Sixty Texas counties are scrambling to replace an important piece of voting equipment after the electronic poll books used to check in voters at the poll were decertified.
In December 2024, the state decertified a poll book from the company Election Systems & Software that was widely used across Texas because thousands of voters in Dallas County received the wrong ballot during the 2024 presidential election, according to a report from the Texas Tribune. At the time, local officials attributed the problem to glitches with the e-poll book.
Just months away from the state’s May elections, county officials now have to weigh whether it is worth it to wait to see if ES&S’s updated software is certified by then or choose a different certified vendor, which could increase costs. Another consideration counties must make is whether any new option would be compatible with their existing systems and if there is enough time to train poll workers to use it.
“We take full responsibility for the usability of the system and the confusion which resulted in voters being given the wrong ballot,” Jeb Cameron, ES&S senior vice president of government affairs, told Votebeat, adding that the ES&S system did not assign incorrect ballot styles to voters, as was the case in Dallas County, and that poll workers have the ability to check the ballot style before handing it to a voter.
The electronic poll book, which acts essentially as a laptop computer or tablet loaded with voter-specific software, is a tool Texas uses to run its elections. Election workers use e-poll books to verify facts about voters, including identity, registration, and whether they have already cast a ballot.
If poll workers did not have access to the e-poll book, they would have to flip through hundreds or thousands of pages of paper voter lists to access the same information.
ES&S officials said they are working on an update that fixes the problems but that the update would still need to pass the weekslong state certification process. Texas will not have statewide elections this year, but May ballots will include school board elections and municipal elections.
Some election officials have expressed worry it will not be ready by May.
In North Texas’s Rockwall County, for example, officials had been using the ES&S equipment for about two years and spent more than $50,000 on it. Christopher Lynch, the county elections administrator, told the Texas Tribune that running an election without the equipment would be “really challenging.”
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Lynch also said he is exploring all options, including the possibility that the county, which has 90,000 registered voters, will need to rely on spreadsheets or a physical print copy of voter lists come May.
“We just don’t know what’s going to happen and that’s what makes me nervous,” he told the outlet. “But we also can’t wait to see what happens. We have to get creative and be ready.”