AUSTIN — A report from a Democratic election judge for the March 1 primary indicated every Republican mail-in ballot cast in Dallas County had to be reproduced manually in order to be counted.
Dallas attorney Louis Bedford IV, who was the local Democratic Party’s appointed election judge for Dallas County’s central counting station during the March 1 primary, created a report this week highlighting numerous issues with voting equipment and staffing shortages that he said affected the election.
Bedford’s report outlines several issues that occurred during early voting and on Election Day for the primary. Those included a technical issue with every Republican mail-in ballot that forced election staff to manually enter ballots into voting machines.
Bedford said ballots had to be “hand duplicated by the Central Count staff during the counting process.” That amounted to 2,777 Republican ballots that election staff had to manually enter into voting machines.
In response to an inquiry from The Dallas Morning News, Dallas County Elections Administrator Michael Scarpello said those ballots were not hand duplicated. After discovering a “flawed” process in programming mail-in ballots that “allowed too much room for human error when programming mail ballots,” staff realized those ballots could not be read by high speed ballot scanners.
“In response, we did not hand duplicate the ballots, as stated in the report, but we input the results of each ballot manually into electronic voting machines,” Scarpello said in an email.
Though the ballots were all counted in a timely manner, the revelation of the programming process flaw comes as Republicans already are expressing skepticism about mail-in voting, especially in blue-leaning counties. The March 1 primary was the first conducted under new election rules that required mail-in voters to provide ID numbers or partial social security numbers when voting by mail.
The process led to a high rate of rejection of mail-in votes — 12.4% statewide and 9.5% in Dallas County. Many Republicans appear to be abandoning the process, which is open to any Texan over the age of 65. While Republicans cast about twice as many votes as Democrats in the election, fewer Republican ballots came by mail than from Democrats.
Bedford, the grandson of Dallas’s first Black judge Louis A. Bedford Jr., said he created the report to “try to hold county public officials accountable in order to make sure that we’re able to expand voting access.”
Bedford’s report also highlighted problems with USB data drives at 22 of 47 early voting locations that led to a decision to count backup paper ballots. Bedford, his Republican counterpart Mike Slayton and Scarpello made the decision to count the paper ballots jointly, despite properly formatted USB data sticks being available with correct voter data.
Bedford also surveyed 72 election workers, with nearly a quarter of the respondents indicating that they were most concerned about issues with voting machines during the election. Also among top concerns of the polled workers was poll watchers.
The newly enacted election law Senate Bill 1 gave poll watchers more freedom to observe elections. Scarpello said very few incidents with poll watchers were reported.
“We had added supplemental training on how to deal with watchers and we think that the training may have helped and we’re hopeful that the lack of problems motivates some poll workers to come back to work in future elections,” he said.
A larger issue was the lack of workers. In some cases, that led to the closure of polling places on election day and limited hours at some locations.
Scarpello said they are addressing many of the issues in the report, including pay increases for poll workers and more effective recruitment to address staffing shortages. They are also considering closing some polling places that saw few voters.
Scarpello said his department is working to finalize a new maintenance contract with the vendor of Dallas County’s voting machines to address some issues with aged equipment, including machines that were unable to stay powered up because of old batteries.
Bedford said providing adequate resources and assistance to election workers was chief among his concerns for future elections. He is slated to be the Democratic judge at the central counting station for upcoming elections in May.
“If we don’t support the people who are actively administering the election, we don’t have an election,” he said.
