By Justin DeSales – Staff Writer
https://dallasexpress.com/
Electronic pollbooks reportedly went offline at multiple polling sites around Dallas County on Tuesday.
Dallas Republican Party Chair Jennifer Stoddard-Hajdu spoke with The Dallas Express about the incident, noting that election workers have been unable to check in voters.
She said this issue allows for the possibility of voters submitting their ballots at multiple sites throughout the county, claiming that 26 pollbooks were affected, some of which have been offline all day.
Stoddard-Hajdu told The Dallas Express the issue has “been going on all throughout early voting.” Election officials allegedly informed her that faulty equipment was to blame.
“What I’ve been told by the elections administrator is that he thinks the problem is that they’ve got really old equipment and it needs to be updated,” Stoddard-Hajdu told The Dallas Express.
The pollbooks in question were provided by the Omaha-based commercial tech firm Election Systems & Software.
Michael Scarpello, the Dallas County elections administrator, previously told Stoddard-Hajdu that he created a $1.2 million budget item meant to fix routers on the equipment that he felt needed to be replaced.
Scarpello’s budget item, according to Stoddard-Hajdu, was referred to the county’s information technology department but was ultimately rejected.
According to Stoddard-Hajdu, it is unlikely the issue will be fixed by the end of the day. She said it would take a lot of time and new equipment.
“If it’s what they’re saying, which is old equipment, they can’t replace the equipment today,” she said to The Dallas Express.
“They’re saying they have 4G compatible equipment. Now that we have 5G, not only does that make it incompatible, but also the equipment is extremely old,” she added.
Stoddard-Hajdu said the issues at polling stations, which are run by a third-party company, raise concerns about the validity of this election.
“Machines hooked up to the internet for voting has disenfranchised voters, in my opinion, more than anything else that has happened,” she said to The Dallas Express.
“There’s no reason why a third party should be involved in our election. A for-profit third-party corporation should not be receiving our information,” she said.
