Dallas County Republicans question voting machines, lobby for paper ballots

Updated Wednesday, February 1 at 5 p.m.: This story has been updated to include further comment from Texas Secretary of State Spokesman Sam Taylor explaining how e-pollbooks work.

The Dallas County Republican Party says its top legislative priority this session is lobbying for the return of the paper ballot.

Local Republicans say that the electronic voting system currently being used may have counted more votes than were actually cast in the 2022 election, despite the Dallas County Elections Department’s saying that is not the case.

The GOP points to those votes that rolled in after polls closed and to 188 “phantom voter” errors the state found in the 2020 election as proof that the county’s electronic voting system can’t be trusted.

“Any voting equipment or election process that is not fully transparent and trustworthy simply has to go,” the local party said in a Jan. 20 blog post laying out its position.

Dallas County Republican Party Chair Jennifer Stoddard-Hajdu told The Dallas Morning News that she is concerned about voting machines in local elections that are connected to a server through Wi-Fi, pointing to a surge in tallied votes that occurred after the polls closed during the last election. She also cited a state audit that reported the “phantom voter” incidents.

The state, county, the voting machine company, and Dallas County Democratic Party have approved or defended Dallas’ current voting system.

“Dallas County’s ExpressPoll electronic pollbooks functioned accurately, but slowly, and correctly recorded the number of voters who were checked in and issued ballots on Election Day,” the county election department said following last year’s Election Day.

Stoddard-Hajdu said she doesn’t believe there is such a thing as a secure internet connection, and she isn’t alone.

Texas Politics Project research is a data and teaching tool at the University of Texas. According to the organization’s polling, 72% of 1,200 polled Texan Republicans strongly support prohibiting any vote-counting equipment to be connected to the internet. That’s far higher than the Democrat’s 28%.

“I just think people who hack are so sophisticated now that if you’ve got a live device, it can be hacked,” Stoddard-Hajdu said.

Josh Blank, director of Texas Politics Project research, dismisses the need to go back to a paper ballot. Because this issue motivates Republican voters, he said the local party’s stance is political. He disagrees that there is an election integrity concern.

“There is a political advantage for Republican officeholders to continue to cite election problems, real or imagined,” he said. “If you’re hell-bent on the notion that there’s fraud in the system, and that you don’t need evidence to support it, then there’s always somewhere to find fraud in the system.”

Blank said if there is truly an interest in total accuracy in a system, the Republican-led state legislature would allocate more funds to county election departments rather than try to fund efforts to return to paper ballots. If larger counties returned to a paper ballot, forgoing voting machines, Blank said they could not quickly get the job done.

“If the expectation is that incredibly large counties with millions of voters should be able to turnaround within less than 24 hours and provide an accurate count of the results, then you need technology,” Blank said.

Kristy Noble, chair of the Dallas County Democratic Party, responded to the Jan. 20 GOP blog post, saying that paper balloting would take the county back years. She said using electronic voting systems is more effective at stopping voter fraud because election workers can check if a voter has already voted much more easily than through a paper system.

“Republicans could try to win over voters with better policies, but instead they’ll stick with plans to make voting harder, more expensive, and less secure,” her statement to The News said.

Stoddard-Hajdu said this issue is beyond politics.

“It’s not a partisan issue. It’s a citizen issue, a voters issue. Because if one party can do it, the other party can do it,” she said.

E-pollbooks

Dallas County Republicans’ concern about electronic voting revolves around Dallas’ e-pollbooks, an iPad-like virtual Rolodex that checks in registered voters through a directory and uploads data to a central server.

The Texas Secretary of State has certified all of Dallas’ election equipment, including the e-pollbooks. Dallas County uses e-pollbooks from Election Systems & Software, a Nebraska-based company that stands by its equipment.

Texas Secretary of State spokesperson Sam Taylor confirmed that the office checks all e-pollbooks for each county elections department across the state. Taylor also emphasized that while e-pollbooks are connected to the internet to prevent voters from casting more than one ballot across voting centers, the actual voting machines are never connected to the internet. The ballot marking device and ballot scanner are not connected to the e-pollbooks in any way.

On the close of Election Day last year, Dallas County poll workers noticed that the number of tallied voters in the e-pollbooks increased past the number of people who had cast ballots at some voting centers.

Election Systems & Software said this was normal. Any activity on the e-pollbook – including the check-in of a voter – is recorded as a “transaction.” These transactions are regularly synced through the day to the central database, company spokesperson Katina Granger said. When connectivity is slow or there is a high volume on the network, these transactions become backed up, and they surge when connectivity improves or volume slows.

While it may have appeared that more votes were being added up than the number of actual voters casting ballots after polls closed at 7 p.m., in actuality votes from earlier in the day across all voting centers were just then rolling into the system, the company and county officials say.

“Electronic pollbooks are incredibly secure, with data and networks surrounded by powerful encryption and dual-provider VPN to further protect the network,” Granger said.

The Dallas County Elections Department declined to comment on the blog post, but published a response in November, saying this surge after the polls closed was due to slow but accurate counts. Dallas’ e-pollbooks processed more than 213,000 votes on Election Day.

“Once the polls closed at 7 p.m. on Election Day, the upload traffic on the network decreased and, as a result, the downloads appeared to have sped up significantly,” the department said. “Dallas County’s e-pollbooks functioned accurately, but slowly, and correctly recorded the number of voters who were issued ballots on Election Day.”

State audit

The state audited Dallas’ 2020 election and published its report last month. The state did find an issue with Dallas County e-pollbooks. In at least 188 cases, when a voter checked in, the electronic pollbook checked in a different voter, referred to as a “phantom voter.”

The state also said more voters might have been, but could not be sure because of incomplete records. Dallas County reported 926,518 ballots cast in the election.

County Elections Administrator Michael Scarpello said his staff is evaluating the audit findings and preparing a report for the Dallas County Commissioners Court.

Stoddard-Hajdu said these “phantom voters” are proof of a problem.

“Why would we operate in a system where that’s even a possibility?” she said.

It can be hard to argue against more transparency and accuracy, but Blank said he thinks some people will never be satisfied that full election integrity can exist.

“Election integrity has no maximum,” Blank said. “No one would ever say the system has too much integrity. Hopefully, these aren’t serious policy discussions. These are political debates, masquerading as solutions in search of a problem.”

The Dallas County Republican Party plans to work with elected officials to present legislation in this and future legislative sessions, the blog post said.