A week out from Super Tuesday, a recount is moving forward in Dallas County.
State district Judge Emily Tobowlowsky on Tuesday approved the county’s request to redo the tally of votes cast in the March 3 primary after it discovered that an unknown number of ballots from 44 tabulating machines were missed in the initial count. It is unclear how many ballots were missing, and if the missing ballots might affect the outcome of any races.
Dallas County elections administrator Toni Pippins-Poole made the request for a recount late Friday after finding discrepancies in her vote count. The county will not recount all ballots cast in the election, but will reopen the tabulation on Wednesday to add the missing ballots to its initial tally.
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Dallas County is among other large counties in Texas that recently switched over to voting equipment that allows voters to fill out their ballots on touch screen machines that then mark up a paper ballot that are kept by election officials.
The county’s recount of the missing 44 tabulating machines will be based on those paper ballots.
See here for the background. WFAA adds some detail:
The recount will take place on Wednesday at 8 a.m. at Dallas County’s Elections Headquarters, the judge ruled. The recount will only concern the paper ballots from the 44 machines that were not originally accounted for.
Approximately 7,000 ballots went unaccounted for due to the error, Pippins-Poole said Tuesday. The polling location sites affected were in Dallas, Garland, Grand Prairie, Iriving, Mesquite and Rowlett.
A complete list of locations affected is located at the bottom of this article.
Dallas County overall had a 23.6% voter turnout, with 73% of 317,011 voters casting ballots in the Democratic primary.
As noted on Monday, it is very unlikely this will affect any election result. It’s just not enough ballots to make a difference. With any luck, we’ll have updated results later in the day. I still want to hear an explanation for how this happened and what will be done in the future to ensure it doesn’t happen again.
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