Preemptive sore losers: Potter County GOP sues before the votes are counted

Seven days before Texans cast ballots in the November 3 midterm, the Potter County Republican Party asked a federal judge to block Texas from certifying an election that had not happened yet. Five days out, the suit remains an exercise in forum choice and forward-looking fear: the plaintiffs do not allege that any machine has ever changed a vote, that any past count was wrong, or that any ballot has been compromised. Their claim is that electronic voting systems could in theory be hacked or misused — and therefore every paper ballot and record in every Texas precinct must be recounted by hand before certification, with the hand count controlling wherever it conflicts with the electronic tabulation.

That is the entire basis of the suit, filed October 27, 2026, against Potter County Elections Administrator Christy Benge: a speculative fear of artificial intelligence or foreign interference, not an identified miscount. Texas law already requires counties using electronic tabulation to conduct a post-election hand-count audit of a sample of ballots to check machine results. The filers argue sampling is insufficient and demand a 100 percent statewide hand count instead. County officials are required by state law to certify their canvassed returns, and election officials and legal experts cited by the Texas Tribune say refusing to certify canvassed results could itself violate the Texas Election Code.

Asked to explain his reasoning, Potter County GOP Chairman Daniel Rogers put it plainly to reporters: “I trust people. I don’t trust electronics.”

The timing is unlikely to be accidental. County canvassing authorities may begin meeting November 6 and must complete the local canvass by November 17, 2026. The governor’s canvass of federal, statewide, and district races takes place between November 21 and December 7. The suit asks for emergency relief now, arguing that “pre-certification verification would be less disruptive than post-certification litigation” — a request for a statewide hand recount inserted into the middle of the canvass calendar, with no evidence that the machine count got anything wrong.

The forum choice is the tell. The case landed in the Amarillo Division of the Northern District of Texas, assigned directly to U.S. District Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk. Amarillo is a single-judge division — Kacsmaryk, a Trump appointee confirmed in June 2019, is the only federal district judge there — so the filers faced no random draw and could reliably know in advance which judge would hear the case. The Brennan Center identifies Amarillo as the best-known example of federal judge shopping: litigants filing there can dependably obtain this particular judge rather than a random assignment across multiple judges.

Kacsmaryk’s appellate record makes that choice revealing. His most consequential ruling did not survive: a nationwide injunction in April 2023 that would have suspended the FDA’s 2000 approval of mifepristone was vacated in part by the Fifth Circuit that August, which held the challenge to the original approval was likely time-barred. The case ended on June 13, 2024, when a unanimous Supreme Court threw it out for lack of standing, leaving no part of Kacsmaryk’s order in effect. In a separate case, on August 18, 2025, a divided Fifth Circuit panel reversed his denial of an injunction to West Texas A&M students seeking to hold a campus drag show, holding the students were likely entitled to relief. That panel opinion was later vacated after the full Fifth Circuit agreed to rehear the case en banc, so the reversal did not remain the controlling disposition — a reminder that these outcomes turn on an appeals court’s review, not the trial judge’s sweep.

The pattern holds across the cases: Kacsmaryk hands down the sweeping ruling aligned with the filers’ ask, and then the Fifth Circuit or the Supreme Court walks it back. A filing in Amarillo offers no guarantee of a sympathetic first ruling, but it does ensure that Kacsmaryk, whose record includes sweeping trial-court orders later narrowed or reversed, would be the initial decision-maker.

Because the complaint invokes Fourteenth Amendment claims and emergency relief, a ruling could come quickly — potentially before the canvass deadlines begin — though no hearing date had been announced at filing. Watch whether any court actually orders certification paused before the county canvass deadline of November 17. Otherwise, local results will be confirmed at your county’s completed canvass and the governor’s statewide canvass, both of which Texas law requires officials to carry out.

The complaint’s own framing is the giveaway. A suit alleging no actual vote was changed anywhere, filed days before the election in a hand-picked courtroom, buys a splashy headline and a season of doubt around certification — a delay aimed at a result the filers could not change at the polls — rather than a remedy for any real flaw in the count. Democracy Docket, the election-litigation watchdog founded by Marc Elias, is tracking the case as an active election-administration matter filed October 27, 2026, under the caption Potter County Republican Party v. Benge.