Nearly 13,000 text messages were sent via election equipment to redirect Dallas County voters who showed up at the wrong location.
That's according to information made available to Dallas County commissioners at Tuesday's meeting.
Commissioners also were told by one poll worker that ballots of some people who had waited in line before polls closed may have been confused for provisional ballot voters amid the chaos and a legal intervention. The poll worker spoke during the public comment segment at the meeting.
If that happened, some of those votes cast by people who were in line before the polls were to close — and were at the correct voting location — may not have been counted.
After a legal challenge, provisional votes that were identified as being cast after 7 p.m. — when polls normally close — ultimately were not counted. A Dallas County judge had ordered polls to remain open until 9.m. — two hours longer than the normal closing time. That was after many voters had gone to the polling location where they thought they could vote, but found out otherwise.
It was not immediately clear how many of the more than 13,000 people who showed up at the wrong polling place may have later cast their vote at the appropriate site.
But software allows navigators who staff voting locations to look up a voter's correct precinct-based polling place and provide that information.
A voter can then choose to receive that information via text, take a photo of the navigator's screen or jot down the correct location address.
Voters who chose to receive a text have helped Dallas County officials understand how many people confused by the change to separate, precinct-based primary Election Day voting went to the wrong place.
"We have no way of tracking the information about how many times it was shown on a poll book to somebody, taken a piece of paper, or taken a picture of," Commissioner Andy Sommerman said during commissioners court Tuesday.
There is also no way to track how many voters who were redirected eventually cast eligible ballots.
"We know that some folks gave up, didn't continue their voting," Sommerman said. "We know, but we don't have a way of actually recording that or finding the data associated with that."
Elections administrator Paul Adams confirmed that.
Dallas County commissioners had previously approved $1 million on education marketing campaigns to inform voters of the changes.
The most voter redirect text messages came from Irving City Hall, followed by Duncanville Library, Fretz Park, Mesquite Government Center, Oak Lawn and then Lancaster.
State Dist. Judge Staci Williams had ordered polls to stay open on March 3 at the request of the Dallas County Democratic Party, which had pointed to confusion over new precinct-based voting rules. Nearly 2,000 Democratic Party ballots cast between 7 and 9 p.m. on Election Day were separated from ballots cast earlier in the day.
The matter ended up before the Texas Supreme Court after the Office of the Texas Attorney General filed a petition opposing extending voting hours. Last week, the Dallas County Democratic Party dropped its initial request for Williams to order the polls to stay open, writing in a statement that the Texas Supreme Court is not a fair and independent forum to apply the law. That effectively meant that votes cast after 7 p.m. in Dallas County wouldn't be included in the final results.
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