Dallas County residents are seeing longer waits at several polling locations, which officials are attributing to a machine “glitch.”
Some people waited in line for two hours.
“It was all the way around the building,” one Dallas County resident told WFAA. “I thought I’d be able to walk in and walk out…I had to wait.”
Local leaders aren’t happy.
“This is just totally unacceptable,” said Dallas County Commissioner John Wiley Price, reported WFAA. “Glitching, having to reboot. We specifically upgraded, supposedly, from 4G to 5G. That was supposed to have been an issue. Now we have all these new poll books and we’re still having the same issue.”
Dallas County Elections uses the Election Systems & Software, which is currently working with the county to address the reported issues, reported WFAA.
The Dallas County Elections Department told The Dallas Express that they are working to be as transparent as possible with the public.
“The Dallas County Elections Department strives to be transparent in all processes. For example, in public tests, we add a Public Verification Day, not required by law, and invite people to come and test the systems themselves. We have also launched an Open Records Initiative, releasing hundreds of thousands of election records proactively without requiring a public information request,” the Elections Office said.
The Dallas County Elections Administrator Heider Garcia, who used to work for Smartmatic, was lambasted in 2010 by Philippine officials for allowing glitches during an election.
“Apparently frustrated at Smartmatic’s Heider Garcia’s failure to explain the internal clock glitches of some Precinct Count Optical Scan machines, automation defender Makati City Rep. Teodoro Locsin Jr. cursed at the Smartmatic official during his committee’s hearing on alleged fraud committed during the May 10 elections,” ABS-CBN News reported at the time.
The current software glitches have led to people losing faith in the machines in Dallas.
“Dallas County Republican Party is being flooded with calls today. An issue that I dealt with personally when voting for myself in the March Primary was my vote flipping to my opponent. This tends to be more of an ES&S issue than a Hart issue. If you notice that a voting machine appeared to change your vote, please alert the judges so they can note it as an election irregularity and request the election department send an inspector come down to the polling location so they can log machine information and date and time of the event. This is serious and could potentially call into question all votes on that machine prior to the reporting of the event,” Barry Wernick posted on X.