Dallas County officials are seeking a recount of the March 3 primary results after discovering that an unknown number of ballots were not initially counted.
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In a petition filed late Friday in state district court, Dallas County election administrator Toni Pippins-Poole said her office has discovered that ballots from 44 tabulating machines were not accounted for in the election results reported by the county on Super Tuesday. It’s unclear how many ballots were missing from the county’s tally of votes.
The issue turned up after county officials were unable to reconcile the number of voters who checked in to cast ballots at some polling places and the number of ballots received from those sites.
It’s unclear which polling places are in question. There were 454 polling places open on Election Day, and each site had one or more machines into which voters fed their marked backup paper ballots so they could be scanned and tabulated, according to an affidavit by Pippins-Poole.
Like many other large counties in Texas, Dallas recently switched over to voting machines that allow voters to fill out their ballots on electronic machines that then mark up a backup paper ballot. The county is now petitioning the court to allow it to perform a recount of the backup paper ballots.
Pippins-Poole could not immediately be reached for comment on Saturday.