsure how to process voters with out-of-state IDs or how to process provisional ballots.

And Republican poll workers said they were struggling to deal with the party’s own poll watchers.

“These poll watchers feel more like detectives than observers,” said Bill Edison, a Republican election judge in Brazos who has been a poll worker for more than a decade.

“​​Nearly all the poll watchers, except for one I had on Election Day, were from the Republican Party. And they're trolling Republican judges, in a town basically where they own the county politically,” he said. “It doesn’t make any sense.”

Ford, the party leader, said the party has been unhappy with Hancock’s staff's previous placement of workers at polling sites. “I know she's very dedicated, but we feel like we need to assert ourselves and make sure that we're doing things right,” Ford said.

The activists say they’re working on behalf of voters who lack confidence in the process. Most voters Votebeat spoke with on Election Day didn’t express such doubts.

At the Brazos Center, one of the busiest polling locations in the county, voters cast their ballots within minutes. Voters walking out and back to their cars said they had confidence in the election process. They were unaware of any issues between conservative activists and the elections department, they said.

“Things are working the way they’re supposed to,” said Brazos voter John Borden.

“The process was smooth and fast. The workers are friendly,” said Omero Lara.

Amanda Cross, who said she hasn’t always had confidence in the outcome of past elections, said she trusts how the process is handled locally. When asked if she’d heard of any problems with the elections office or anyone questioning the reliability of the voting equipment, she said “never.”

It was Donald Trump who helped fuel a movement of election suspicion after his loss in the 2020 presidential election. Hancock doubts his 2024 victory will slow that movement down. Just the day after the election, Hancock was hearing more questions from Daughterity.

“This is the new normal, and that scares me,” Hancock told Votebeat that day. “The distrust in our process and our people. The distrust in everything.”

When asked how she planned to move forward, she said, “by retiring.”

The timeline for that will depend on the results of a stress test she had scheduled for this month, after the election.

“No matter how much I love this job, you’ve got to decide whether it’s worth risking your mental and physical health,” she said. “And that’s where I am.”

Natalia Contreras covers election administration and voting access for Votebeat in partnership with the Texas Tribune. Contact Natalia at ncontreras@votebeat.org

Correction, Nov. 15, 2024 at 11:55 a.m.: A previous version of this story misspelled the name of the Brazos County Republican Party chairman. His name is Russ Ford.