Dallas County commissioners could be naming a new election systems vendor as early as Tuesday, during a special called meeting.
A new electronic pollbook provider was sought after the tablet devices used to check in voters glitched at some locations during the November election.
The current $2 million, 4-year contract with Election Systems and Software expires this summer, though it has been abated.
The software on some ES&S tablets had frozen and rebooted, causing voter check in problems in the last election.
Because of that, in December the Texas Secretary of State decertified them as vendors.
The ballot count at a DeSoto early voting location was off by almost 200 votes.
The screens on tablets that election clerks use to check in voters froze and rebooted.
Elections administrator Heider Garcia said once they restarted, the electronic poll book possibly did not save the last voter as checked in.
County commissioners had the option to continue using ES&S if their software issue was corrected and the state recertified their equipment.
Though the Secretary of State's office said the reevaluation would be March 3, which would jeopardize the preparation schedule for Spring elections, which include mostly school district and city races.
The companies still approved in Texas to provide electronic pollbooks for elections systems are ContentActive, Tenex, Votec, Knowink and VR Systems.
Dallas County gave four of them two hours each last week to present proposals for their respective election system use, training, technical support and maintenance.
The new vendor must provide 4,500 tablets ready to use, and be available to train workers on the system.
County Judge Clay Lewis Jenkins said the state offers a grant that could pay 80 percent of costs when a new vendor is chosen.
He had asked Garcia in November whether he should confirm the election after the glitches.
“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. “… 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.
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