Problems that caused the ballot count at a DeSoto early voting location to be off by almost 200 votes were caused by a company with a $2 million Dallas County contract. That's according to Elections administrator Heider Garcia.
Election Systems & Software's 4-year contract with the county expires next summer.
The screens on tablets that election clerks use to check in voters froze and rebooted.
Garcia said once they restarted, the electronic poll book possibly did not save the last voter as checked in.
“It's not a process we didn't run, it's not something we didn't do," he said. "It's just, these poll books, the software, basically, was defective and this is the aftermath of it.”
Commissioners Theresa Daniel and John Wiley Price opposed the Omaha-based ES&S contract in 2022.
The first day of early voting in the recent general election revealed discrepancies in the number of registered voters who cast ballots and the total number of ballots received at three locations.
Within 3 days, elections staff rescanned in 19 of 71 early voting center ballots.
While calculating returns on election night, the counts from 3 of those 19 centers were “substantially different” than numbers polling place’s had given.
Garcia theorized where the mistake was.
“[Maybe] somehow we skipped the batch or we mishandled something there because it just didn't make sense, right?” he said in Commissioners Court recently. “That we that we have a count from the polling place, we count again, we have a different number.”
Ballot differences at Northway Christian Church in Dallas and Ministerios Charisma in Richardson were likely user error and reconciled.
Disciple Central Community Church in DeSoto was a different story.
Of 17,800 registered voters who cast ballots there, the reviewed total kept returning about 17,600 votes.
Garcia secured a court order to review ballot boxes for accuracy.
“My thought process was ‘We owe it to the voters to at least go back and check those boxes again," he said. "If it was us, [the review] will fix it. If it wasn't, then we'll know, we’ll confirm -- something came back wrong from a polling place.”
After troubleshooting and a process of elimination, ES&S again was to blame, Garcia said.
Commissioners agreed.
The total count difference remained 190 ballots out of 17,800 at the DeSoto church.
Separately, poll book screens freezing also caused election clerks to press more than once the button that creates a ballot for a specific voter.
Clerks nor voters realized that the next voters in line were getting the extra ballots created from the previous button-pressing.
So each time screens froze, and for each time the button was pressed, one precinct-specific ballot likely created multiple identical ballots for voters who should have received one with choices from a different precinct.
Because voters can cast ballots at any location, precinct-specific ballot choices got mixed up.
"It's a software bug, Garcia said. "It's a defect in the software that made it — that freezing in that rebooting issue that was happening. So that issue, at the check-in point when voters were signing, again, had two consequences. Printing duplicates of the same ballot for the person next in line and potentially not saving the record, the transaction, which created inconsistencies in accounts of people to ballots."
Similar problems have caused long wait times and ballot count irregularities during other elections.
County Judge Clay Lewis Jenkins asked Garcia during the Nov. 19 commissioners court meeting whether he should confirm the election.
“Obviously, based on all this, you're asking me to sign the certification, right?” he said.
Garcia was confident in the department’s work.
“Yes,” he said. “All that context to say, it wasn’t a small issue, it was potentially big. It wasn’t devastating because our poll workers did phenomenal."
Garcia said that to the outside world, "it may be a hard thing to hear the administrator say they did a good job when we went through this."
"I think the numbers you have in front of you reflect the will of the people,” he said.
In August, commissioners authorized $500,000 worth of more equipment from ES&S, which did not include more poll books.
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