DALLAS — Day one was not perfect, and on day two of early voting, the Dallas County Elections Administrator said he’s sorry.
“A big apology. Obviously, yesterday was not our finest day,” Heider Garcia told WFAA.
Voters at some locations in Dallas County reported waiting in line for more than two hours on Monday. The issue, Garcia confirmed, was a problem with the digital books used to check in voters.
As WFAA reported Monday, the software in the electronic sign-in system was randomly glitching, which forced poll workers to constantly reboot the system. Because those reboots took time, lines kept growing.
The glitches, which Garcia said happened county-wide, also caused some voters to get ballots that didn’t match their precinct.
“No matter where you live in Dallas County, you're going to have the presidential race. You're going to have the sheriff’s race. Those are county-wide races,” Garcia said.
But issues like school bonds or city propositions might not have shown up on every ballot they should have. Garcia says that was the issue in Sunnyvale, where some voters told a city councilman a school bond was not on their ballot. If a voter or poll worker recognized the error, the ballot was thrown out and a new one issued. Election workers call that process “spoiling” the ballot.
“A spoiled ballot is actually a good thing because it means the poll worker or the voter realized, this doesn’t match my registration. So, they spoil the ballot and they give them a new one,” Garcia said “We don’t know how many they missed. That’s the real question.”
How prevalent the mistake was won’t be answered until after Election Day, because the ballots that were cast without down-ballot races are locked away in ballot boxes and can’t be opened until it’s time to count them.
“There's really no legal remedy. There's nothing that can be done,” Garcia said. “It'll all depend basically on the outcome of the election, and if any race is close enough that it might make a difference, then someone can file an election contest on that.”
Garcia said it’s important for voters to know that the glitches were with the check-in process only, not the voting machines. He wants voters to trust the process and participate in it.
“It has been addressed, we have a paper trail, we can verify that, and we've had a second day where we've seen barely any issues at all. So that's proof that the solution we put in place worked,” he said. “From this point on what we need is for people to show up and just mark the ballots. That's the essence of this whole thing, right? For people to show up and vote.”