Dallas County's ballot board continued Monday evening auditing ballots cast after 7 p.m. on Election Day last week — when a judge ordered polls to stay open.
The board decides which of the nearly 2,000 ballots to accept or reject.
Dozens of Democratic and Republican board members worked through the weekend hand-counting and checking each ballots' validity.
Texas election code requires all provisional ballots to be accounted for within six days.
Based on preliminary election results, no race was close enough to be affected by 2,000 votes.
In one of the most-watched races in Texas, state Rep. James Talarico led U.S. Rep. Jasmine Crockett by more than 83,000 votes statewide in the Democratic primary battle for U.S. Senate, according to Texas Secretary of State results.
As of early evening Monday, the Texas Supreme Court had not issued a final ruling on whether votes cast between 7 and 9 p.m. at Democratic polls on primary election day should be included in final results.
But county Elections Administrator Paul Adams said on Monday that his department will continue working to meet its deadline.
"At this point, we are moving forward under the laws of the state until we hear otherwise from the courts," Adams said.
"We touched base with the [civil] DA's office earlier today [Monday] just to see if there had been any other word from the court," he said. "They had not heard anything at that time and had told us that they would reach out to us if there was anything else that came up, and as of now we have not heard anything else."
The Texas Supreme Court ordered all Dallas County ballots cast by voters in line after 7 p.m. on primary election Day last Tuesday be separated.
That was after hundreds of voters arrived at polling locations where they thought they could vote on primary election day, March 3.
“Voting should occur only as permitted by Texas Election Code… Votes cast by voters who were not in line to vote at 7 p.m should be separated,” the order on the Supreme Court’s website read.
Dallas County Judge Staci Williams on Tuesday evening had ordered polls to remain open until 9 p.m. — two hours longer than the 7 p.m. closing time.
The order, signed about 5:30 p.m. Tuesday, shows that Kardal Coleman, Dallas County Democratic Party chair, filed an emergency petition for voting hours to be extended at polling places from 7 p.m. to 9 p.m.
Williams agreed.
“…(T)he Court after reviewing the petition finds that there has been mass confusion as to where to voters[sic] were entitled to cast their ballot on election day, and voter confusion was so severe that the Dallas County Election Department website crashed..."
Williams’ order, which was put on hold by the high court Tuesday night, did not specifically distinguish between Democratic polling places and Republican polling places.
However, a pop-up box on the Dallas County Elections Department site stated that “Democratic Party polling locations in Dallas County will remain open until 9:00 PM pursuant to Court Order” and that “Republican Primary polling locations will close at 7:00 PM as scheduled.”
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