Texas: Elections for U.S. Senate runoff, local races in flux amid coronavirus spread | Allie Morris/Dallas Morning News

Texas Democrats are pushing for the May 26 runoff election to be carried out entirely through mail-in ballots, amid fears of the continued spread of the novel coronavirus. The disease is upending the way candidates campaign, with many furiously canceling fundraisers and block walking in favor of virtual events. While Republican Gov. Greg Abbott cited COVID-19 in postponing a special election set for early May, it remains to be seen whether the runoff or other local elections will be similarly delayed. Abbott will be making a decision shortly and said “everything’s on the table.” Past and present election officials caution that shifting the contest to mail-in only, as the Texas Democratic Party is requesting, would be a major undertaking. “It’s hard enough getting people to vote, especially in a runoff election. How are they going to logistically get mail-in ballots to everyone?” said Carlos Cascos, who was Texas Secretary of State from 2015 to 2017. “Pushing it back 30 or 45 days may be the safe harbor to use.” In the runoff election, voters are choosing the Democrat who will challenge Republican U.S. Sen. John Cornyn in November and party nominees in a slew of other local races. Also at risk are municipal and school board elections scheduled to take place on May 2. Democrats in the runoff for U.S. Senate are focusing campaign efforts online.

Texas: Bexar County GOP Chair, Former Constable Question Election Integrity | Jackie Wang/Rivard Report

Cynthia Brehm, who heads Bexar County’s Republican Party, criticized the Bexar County Elections Department’s handling of the March primary election and demanded that the election be redone at a county commissioners meeting Tuesday. “Not a recount,” Brehm said. “Throw it out. Bexar County citizens deserve better than a system that is faulty and flawed.” Brehm, who will face candidate John Austin in a May runoff election for her second term as party chair, pointed to the software issues that caused a delay in early voting result publication. “I can tell you right now – I’ve already talked to the people above me that I don’t have the confidence in this election at all,” Brehm told reporters Tuesday. “And my constituents don’t trust it.” Bexar County Elections Administrator Jacque Callanen said the comments made by Brehm and Michelle Barrientes Vela, a former constable and Democratic sheriff candidate, were “misinformation.” “I stand behind this election,” Callanen said.

Texas: Dallas County recount turns up 9,149 ballots that were missed | Alexa Ura/The Texas Tribune

A Dallas County recount turned up 9,149 ballots that were missed on Super Tuesday, but the new votes did not affect the outcome of any race. Through the recount — which was prompted by vote discrepancies discovered last week — county election officials found 6,818 votes Wednesday that were not included in their initial tally of votes in the March 3 Democratic primary and 2,331 votes that were left off the results of the Republican primary. More than 329,000 votes were cast in Dallas County during early voting and on election day. The county is still processing mail-in ballots and provisional votes. A state district judge ordered the recount Tuesday at the request of Dallas County elections administrator Toni Pippins-Poole. The county asked to redo its vote count after discovering it missed ballots from 44 tabulating machines used on election day. Dallas County officials realized they were missing votes when they were unable to reconcile the count of voters who checked in at some polling places and the number of votes recorded.

Texas: Judge allows Dallas County recount of missed ballots to move forward | Alexa Ura/The Texas Tribune

A week out from Super Tuesday, a recount is moving forward in Dallas County. State district Judge Emily Tobowlowsky on Tuesday approved the county’s request to redo the tally of votes cast in the March 3 primary after it discovered that an unknown number of ballots from 44 tabulating machines were missed in the initial count. It is unclear how many ballots were missing, and if the missing ballots might affect the outcome of any races. Dallas County elections administrator Toni Pippins-Poole made the request for a recount late Friday after finding discrepancies in her vote count. The county will not recount all ballots cast in the election, but will reopen the tabulation on Wednesday to add the missing ballots to its initial tally. Dallas County officials realized they were missing votes when they were unable to reconcile the count of voters who checked in at some polling places and the number of votes recorded. The initial vote count was compiled from flash drives taken from the county’s tabulating machines. There were 454 polling places running on Election Day, and some sites had more than one machine into which voters fed their marked paper ballots to be scanned and tabulated. The county initially believed it had received flash drives from all of the machines distributed throughout the county, Pippins-Poole wrote in an affidavit filed with the court. But officials later discovered that ballots from 44 of the tabulating machines were “unaccounted for.”

Texas: Dallas County’s Super Tuesday re-do stems from philosophical differences in elections | Nic Garcia/Dallas Morning News

At 8 a.m. Wednesday, Dallas County election employees will unseal dozens of boxes containing thousands of paper ballots from last week’s primary and feed them to a high-speed scanner. It’s an attempt to close a gap between the number of voters who showed up to the polls last week and the number of ballots originally counted. The re-do, approved by a judge Tuesday, is the latest development in a primary election that for months teetered on the brink of disaster behind the scenes as both parties scrambled to get enough election judges, while public officials hurled accusations, and ultimately left thousands of voters waiting in long lines late into the evening wondering if their vote was counted. Estimates put the number of ballots that will be counted Wednesday between 6,000 and 8,000 from 44 different polling locations spread across the county. Those were the ones the elections department identified as the root of the undercount. But that likely won’t change the outcome of any election given that they are a fraction of the total number of votes cast.

Texas: Dallas County election recount court date set for Tuesday | Nic Garcia/Dallas Morning News

Dallas County’s request for a recount of last week’s election after it discovered a discrepancy between the number of voters who signed in and the actual ballots counted will be heard by a district court judge on Tuesday. The county’s election chief, Toni Pippins-Poole, filed a request to reopen the election late Friday after ballots from 44 vote tabulating machines were not included in the final tally that officials had submitted, according to court papers. Without knowing how many votes are at issue, it’s unclear whether the outcomes of any races will change. State law stipulates that ballots must be counted continuously after the polls close. Once officials have stopped tallying votes, the election is considered completed. Even though the results are unofficial until county commissioners approve them, a judge must order any additional ballot counting. Judge Emily G. Tobolowsky will consider the recount request. Between the two parties, more than 317,000 ballots — 233,014 Democratic and 83,997 Republican — were counted last week, according to unofficial results on Dallas County’s election website. Democratic turnout, in particular, nearly hit a record — second only to 2008 when 298,612 Democrats voted.

Texas: Parker County Commissioner on Hart InterCivic voting machines: ‘We’re not going to tolerate this type of failure again’ | Autumn Owens/Weatherford Democrat

Parker County officials discussed voting machine failures that occurred at five locations on Election Day last week, saying what took place cannot happen again. The discussion took place during Monday’s meeting of the commissioners court and included comments from the elections administrator, county judge, party chairs, commissioners and a representative from Hart InterCivic, the vendor that owns the voting machines. “We had about 14,454 people vote in early voting and that went very smooth — we had seven sites and no major issues whatsoever, so early voting went very well. The problems occurred during Election Day,” Elections Administrator Don Markum said. “We had 13,401 people vote on Election Day at 37 poll sites. The issue we had was the scanners would not read some of the ballots. It was basically five whole sites that had this issue with a lot of the ballots not being able to be read — Santa Fe Baptist Church, ESD 6, Rock Baptist Church, Willow Park and Aledo ISD. Those five sites had major issues.”

Texas: Dallas County asks for Super Tuesday recount after discovering it missed some ballots | Alexa Ura/The Texas Tribune

Dallas County officials are seeking a recount of the March 3 primary results after discovering that an unknown number of ballots were not initially counted. In a petition filed late Friday in state district court, Dallas County election administrator Toni Pippins-Poole said her office has discovered that ballots from 44 tabulating machines were not accounted for in the election results reported by the county on Super Tuesday. It’s unclear how many ballots were missing from the county’s tally of votes. The issue turned up after county officials were unable to reconcile the number of voters who checked in to cast ballots at some polling places and the number of ballots received from those sites. The tally of ballots had been compiled from flash drives that were turned in to the county, and the county initially believed it had received all ballots from the 454 vote centers, Pippins-Poole said in an affidavit filed with the court. "However, it was later determined that there are ballots from 44 of the precinct scanner and tabulator machines that are unaccounted for," Pippins-Poole said. She could not immediately be reached for comment on Saturday.

Texas: Bexar Elections Official: Software Issue Will Be Resolved by November | Iris Dimmick/Rivard Report

Bexar County wasn’t the only county in Texas that experienced difficulties reporting election results on Super Tuesday, but it was one of the last large counties to start doing so. While software issues caused a delay in reporting vote tallies Tuesday night, one problem election officials encountered early on election day was fixed with a simple flip of a switch. Backup generators kicked on at the Copernicus Community Center voting site to power printers, laptops, and voting machines during the early hours of Tuesday. Utility crews and facility staff investigated the problem; they couldn’t figure it out at first, said Bexar County Elections Administrator Jacque Callanen. “There [were] no power issues. … Everything was plugged in, it looked great,” Callanen said. “Well, nobody had turned the surge protector on. … They had not looked at the little light at the bottom.” Power was restored to the far East Side voting site by 2 p.m., she said. Callenen called a press conference Wednesday morning to outline the factors that led to Bexar County’s “rough morning” and slow, cumbersome posting of voting results on Tuesday night. In short, a record-breaking number of voters resulted in technical issues.

Texas: Long voting lines in Texas spotlight concerns about access to the polls | Elise Viebeck/ The Washington Post

The lines stretched in the dark across the plaza at Texas Southern University, as hundreds of would-be voters stood for hours Tuesday to cast ballots in the Democratic presidential primary. As they waited, students shared phone chargers, activists sent in pizza and exhausted voters resorted to sitting on the ground. The voting center at the historically black university in Houston was one of a number of such locations around Texas that were plagued by long delays on Super Tuesday, raising questions about the readiness of local election officials and spurring outrage among voting rights advocates. Many cited as a factor the closing of hundreds of precincts around the state after a pivotal Supreme Court decision in 2013. One of the remaining Democrats in the presidential field — Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) — seized on the episode, tweeting that it revealed a “crisis of voter suppression.” However, interviews with election officials, activists and voters pointed to a number of complicated factors that combined to produce the massive lines in Harris County. “There was actually a failure in the system at multiple junctures,” said Beth Stevens, the voting rights program director with the Texas Civil Rights Project, in an interview  “The effect is that you have black and brown people on college campuses standing in line for two hours, four hours, seven hours to vote,” she said.

Texas: Harris County’s cascade of election day fumbles disproportionately affected communities of color | Alexa Uren/The Texas Tribune

From the sunlit atrium of the science building on campus, former Vice President Joe Biden asked Texas Southern University for an assist. It was election day eve, and Biden was visiting the university just days after black voters in South Carolina had forcefully revived his presidential bid. That Biden had chosen to spend precious hours at Texas Southern ahead of Super Tuesday seemed to signal he hoped to make the historically black college and the community it represented a nexus between his last pivotal win and the next crucial test of his campaign. “Tomorrow, Texas is going to speak,” Biden said to a raucous throng of supporters surrounding him. “I think we’re going to do well here in Texas with the help of all of you. I’m asking you for your vote. I’m asking you for your support because I’ve got to earn it.

Texas: Bexar County’s new ES&S voting system ‘crashed’ 3 times, tying up race results, election chief says | Scott Huddleston/San Antonio ExpressNews

Bexar County Elections Administrator Jacque Callanen said computers used to post results in a new voting system “crashed” three times, forcing election officials to post separate sets of numbers, rather than consolidating them as they had on past election nights. “We will be working today with the vendor to get the regular report that y’all are used to seeing,” Callanen told reporters at a Wednesday news conference. Election officials, hoping to post early vote totals just as polls closed at 7 p.m. Tuesday, started preparing to do that about 6:30 p.m., Callanen said. But the computer, which was processing 122,159 early votes, began running slower, then suddenly stopped. “It just crashed,” she said. After repeated failures, officials decided to release the early votes as two separate reports — one set showing results for the in-person early voting and another with the tallies from 17,262 mail-in ballots, also known as absentee voting.

“We made the decision that we had to get some results out. We knew they were accurate. We knew they were in there,” Callanen said.

When the 113,650 ballots cast on election day started coming in, those results also were reported as a separate set. That meant poll watchers had to do their own math, tabulating results and calculating percentages from three different reports — absentee, early in-person voting and election day votes.

The results from election day reached 100 percent about 2 a.m. Wednesday.

Callanen said she is confident that the county’s longtime voting system vendor, Election Systems & Software, will pinpoint the cause of the system failures and find a way to report consolidated totals in November.

ES&S has been the county contractor since 2002.

“Was I upset? Sure I was. Was I disappointed? Yeah, I was,” Callanen said. “But we’ve worked with this company. I have every confidence in them. They won’t stop until they can give us a solid answer.”

There were a few other gaffes Tuesday, including a “rough start” at 50 to 60 of the 280 vote centers countywide, where printers were plugged into the wrong printer ports.

Callanen said she also felt responsible for complaints from “unhappy” voters from other states with election laws and processes that differ from the Texas Election Code. Some states allow for same-day primary voting and registration. Others, such as Michigan, permit voters to request a new ballot after casting an early vote “if their candidate had withdrawn,” she said.

Callanen said she “never did the studying” to prepare election judges and other officials to field those voter concerns, so they could explain how voting in Texas compares with other states.

“I was not prepared for that,” she said. “I feel like I let the election officials down. Because all of a sudden, they had these people in front of them with something they had never had to deal with.”

Full Article: Bexar County’s new voting system ‘crashed’ 3 times, tying up race results, election chief says – ExpressNews.com.

Texas: Harris County Democrats waited for hours to vote. Two-thirds of polling sites were in GOP areas. | Zach Despart and Mike Morris/Houston Chronicle

Many of the 322,000 Harris County Democratic primary voters who surged to the polls Tuesday faced long lines that forced several balloting sites to stay open late into the evening. Though Democrats outnumbered Republicans 2 to 1 on Election Day, almost two-thirds of the county’s voting centers were in county commissioner precincts in west Harris County held by Republicans. And, in a decision that worsened delays, the Harris County Clerk’s Office placed an equal number of voting machines for each party at every voting center. That meant that in Democratic strongholds like Kashmere Gardens, where Republicans were outnumbered 30 to 1 during early balloting, Democratic voters languished in line while GOP machines sat unused. Adding to the frustration was a County Clerk website that is supposed to show wait times at poll locations. Numerous voters on Tuesday complained the website led them to a polling place showing a minimal wait only to stand for hours because poll workers failed to update the site. Housing advocate Chrishelle Palay said she saw two or three Republican voters while she waited two hours to cast her ballot in Kashmere. “People were confused and infuriated,” Palay said. “They were definitely upset at the approach and how the machines were set up.”

Texas: Voting delays in Fort Worth area blamed on machine set up | Anna M. Tinsley/Fort Worth Star-Telegram

Some Tarrant County voters waited in long lines — some that took an hour or more to get through — to cast their vote Tuesday in the presidential primary election. Officials said that was because the turnout at some sites was larger than expected, some sites were understaffed, and some voters are still getting accustomed to the new voting machines. But frustration grew on Super Tuesday when there was, for instance, a long line of Democrats waiting to vote at a polling site as several machines went unused because they were set aside for Republicans. Tarrant County Judge Glen Whitley said he believes the problem can be avoided. “I hope we will take advantage of what technology offers us and share the machines between the two parties,” he said Wednesday. The catch is that early voting, which is run by the county, lets residents use any of the 600 voting machines set up to cast ballots in either the Republican or Democratic primary.

Texas: ‘The worst voting experience’: Long lines drag Super Tuesday deep into the night for some voters | Mike Morris, Samantha Ketterer, and Nicole Hensley/Houston Chronicle

Dozens of Democratic voters were still waiting to cast ballots at midnight in Houston, turning Super Tuesday into a painful slog for some citizens amid questions about how the County Clerk's office had allocated its voting machines across the county. Janet Gonzalez left work early and at 5:30 p.m. checked a website the clerk’s office runs to show wait times at polling places. It seemed Texas Southern University had a short wait, but when she arrived she found a massive line. She waited an hour outside and three more inside before she finally cast her ballot. Officials with the clerk's office acknowledged the accuracy of the wait-times website is reliant on election workers manually updating the status of their polling places. Some people in line gave up and walked away, Gonzalez said. Others briefly sought refuge on a scattering of chairs before giving them up to others as the line inched forward. Polls closed at 7 p.m., but voters still can cast ballots as long as they stay in line. “It was a challenge,” Gonzalez said. “You have to look around at the elderly people and overcome your own pain.”

Texas: Dallas County Lit $6 Million on Fire During Countywide Voting Transition | Stephen Young/Dallas Observer

Dallas County's switch from traditional polling places on election day to vote centers that can be used by anyone registered to vote in the county is a good thing. The Observer is on the record saying as much. The county's transition to the new voting setup, as county commissioners and the public found out this week, hasn't been as positive. In its haste to get ready for the November 2019 state constitutional amendment election, the county, as KDFW first reported, spent $6 million on electronic poll books that don't work with the rest of its voting setup. As a result, the county has had to purchase more than $5.6 million in poll books from a second vendor. Commissioner J.J. Koch, the sole Republican on the Commissioner's Court, lit into county Elections Administrator Toni Pippins-Poole on Tuesday. According to Pippins-Poole, Tenex, the company from which the county bought the now-useless poll books, didn't know that it wouldn't be able to meet state rules that require that the tablets have a constant link to a central system at the time of the sale.

Texas: Electronic pollbook problems cost Dallas County taxpayers an additional $6 million | Lori Brown/KDFW

FOX 4 has discovered Dallas County spent millions of dollars on polling equipment that doesn't work securely with its voting machines. Millions more will need to be shelled out to fix the problem by the March primary election. Dallas County bought the new equipment in order to have new voting centers so voters can vote anywhere in the county on Election Day. But it turns out $6 million were wasted on poll books made by one company that can't securely function with voting machines made by a different company. It turns out Dallas County Commissioner J.J. Koch says new equipment unveiled in the November 2019 election could have been vulnerable to hackers. “We purchased something entirely too quickly, and it ended up costing taxpayers now additional millions of dollars,” he said. “Largely because of security features. In fact, we had an unsecure election.”

Texas: Governor warns of possible cyber attacks amid conflict with Iran | Allie Morris/HoustonChronicle.com

Republican Gov. Greg Abbott is warning of potential cyberattacks on state agencies as a result of the conflict between Iran and the U.S. In the past 48 hours, Abbott said Texas officials have identified Iran as the origin of as many as 10,000 attempted attacks per minute on state computers and networks. After a roundtable with law enforcement officials on Tuesday, Abbott said there are some concerns about the attempted hacks, but that state officials have no credible information about immediate threats to the state or Texas residents. A federal website and a state website that isn’t monitored by the Texas Department of Information Resources might have been defaced by someone with pro-Iranian sentiments, the agency’s executive director Amanda Crawford told reporters after the roundtable. But she declined to name the affected sites and said the department is still gathering information. Abbott is warning local governments to be especially vigilant.

Texas: Missing Midland County ballot box could throw bond election into question | Stacy Fernández/The Texas Tribune

A proposal for a $569 million bond to build two new high school buildings in Midland failed by 25 votes in the November election, a margin slim enough it set off calls for a recount. The ballots were recounted manually, and to the delight of Midland ISD officials, the results flipped and the proposal passed by a margin of 11 votes. But last week, a Midland elections staffer found a box on the bottom of a shelf in the office containing 836 ballots that weren't tallied in the recount. Those votes threaten to again reverse the election results, which school officials are counting on to generate hundreds of millions of dollars for school construction. The elections office obtained a court order to open the ballot box on Monday morning, when staffers began to count up the missing votes. The first and unofficial vote tally on Nov. 5, which used the electronic ballots, took the missing ballots into account. The paper ballots are a physical copy of how constituents voted on the electronic system. The paper ballots came into play during the manual recount, which was missing the more than 800 ballots, making the recount number inaccurate.

Texas: Alarming Discrepancies Found in Midland County Election | Matt Stringer |/Texas Scorecard

An investigation into a West Texas school district’s bond election found even more ballots unaccounted for and a locked ballot box that officials cannot explain, leaving the community still looking for answers. The election was held last month on a proposed $569 million school bond for the Midland Independent School District. Unofficial results from election night showed 11,560 votes for the bond and 11,548 votes against, with military and absentee votes still pending. But the unofficial results were flipped going into final tabulation, with the bond failing by 30 votes due to an incorrect reading of the unofficial results from election night that stood uncorrected by the elections administrator for some time. Final results showed 23,631 votes cast in the bond election: 11,803 votes for and 11,828 against the measure. A recount of the results conducted on November 23 found that 11,400 people had voted against the bond, while 11,411 voted for it, giving a grand total of 22,811 voters having participated in the election.

Texas: We won. No, you won. Wait! We won! Confusion in a Texas school bond election isn’t going away. | Dave Lieber/Dallas Morning News

Jim Wells County had the infamous Ballot Box 13. It was 1948, and supporters of Lyndon B. Johnson held the box back, and then, miraculously, came up with just enough votes for LBJ to win his first U.S. Senate race. History would be quite different if the future president’s South Texas supporters hadn’t cheated. The fragility of our voting system should not be taken for granted. This can happen anywhere in any election. Midland County currently faces its own threat to the sanctity of its election system. Nobody is officially accusing anyone of cheating, but there are problems galore. Much of the problems stem from the first-time use of new voter machines that are supposed to protect ballot security. Called hybrids, they record a vote both electronically and through a backup paper ballot. Most Dallas/Fort Worth area counties have switched to them or are working on a switch. But, so far, that promised measure of security hasn’t worked in that part of West Texas.

Texas: Ahead Of 2020, Voting Group Warns Most County Election Websites In Texas Are Not Secure | Ashley Lopez/KUT

Almost 80 percent of county election websites in Texas are not secure ahead of the 2020 presidential primary, according to a report from the League of Women Voters of Texas. Before every major election, the nonpartisan voting group says, it looks through the state’s 254 county election websites to make sure they have the information they are legally required to have, that the information is easy to find and that it’s easy to read. League of Women Voters of Texas President Grace Chimene said as the group conducted this review, it found a glaring issue. “One of things that stood out to us is that there is a definite problem with website security,” she said. “I was really surprised. I was totally shocked that this is a problem.” In particular, Chimene said, 201 of the 254 sites don’t have https in their URLs, signaling the website is secure. “This is just the most simple thing to fix and it hasn’t been fixed,” she said.

Texas: District Judge approved petition to open Midland County ballot boxes | Brandi Addison/Midland Reporter-Telegram

Midland County Attorney Russell Malm filed a petition Friday morning for permission to open ballot boxes from this election season. The petition was approved by Judge David Lindemood of the 318th District Court, and ballot boxes are set to be opened at 9 a.m. Thursday in the Commissioners’ Court located at the Midland County Annex on “A” Street. The request comes after a manual paper-ballot recount, on Midland ISD’s $569 million bond on Nov. 22, showed an 820-vote discrepancy from what the electronic machines tabulated on Nov. 5 and 12. The opening of ballot boxes is just part of an ongoing process of investigation, Malm said. Under the guidance of the Secretary of State, this was the suggested step that should help determine whether the large gap was due to incorrect tallying during the recount or if the electronic voting machines duplicated votes. The Elections Office will open the boxes to see if there was anything misplaced – specifically a tally sheet – and if so, Elections Administrator Deborah Land will make a copy and place it in an original sealed envelope. From there, all ballots will be run through the electronic machines to count the number of votes cast. This will not tabulate how many votes were “for” or “against,” but rather if the numbers match the tallies from the recount or match the votes tabulated on the electronic machines.

Texas: Midland County officials share update on investigation into ballot discrepancy

The Midland County Elections Office has shared the latest on their investigation into how hundreds of votes went missing during the Midland ISD bond recount. The following comes from Midland County: This is an update on the steps we have and are continuing to undertake to find where the discrepancy has occurred. A telephone conference was held on November 25, 2019 between Keith Ingram and Christina Adkins of the Legal Department of the Texas Office of Secretary of State, and including Terry Johnson, County Judge, Russell Malm, County Attorney, and myself. We were given steps to go through to compare voter check-ins with totals tapes from each vote center, both early voting and election day. We are completing that task at this time.

Texas: Report finds 20% of Texas counties are following best website security practices | Wes Rapaport/Nexstar

With a big election year coming up, one Texas group says improvements to election security are still needed. A new survey from the League of Women Voters of Texas found 20% of Texas county election websites are following best security practices. The review looked at nine points of criteria: Website security: counties earned points for having secure websites, including “.gov” domains and “https” URLs. Mobile friendly: each website was tested for its compatibility with mobile devices. Accessibility: the sites were judged on keywords like “election” or “voting” on the home page. Election information: reviewers looked at ease of accessible voter and election information like detailed contact information for county election offices, dates and hours for early voting and Election Day, registration information, polling locations, and personnel, sample ballots, election results and candidate filing. Help for special categories of voters: the survey reviewed how much information was provided for military and overseas voters, students, and voters with special needs

Texas: Midland ISD canvassing bond election | Victor Blanco, Tatum Guinn, Rachel Ripp/KWES

It's officially in the books: the Midland school board finalized the bond election recount results Tuesday. Everything from here forward will be dealt with by Midland County. This despite a more than 800 ballot discrepancy. People at today’s meeting asked the board to hold off on canvassing the recount until the county gets to the bottom of what happened. “It's disappointing in that there's so many questions left unanswered. That's the part that really I'm having trouble with,” Matt Galindo said. “To know that there's a discrepancy in the amount of votes. I’m disappointed, worried and now have a lack of trust." Midland ISD school board president Rick Davis took the opportunity to explain in detail how the recount process worked Friday. The process included nine teams of three – one representative from each side of the issue and an at-large member were on each team.

Texas: Cause of 820-vote discrepancy in Midland County not yet known | Midland Reporter-Telegram

Midland County Elections Administrator Deborah Land told the Reporter-Telegram it has not been determined what caused an 820-vote discrepancy between Election Day and the recount on the Midland ISD $569 million bond. Land said she has reached out to the legal department of the Secretary of State’s Office and is awaiting response. She has also reached out to representatives from ES&S, the voting machine vendor. “Until I have more information as to how we will be making any determination as to the difference in numbers, I have nothing further to tell you at this time,” Land wrote in an email. The electronic machines counted 23,631 ballots were cast on Nov. 5. When the ballots were counted by hand, the nine three-person teams counted 22,811 ballots total. The recount began sometime after 8 a.m. Friday and ended about 4 a.m. Saturday. Midland County Elections Administrator Deborah Land told the Reporter-Telegram it has not been determined what caused an 820-vote discrepancy between Election Day and the recount on the Midland ISD $569 million bond. Land said she has reached out to the legal department of the Secretary of State’s Office and is awaiting response. She has also reached out to representatives from ES&S, the voting machine vendor.

Texas: Travis County Election Results “Significantly” Delayed After Recounts Were Required | Spectrum News

Election results are in but in Travis County, there were “significant” delays compared to previous elections. Travis County Clerk Dana DeBeauvoir says the delays were not only caused by new voting machines but a statutory requirement to recount some ballots. This is the first time Travis County voters used new machines that utilize paper ballots. At the polls, voters were given a paper “receipt” that inserted into a ballot marker. There they made their selections on a computer which are then printed on the paper. Voters were able to make sure their selections were accurate before having the paper scanned by the ballot box. The papers were then stored in a locked storage box at the bottom of the device in case there was a need for a recount, and recounts were required. DeBeauvoir’s office says the Texas Election Code requires polling places to recount ballots where the number of people who check in, and the number of votes counted, don’t add up. In Travis County, votes from 15 polling locations had to be recounted. That pushed back when the final unofficial results were released: 3:45 a.m. on Wednesday.

Texas: Paper-Based Voting Takes Hold in Texas | Erin Anderson/Texas Scorecard

This November, Texas voters may be less surprised by what’s on their ballots than by what their ballots look like. Dozens of counties across the state—including Collin, Dallas, and Tarrant—are rolling out brand-new, “hybrid” voting systems that combine paper-based and electronic balloting. With hybrid systems, voters use an electronic touch screen to mark paper ballots, which are then counted using a separate tabulating machine. Voters can confirm their selections on paper before scanning their ballots for electronic counting, and election officials have a paper record to use for audits and recounts. Electronic ballot-marking eliminates stray marks and over-votes (marking more than one choice in a race) that can make it difficult or impossible to interpret a voter’s intent. The systems include multiple security features and are not connected to the internet. “Russia cannot tie into this voting equipment,” Collin County Elections Administrator Bruce Sherbet said at a training class for election workers last week, adding that the rollout has been very smooth during early voting.

Texas: Palo Pinto County to Block State Network Access for Security | David May/Mineral Wells Index

If state officials want to perform a security or other audits of the local elections office, they may have to come to Palo Pinto to do it. Joey Fenley, head of Palo Pinto County’s Information Technology department, said allowing remote access to the county’s network through an offsite connection – such as software using a virtual private network – puts the county’s network at risk of receiving a virus or, worse, ransomware. He said it is a breach of the county’s network security protocols. Fenley questions why the state would perform a network security audit using an insecure method. “It’s done by a third party and you don’t know who they are,” Fenley told the Index.