Texas counties left scrambling after critical election equipment loses its certification

This article was originally published in The Texas Tribune.

With city and school elections just a few months away, election officials in more than 60 Texas counties are scrambling to replace a key piece of voting equipment that’s no longer in service: the electronic pollbooks they use to check voters in at the polls.

The state decertified widely used pollbook software from voting machine company Election Systems & Software in December after several thousand voters in Dallas County received the wrong ballot during the November presidential election, a problem local officials attributed to glitches with the e-pollbook.

Now county officials have to decide whether to wait to see if ES&S’s updated software is certified in time to prepare for the May elections, or choose a different certified vendor, which could be expensive. They must also consider whether any new option would be compatible with their existing systems and whether they have enough time to train poll workers to use it.

The state tests all certified election equipment extensively, but that hasn’t included how well e-pollbooks function in elections with high voter turnout. Now the state plans to revise its certification standards and add testing to include whether the devices can function error-free over extensive periods during those conditions, said Alicia Pierce, assistant secretary of state for communications at the Texas Secretary of State’s Office.

State officials have offered grants to affected counties to offset some of the cost of switching to a new vendor, but some county officials say they won’t be enough.

ES&S, meanwhile, says it is working on an update that fixes the problems, but that update would still have to go through the weeks-long state certification process and election officials are worried it won’t be ready on time.

The electronic pollbook — basically a laptop computer or tablet loaded with specific software — is an essential tool for running elections securely and efficiently in Texas. Election workers use them to verify voters’ identity, check their registration and guard against fraud by checking whether a voter has already cast a ballot by mail or at another polling location. Without the e-pollbook, election workers would have to flip through hundreds or thousands of pages of paper voter lists.

Trying to run an election without them “would be really challenging,” said Christopher Lynch, the elections administrator in North Texas’ Rockwall County, which has nearly 90,000 registered voters. “We wouldn't have the ability to execute elections the way we're used to doing it.”

State cites 10 areas where e-pollbooks failed 

Running an election with a poorly functioning e-pollbook can create a mess, too.

The electronic pollbooks are synced with the voter rolls. Once a voter checks in at a polling location, election officials use them to determine which version of the ballot the voter is supposed to receive, with the selection of local races that corresponds to their address.

The ballot-assigning function is one of 10 that the ES&S electronic pollbook “failed” to perform properly during the November presidential election, according to officials with the Texas Secretary of State’s Office. Votebeat obtained a copy of a December letter from the state to ES&S detailing those lapses.

The system also failed to keep a running count of voters who had checked in to vote each day and failed to sync with counties’ central databases in real time, the state said. The company in an email said new features in its upcoming updated version will resolve these issues.

The state also told ES&S in the letter that it had received “reports from multiple counties” related to issues with the e-pollbook, though it didn’t identify them. Three counties — Rockwall, Victoria in South Texas, and Angelina in East Texas — had problems in November, though on a much smaller scale than Dallas.

“These issues included electronic poll books becoming unresponsive, errors that caused some voters to receive incorrect ballot styles, failure to save check-in data for certain voters and a general failure to provide notification to poll workers of errors in workflows or with peripheral devices,” the letter said.

Texas has tested and certified versions of ES&S’s e-pollbook since 2020, most recently in August, just a few months before the November problems.

The certification process includes testing by the National Institute of Standards and Technology lab, physical examination of the devices, and what’s called a functional examination, where state officials put the devices through a test of specific functions, using a database of fictional test voters. Officials then test whether the equipment is able to check a voter’s identity, by scanning various forms of ID; whether it can import and export the county’s voter registration data; and whether it can determine if a voter is at the correct polling location, among other things.

Dallas County problems unnerve election administrator

The problems in Dallas County unfolded like this: Once voters checked in, poll workers would use the system to check their identity and determine which ballot style they should get. The voter would then enter their signature, and the poll workers would hit the “accept” button, which triggers the system to begin printing their ballot. But the system didn’t notify the poll worker that printing was in progress, prompting workers to hit the “accept” button multiple times. Each time, the system added another copy of that type of ballot to the printing queue.

As more voters came in, they were then handed the ballot that had been mistakenly added to the queue and printed for the voter ahead of them.

ES&S said the issue was due to the slow transitions between pages when the print command is used, and appears to be isolated to this pollbook version. “Our records indicate that the November 2024 election was the first time this particular issue was reported,” a company spokesperson said in an email to Votebeat.

“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. But he stressed that the ES&S system did not assign incorrect ballot styles to voters and that poll workers have a way to check the ballot style before handing it to a voter.

Dallas County elections administrator Heider Garcia said no amount of additional poll worker training could have fully prevented the problem.

“This is a defect in the software. There's no getting around that,” he said. “You can train people to expect issues. But if you're training them on how to deal with an issue, the question is, why are you not fixing the issue in the first place?”

ES&S added a temporary fix to resolve the problems that occurred in Dallas County: a pop-up screen giving the poll worker the option to activate the printing.

Company officials said they are now working on an updated version that would eliminate the problems and expect to complete it and submit it for certification to the state by March 3. The company said it “will work closely with the state to obtain certification as timely as possible.”

Garcia said it’s too risky to count on ES&S’s update, and he’s taking bids from other vendors.

Other counties may not be able to afford that. The state has offered grants drawn from federal dollars meant to help states upgrade their voting systems. State officials said those funds would cover 80% of costs. Counties could also dip into state funds allocated to cover local voter registration-related expenses.

In Rockwall County, officials had been using the ES&S equipment for about two years and had already spent more than $50,000 on it.

If the equipment isn’t recertified, and the county isn’t able to use it, that money could go to waste.

Lynch, the elections administrator there, said that he is exploring all of his options and preparing for the possibility that the county may have to rely on spreadsheets or printed voter lists in May.

“We just don’t know what’s going to happen and that’s what makes me nervous,” he said. “But we also can’t wait to see what happens. We have to get creative and be ready.”

Disclosure: Texas Secretary of State has been a financial supporter of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in the Tribune's journalism. Find a complete list of them here.