DALLAS — Nearly 4,000 voters in Dallas County received and cast ballots in the incorrect precinct, the county's election administrator told county commissioners and city councilmembers on Tuesday. The discrepancy was not enough to change the winners of any races, he said.
Heider Garcia said the issue started on the first day of early voting with software used to check in voters and print their ballots. Software glitches with the pollbooks resulted in long lines and led some voters to get a ballot printed for the wrong precinct, which gave them the option of voting in the wrong races for local elections, he said.
The glitches led poll workers to press the "print ballot" button more than once, he said, which caused the printer to print multiple copies of the same ballot. In some cases, the intended voter got the correct ballot, but a person in line behind that voter may have incorrectly received a second copy of the first voter's ballot, Garcia told the Dallas County Commissioners Court.
The issue would not have affected candidates at the top of the ticket, such as the race for president or vice president, as those races appeared on all ballots in the county. However, voters may not have had the down-ballot candidates or local ballot measures appear on their ballot correctly.
Garcia said the discrepancy was not enough to change the election results in any race, including in the city of Dallas, where a transformative ballot measure passed by about 3,000 votes. Garcia said the number of voters who received incorrect ballots tied to the city of Dallas was "about 1,700," still within the margin of victory.
"It could have been devastating," Garcia told County Commissioners, crediting poll workers for helping to remedy the problem. "We managed to contain it, it was not ideal, but I think the numbers you have in front of you reflect the will of the people."
Garcia said the number of incorrectly issued ballots was ascertained by comparing the number of voters who checked in for each precinct with the number of ballots cast for that precinct. The discrepancy indicated voters who received the wrong ballot.
At this point in the process, Garcia said there is no way for voters to know whether they received the wrong ballot -- nor correct it.
Both the city of Dallas and Dallas County voted Tuesday to accept the election results, although one Dallas Councilmember promised to hold a hearing into what went wrong.