West DFW News

Parker County officials said voting machine failures that happened at five locations during the primary election cannot happen again. 

Commissioners discussed the failures with Don Markum, the county's elections administrator, who said early voting went smoothly with 14,454 people casting an early ballot. Problems with the machines didn't occur until election day, he said. 

“We had 13,401 people vote on election day at 37 poll sites," Markum said. "The issue we had was the scanners would not read some of the ballots. It was basically five whole sites that had this issue with a lot of the ballots not being able to be read — Santa Fe Baptist Church, ESD 6, Rock Baptist Church, Willow Park and Aledo ISD. Those five sites had major issues.”

County Judge Pat Deen said he experienced the issues with the machine, having to cast his ballot five times to finally get the machine to work, he said. 

“When I was in the voting site trying to vote, it became extremely frustrating,” Deen told a representative from Hart InterCivic at the meeting. "I was obviously a little vocal, but within reason in trying to maintain some tact, but I noticed probably a dozen other people that were the same. That was clearly a disaster at that voting site. This is a reflection of the Commissioners Court and the decision we made on the equipment — obviously there were two options we had and we went with you because of the trust and recommendations. I’ve been election judge in the past and I’ve never seen anything like that before.”

The new voting machines were approved last summer by the commissioners. Hart InterCivic has provided the equipment that is used in the county for 15 years, and it cost $937,921 to purchase all the new machines. 

“We’re 100 percent committed to root-causing this issue and resolving it permanently and making sure that not just the machines that were affected on election day, but your entire installation base is retested to make sure this is completely fixed, not before the November [election] but before your May election,” Steven Sockwell, vice president of marketing at InterCivic, said. 

Sockwell also said some of the malfunctioning machines will be researched. 

“We picked up a representative sample of some of the affected machines and brought them back to Austin and we’ve been researching them as best we can, but we don’t have a root cause identified yet," Sockwell said. "Today we’re picking up all the systems that were affected, I believe there’s 44 total and bringing them back to Austin. We’re re-creating the polling places in our office and setting up everything because we want to be able to replicate the problem so that we can root-cause it.”

Due to the voting machine failures, 1,300 ballots had to be counted by hand by the Elections Board's eight members. 

“I will start by thanking the people that served on the ballot board to make sure that everybody’s vote got counted and that they were handled as best they could be given the conditions that we faced. These people worked 30 hours without any sleep in a building where the heat and air conditioning had been turned off. It was truly inhumane to have these people who were up since 4 a.m. already and had worked a full day at our poll sites, to be expected to stay until every one of those 1,300 ballots was read out, hand-marked and put through the scanner," Kay Parr, Parker County's Democratic Party chair, said. "I admire their perseverance and dedication, I can’t believe they did that, and I would like to reassure the community that these people have the highest integrity and these ballots were protected."

Parr also said she would also like to have a contingency plan so that people who haven't been working at the polls all day wouldn't have to count ballots. 

“I would like to see contingency plans moving forward that we have people who have not worked the polls all day who can be called upon to step up and work on these ballot boards, which would mean they would need to be properly trained ahead of time and we need to have a list on standby," Parr said. "We did not have enough people to do this task. I want to thank Don and his staff; they were there through the night until we got these votes counted so they also had an incredibly long workday.”

Tarrant County, the largest county in the area that uses the same voting machines, didn't have the same issues, Parker County Republican Party Chair Scott Utley said. It bothers him that Parker County did have the issues, but Tarrant didn't, he said. 

“I spent pretty much the entire day at Santa Fe Baptist Church reassuring voters that their vote did count," Utley said. "For us, the most vital part of our democracy is faith in the system — that the system is going to work and your vote is going to count — and so that’s why it’s so adamant that we get ahead of this ASAP because the next election will be even more pressing."

Utley also said the failure rates need to be looked into and see if the other seven counties also had failure rates. 

“So Tarrant County is going to have more [equipment] than what we have and probably multiple times more than we have, so how are we the only county that has this problem? That’s what bothers me," Utley said. "You have Tarrant County deploying and Parker County not deploying, so when I’m sitting there and have voters yelling at me because the voting system didn’t work, it’s disturbing to me.”

Larry Walden, Precinct 3 commissioner, said these failures won't be tolerated. 

“We need a total cost of these failures, a cost for us as a county collectively so we can address that part,” Walden said. “This is unacceptable and I’ll tell you that as a court we’re not going to tolerate this type of failure again and we will seek whatever necessary action to correct the situation. We want to send a very strong message from Parker County Commissioners Court that it’s unacceptable and it must be solved or we will solve it for you.”

InterCivic will put together a report on the machines and present it at a meeting of commissioners, Sockwell said.