The Dallas County Republican Party has forced voters back to separate primary elections.
Dallas County residents voting in the Republican or Democratic primary must now vote at their own designated polling location on primary Election Day in March.
Early voting can still be done at any location.
People who choose to vote on March 3 can only do so at one polling center.
Dallas County elections administrator Paul Adams said it creates challenges.
"I realize that is going to be very confusing, as this has not happened in Dallas County in a number of years," he said.
The number of early voting polling locations will also be cut from 450 to a minimum of 250.
"I’m going to do the best that I can," Adams said. "Our staff is going to do the best that they can. But there’s certainly a lot of hurdles to overcome, particularly for voter education."
The Republicans' months-long effort to count primary election ballots by hand would have automatically required separate elections.
Though that initiative was abandoned because of logistics, cost and staffing, the local party elected to still hold its own election.
Democratic party chair Kardal Coleman said changing election operations hurts voters.
"To not do hand counting — we all knew that this was the wrong direction — they ultimately found out that they couldn't execute it," he said. "But then to just do precinct level voting and for them to use machines ... it's still a step short of doing the right thing. So they've never really intended to do what's right and fair by their voters. This is all really been a solution in search of a problem."
Coleman said that Republicans seemed uninterested in cooperation.
"It was never the Republican Party's intent to execute a joint election with us," he said. "It was never their intent to do, in my opinion, the right thing by voters. Not just Democratic voters, but all voters."
He said joint elections would have saved both parties money, too.
Republican Party Chair Allen West said the opposite is true.
"As a matter of fact on election day we actually can save money because we're looking at 250 some-odd precincts by the way of combining them based upon Texas election statute," he said. "When you look at the amount of voters per precinct, that really does save and cut down on the cost for the county overall.
"It saves the county money because they would not have to, on our part, go out and man as many and put machines and equipment out to as many locations," he said.
Commissioner John Wiley Price said during commissioners court that the elections department cost estimate of $300,000 total for both parties is not enough to host separate elections.
West said as its local leader, he is doing what 74 percent of Republicans said they wanted two years ago.
"They wanted to have closed primaries. So this is the first step to where we're going there. Republicans in the state of Texas want a closed primary," he said. "Our county executive committee in September voted to have non-joint precinct based elections. That was resolution number one.
"Resolution number two was hand-count paper ballots. We already know about the story on that."
The Dallas County Republican Party abandoned its effort to hand-count all voter ballots in the upcoming primary election late last year. At the time, West said in a statement that the month's long initiative faced financial reimbursement, logistical and personnel challenges.
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