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Concerns of voter suppression in Dallas County swirled on Election Day as voters were redirected under a new precinct-based polling system.
On Tuesday, poll workers at the Martin Weiss Recreation Center in Oak Cliff told the Observer several residents had been redirected to their registered voting precinct while trying to cast votes at the center.
The Dallas Morning News also reported that hundreds of voters, specifically at Highland Park United Methodist Church and the Oak Lawn Branch Library, were directed to other polling places by county-designated election navigators.
“We’ve been at the polls all day, and we have experienced time after time voters being confused about their location, about directions that they’ve been receiving,” state Rep. Venton Jones told the Observer on Tuesday. Jones is headed for a runoff election against Amanda Jones after receiving just under 49% of the vote.
Unlike most elections since 2019, Dallas County voters were required to vote at designated voting precincts determined by their place of residence on Tuesday. The change is the result of a push by Dallas County Republicans to hold separate primary elections. Under state law, countywide voting must also be agreed upon by both parties, and the county GOP instead decided to pursue a “precinct-based, community, separate Election Day electoral process.”
In January, the county redrew precinct boundaries to adjust for Texas’ controversial new congressional map. Dallas County Democratic Party Executive Director Brenda Allen said most voters didn’t know which precinct they live in, and those who did may not have been aware of the new precincts.
“We also have the combination of now separate polling locations, separate voting machines and separate poll workers,” Allen said. “It was an impossible task for our Dallas County Elections department to execute an election under those circumstances. We had equipment that had not updated.”
Dallas County Elections officials did not return requests for comment.
“There’s a reason why they want to silence voters,” Allen said. “There’s a reason why they’re doing these efforts and testing these kinds of processes and changes. We cannot let them win.”
Confusion stemming from the precinct-based system led Dallas County Democratic Party officials to file an emergency petition to extend the 7 p.m. voting deadline to 9 p.m, citing voter confusion tied to inaccuracies on the Texas Secretary of State’s website, issues with polling equipment and a brief outage of the Dallas County Elections Department website.
“This is voter suppression by design,” Dallas County Democratic Party Chair Kardal Coleman said in a statement Tuesday. “When the countywide voting system people have used for over a decade is discarded, it forces working Texans to hunt for new locations and navigate unnecessary barriers. We are stepping in to clean up the mess made by these partisan decisions.”
District Judge Staci Adams granted the motion and ordered the county to keep 279 Democratic polling places open for an additional two hours.
Just before 9 p.m, the Texas Supreme Court stayed the emergency motion and ordered Dallas County to separate votes cast by those who got in line after 7 p.m. as provisional ballots after Attorney General Ken Paxton claimed his office had not received the one-hour notice required to make the change.
Along with U.S. Rep. Jasmine Crockett’s support base, the ruling also ordered Williamson County, the home county of fellow Democratic Senate candidate and State Rep. James Talarico, to separate ballots. Williamson County voters waited in lines for hours on Tuesday after another Republican-led implementation of a precinct-based voting system, prompting a court ruling to extend polling hours, the local ABC affiliate reported.
Dallas County Commissioner Andy Sommerman, a Democrat who ran unopposed in his primary, said that the move to precinct voting was intended to incite “chaos” on election day and spread voter mistrust in a Democratic stronghold.
“Their goal is to make us have no confidence in elections,” Sommerman said. “There was clearly a strategy here that they would use chaos that they created by going in-precinct and demanding to go in-precinct, which the law requires us to go in-precinct, because they demanded it.”
In a statement, Dallas County Republican Chair Allen West blamed the confusion on Democrats’ failure to educate voters.
“It is absurd, insidious, and delusional to assert that the Dallas County GOP had any part in the failure of Dallas County Democrats to execute their own primary election day operation,” the statement reads. “Rep. Jasmine Crockett lost and perhaps a lesson in civics and precinct chairs duties and responsibilities would have been advised.”
Sommerman estimated that at least 50% of voters in Dallas County were redirected on Election Day, before adding that he is concerned that confusion and voter mistrust will bleed into November.
“If half of your voters are being renavigated to a new location, you’re going to have a lot of people not liking it, and therefore creates voter suppression when it comes time for the general election,” Sommerman said.
