The confusion experienced at polling places across Dallas County during the primary election has now triggered a legal and political battle over thousands of ballots that remain unresolved.
According to the Dallas County Elections Department, more than 2,300 provisional ballots were cast and will remain on hold as the dispute plays out.
“The Texas Supreme Court told us to keep them set aside,” Nicholas Solorzano with the Dallas County Elections Department said. “For right now, they’re safe, they’re secure. They are labeled, and we know where they are.”
Officials said there is no tally of how many voters may have been turned away from the polls amid confusion surrounding voting rules and a last-minute reversal of an extension that some voters believed would allow them to cast ballots.
“I really don’t have a ballpark,” Solorzano said. “There’s probably a decent percentage there that were redirected to where they could vote.”
Outside the Kleberg-Rylie Recreation Center on Monday evening, a group of voters said they waited in line for more than two hours before being told they could not vote.
“We’ve been here since before 7 o’clock, so clearly our rights have been violated,” one voter said while standing outside the polling site.
Alyson Headley Smith said she had a similar experience at a different area. She said she was turned away twice and still does not fully understand why she was unable to cast a ballot.
“You know I lost a freedom that I’ve always had,” Headley Smith said.
She said she believed she had followed the proper steps after receiving election information in the mail.
“I got this in the mail, and I scanned the QR code, so I know I was at the proper place,” she said.
Election officials say they spent about one million dollars attempting to inform voters about a new rule governing the primary that was established by Texas Republicans.
“We sent a mailer to the residential households. We sent a text message to over 700,000 Dallas County residents. We’ve been running ads for the last three to four weeks,” Solorzano said.
Even with those efforts, more than 2,000 provisional ballots, including some cast by Republican voters now sit unresolved while legal challenges move forward.
Leaders from both political parties are already staking out positions as questions grow over who is responsible.
In a statement, Texas Republican Party Chairman Allen West said Republicans properly executed their election operations and rejected accusations that the party was responsible for the confusion.
“We planned, informed, adjusted and executed our primary election day operation. It is quite insidious and absurd to castigate blame on Republicans for Democrats’ failure in a county controlled by Democrats,” West said.
Texas Democratic Party Chairman Kendall Scudder said the priority now is ensuring every eligible vote is counted.
“Regardless of who is in what position, I just want to make sure that every person who wanted to cast a ballot legally had an opportunity,” Scudder said.
As the legal battle unfolds, the outcome could determine whether the provisional ballots are counted and whether voters who say they were turned away will ultimately have their voices heard. For many of them, the bigger question remains how an election meant to exercise a fundamental right left them feeling as though it had been taken away.