Dallas County Elections Administrator Toni Pippins-Poole discovered her office did not count about 10% of the ballots that voters cast on Super Tuesday.
She is now asking a court to let her conduct a manual recount of the votes, after she discovered 44 thumb drives containing ballots that were not included in the final results.
It’s uncertain which precincts are involved, how many votes are at issue or whether the apparent winners from any races will change.
It is also uncertain if the 44 thumb drives represent 44 individual voting centers or joint centers where votes were cast in both primaries.
Still, the drives represent almost a tenth of the total vote centers open on Super Tuesday, officials told WFAA.
“Of the 44 thumb drives, 16 were not received in a timely manner to the Elections Department and 28 were from voting machines not scheduled to be used but were used by volunteer election officials,” Pippins-Poole said in a statement Saturday evening addressing the blunder.
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Pippins-Poole filed the petition and affidavit in court late Friday, according to county officials.
In the affidavit accompanying the court petition, Pippins-Poole said she only made the discovery while reconciling the books and discovered she did not have enough ballots for everyone who showed up to vote.
She now wants to recount and re-tabulate votes in both the Democratic and Republican primary elections.
“I think that its important that every vote is counted and then if it impacts the election, it impacts the election,” said State Sen. Royce West, D-Dallas, who narrowly made the May runoff election for the Democratic nomination in the U.S. Senate race. “I’m troubled by why 44 boxes had not been counted. We need to find out why that occurred and make sure it doesn’t happen again.”
For the March 3 primary elections, Dallas County began using new voting equipment that requires two thumb drives to record the votes, one is the main drive, the second is a back-up.
“This new election equipment records citizen votes electronically, but also creates a paper ballot record of the votes which were cast,” according to the court petition.
“It was initially believed that all of the ballots cast at all of the 454 vote centers had been received back,” wrote Pippins-Poole in an affidavit to the lawsuit. “However, it was later determined that there are ballots from 44 of the precinct scanner and tabulator machines that are unaccounted for. Consequently, I need to perform a paper recount of the ballots from 44 of the precinct scanner and tabulator machines that were not accounted for during the reconciliation process.”
Pippins-Poole said she “consulted with the Texas Secretary of State” after discovering the 44 thumb drives and decided to petition a court to let her “reopen” the central counting process.
“The recount requested would involve taking the paper ballots from the ballot boxes of those 44 scanner and tabulator machines and running the paper ballots through the central counting station tabulator,” the Dallas County petition states. “Further, the Dallas County Elections Administrator asks the Court to set a date and time for the recount to occur so all parties authorized under the Texas Election Code may attend the recount and observe.”
Not great, Bob. At least it was discovered now, before results are to be certified. Looking at the Republican and Democratic election returns, the only race above precinct chair that might be in range of being affected is the Republican primary in HD103, where the winner had 1,064 votes and the loser 930. That’s a safe Dem district, so the stakes are a bit lower if there is an effect, though most likely there won’t be. I do hope that in addition to the recount, Dallas County Elections Administrator Pippins-Poole does a thorough and transparent investigation of how this happened and why. How come some of the thumb drives were not returned in a timely manner, why did some machines that weren’t intended to be used get used anyway, and how is it that no one noticed either of those things on Election Day, when they could have figured it out and gotten the count right the first time? Stuff happens, but the process needs to be robust enough to handle it when it does. That’s as important as getting the count right. The DMN and the Trib have more.
10% not counted?!
That is egregiously bad.
There needs to be standards and quality controls on voting.
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