A Texas county Republican Party has gone to federal court before a single general election ballot has been counted, asking a judge to stop certification of the state’s results unless every paper ballot in Texas is counted by hand first. The Potter County Republican Party and its chairman, Daniel Rogers, filed the lawsuit on Tuesday against Potter County Elections Administrator Christy Benge, and they seek to turn the case into a statewide class action covering county election administrators, Al Jazeera reported.
The complaint does not allege that any voting machine in Potter County, or anywhere in Texas, has actually changed a vote. Its 27 pages argue instead that the possibility of hacking, software error and manipulation by increasingly sophisticated artificial intelligence, together with Chinese made components inside voting machines, makes the state’s existing safeguards constitutionally inadequate. Texas law already requires post election hand count audits where electronic systems are used; the plaintiffs want a complete hand count of every ballot in every precinct as a precondition of certification, a procedure state law does not currently require.
The case is assigned to US District Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk in Amarillo. The plaintiffs state that they do not seek to prevent voting, postpone election day or invalidate lawfully cast ballots. In practice, the relief requested would hold up the normal certification timetable for the November 3 election while an unprecedented statewide manual count was organised, in a state where Democrat James Talarico has polled narrowly ahead of Republican Ken Paxton in a Senate race that could decide which party controls the chamber.
The filing is the second pre-emptive certification fight of the final week, after the Justice Department’s suit over Alaska’s Senate race, and it follows a pattern in which the legal battle over the 2026 midterms is being fought before the results exist. Democracy Docket reported that Rogers has a long record of election denial claims, including an unsupported assertion that more people voted than were registered in 17 counties in 2020. The Texas Secretary of State’s office declined to comment to Al Jazeera, and neither Senate campaign responded.