Dallas County elections staff is prepping for the primary runoffs by repairing a lot of broken equipment — much of which the delivery vendor may have caused.
About 400 ExpressVote voting machines needed repair or replacement since the March primaries. That's about 10 percent of the county's total inventory.
That number was down to 30 machines on Wednesday as equipment deliveries began for early voting Monday.
The county's voting systems vender ES&S has been onsite working on repairs, said elections department spokesperson Nic Solorzano.
That included shattered voting machines likely caused during delivery, Elections administrator Paul Adams told commissioners last week.
"The amount of money that we pay the delivery company, there is really no excuse for this number to have broken screens," he said. "That's not a technical problem. That's not something that the voters were doing. That's clearly something with the delivery of the equipment to have that many of them with shattered screens. And when the screen is shattered, it almost costs as much to replace that screen as to get a whole new unit because that's so much of that unit."
ExpressVote voting machines cost about $3,000 each to replace.
Commissioner Andy Sommerman asked whether regional equipment centers could be stocked with functioning equipment and supplies to deploy quickly in case of failures during voting hours.
Adams said he and Commissioner John Wiley Price were exploring that in Southern Dallas County and hopes to expand to other areas.
He said he also is working to train and increase the number of technicians in the field for quick fixes.
Programming and delivering tabulators, voting machines and electronic poll books to 279 countywide vote centers began this week.
Casting ballots will still be separated by Republican and Democratic party affiliation — separate elections, separate workers and separate equipment for each party — during early voting and on Election Day.
But this time, voters can go to any location throughout the county to cast a ballot.
That's for Election Day and early voting, which starts Monday, May 18.
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