Dallas County Republican mail-in ballots were ‘hand duplicated,’ Democratic election judge reports

A report from a Democratic election judge for the March 1 primary indicated every Republican mail-in ballot cast in Dallas County had to be reproduced manually in order to be counted. Dallas attorney Louis Bedford IV, who was the local Democratic Party’s appointed election judge for Dallas County’s central counting station during the March 1 primary, created a report this week highlighting numerous issues with voting equipment and staffing shortages that he said affected the election. Bedford’s report outlines several issues that occurred during early voting and on Election Day for the primary. Those included a technical issue with every Republican mail-in ballot that forced election staff to manually enter ballots into voting machines. Bedford said ballots had to be “hand duplicated by the Central Count staff during the counting process.” That amounted to 2,777 Republican ballots that election staff had to manually enter into voting machines.

In response to an inquiry from The Dallas Morning News, Dallas County Elections Administrator Michael Scarpello said those ballots were not hand duplicated. After discovering a “flawed” process in programming mail-in ballots that “allowed too much room for human error when programming mail ballots,” staff realized those ballots could not be read by high speed ballot scanners. “In response, we did not hand duplicate the ballots, as stated in the report, but we input the results of each ballot manually into electronic voting machines,” Scarpello said in an email. Though the ballots were all counted in a timely manner, the revelation of the programming process flaw comes as Republicans already are expressing skepticism about mail-in voting, especially in blue-leaning counties. The March 1 primary was the first conducted under new election rules that required mail-in voters to provide ID numbers or partial social security numbers when voting by mail. The process led to a high rate of rejection of mail-in votes — 12.4% statewide and 9.5% in Dallas County. Many Republicans appear to be abandoning the process, which is open to any Texan over the age of 65. While Republicans cast about twice as many votes as Democrats in the election, fewer Republican ballots came by mail than from Democrats.