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.

However, the ballot count symbolizes how susceptible elections in Texas can be to human error. The situation also underpins how critical election infrastructure includes multiple firewalls, including paper ballots to ensure a complete count.

“Elections are run by humans, and sometimes they’re messy,” said Brandon Rottinghaus, a University of Houston professor. “There is an unfounded expectation that ballots are counted quickly. But the responsibility of election officials is to count them properly. And efficiency and completeness are not always easy to accomplish.”

Toni Pippins-Poole, Dallas County’s election administrator who asked for the recount, said counting paper ballots will ensure every resident has his or her voice heard.

“This is the safeguard that we put in place,” she said after the hearing. “We want to make sure that the number of voters who walked in is the actual number of ballots that are cast.”

Philosophical differences

The problems in Dallas’ elections — long lines, a dearth of poll workers and missing ballots — stem from a philosophical difference in how many voting locations the county should have opened.

When Dallas County commissioners made the pitch in 2019 to voters to abandon the traditional precinct system in favor of countywide voting, they promised to keep as many locations open through the 2020 election, despite a law that would allow them to cut the number nearly in half.

Complicating that promise is that the county has little authority over how primary elections are run. That responsibility lies almost exclusively with the two major political parties.

During negotiations between the local parties and the elections office, with whom the parties contract to coordinate the elections, Republicans said they needed no more than 250 polling locations. Democrats — aligned with the majority of county commissioners — insisted on more.

"We've never had, on primary days, this many locations,” said Rodney Anderson, chairman of the Dallas County Republicans.

Both parties historically condensed the number of locations to between 200 and 300 — much fewer than the 455 Dallas ended up opening this March.

At one point, Pippins-Poole, the county’s election’s chief, offered to combine the two primaries into one election, which would have given her more authority to organize the election and hire and train workers earlier.

Both parties rejected the idea.

As the March 3 primary neared, tensions rose and accusations of sabotage and incompetence were exchanged.

Republicans told the elections department they would only be able to recruit election judges for about 250 polling locations. Election judges are responsible for setting up and closing down polling locations among other duties. Typically, each party has its own judge during a primary.

Dallas Republicans said they would not pay to cover the cost of temporary workers. However, the party agreed to allow Democrats to serve as election judges in locations where a Republican poll watcher wasn’t assigned. Conversely, Republicans would run the Democratic election if the latter party couldn’t assign an election judge to a particular vote center.

With the primary just two weeks away, the Dallas County commissioners approved an emergency $400,000 for the elections department to hire and train temporary workers to fill in the gaps. Before approving the money, Dallas County Commissioner John Wiley Price, a Democrat who represents southern Dallas, suggested the Republicans were trying to sabotage the election.

Dallas County Democratic chairwoman Carol Donovan echoed Price: "I’m just really dismayed that the Republican Party has abandoned their own voters by not fully staffing election judges. The Republicans have decided the fewer the voting sites, the fewer voters.”

However, it was unclear as late as Feb. 26 — less than one week before the primary — how many election judges the Republicans had and which polling locations they would be assigned to. The hold-up meant that the elections department was delayed in finalizing the locations and hiring and training workers to fill the gaps.

The Republicans’ delay in identifying where their election judges and other workers were assigned “was a huge factor” in planning, Pippins-Poole said.

GOP chairman Anderson said his team was in daily communication with the elections department and that everyone was working up until the last minute to recruit as many election workers as possible.

He added that the county was holding up the process, rewriting the contract that was supposed to lay out the rules of the election and attempting to charge the Republican Party $284,000 for temporary workers, a cost the county commissioners had already agreed to pay.

Anderson ultimately refused to sign the amendment.

"They're going to try and lay blame on the Republicans no matter what," Anderson said.

An election on trial and calls for reform

Several long-time election judges from both parties were blindsided when the weekend before the election they learned they’d be the designated election judge for both primaries.

Temporary workers hired by a staffing service to help the party-appointed judges were required to learn how to set up electronic poll books, machines and the intricacies of election law in a matter of days.

But perhaps the greatest source of confusion came from last-minute instructions given to election judges who would be running both parties’ primaries.

Pippins-Poole said during the hearing Tuesday that the elections department provided verbal instructions to election judges who were working a polling location without a counterpart from the other party to only set up one vote tabulating machine — which would count both Democratic and Republican ballots.

At locations where there was an election judge from each party, two machines would be set up, one for Democrats and one for Republicans.

Pippins-Poole said she believes some judges working elections by themselves used two machines. Pippins-Poole added that about half the judges at the 44 locations where another count will take place were new.

During Tuesday’s hearing, Republicans attempted to delay the counting by three days to better understand what happened on Election Day. The judge declined. After the hearing, Anderson said he wants an independent investigation commissioned by the county commissioners. However, he stopped short of suggesting Pippins-Poole should resign, something Republican County Commissioner J.J. Koch has done.

“I would love for the county commissioners court based on this, to request an outside auditor come in and evaluate the process,” Anderson said. “I think the process is obviously not working properly.”

Outside groups are also sounding the alarm and calling for changes to how elections are run in Texas.

Anthony Gutierrez, Executive Director of Common Cause Texas, a political nonprofit that advocates for election reform, called the situation in Dallas alarming. However, he said, the state needs to rethink elections.

“Political parties should not be administering the elections,” he said. “Everyone’s lives would be so much easier if the county would just run all the elections.”