DALLAS — Veronica Anderson walked 2 ½ miles Tuesday afternoon to the Martin Luther King Jr. Community Center because she wanted to vote.
When she arrived, election workers told her she was at the wrong polling place and would need to cast her ballot at a different precinct — one she said she had never heard of. Unsure where it was or how to get there, she stood outside trying to sort out her options.
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“I walked up here because I want to vote so, so bad,” she told a reporter for the Dallas Free Press and Votebeat, adding that it felt like “your self-esteem and everything is torn down.”
Anderson was one of hundreds of voters across Dallas County on Tuesday who went to the wrong voting location as they tried to cast ballots in the state’s high-turnout primaries, with closely watched contests for U.S. Senate at the top of the ticket.
Under state law, political parties have wide authority to decide how to run county primaries. The confusion stemmed from a decision by the Dallas County Republican Party to abandon the use of countywide vote centers — which allow voters to cast a ballot at any location — and return to a system of precinct-based assigned polling places for Election Day. That decision forced Dallas Democrats to do the same. Voters were still able to cast ballots at countywide sites during early voting.
Dallas County Democrats had objected to the decision and warned it would confuse voters. After reports of hundreds of confused voters being redirected away from the wrong polling places Tuesday, Democrats obtained a court order extending voting hours for Democrats in Dallas County until 9 p.m., with ballots cast after 7 p.m. counted provisionally.
The Texas Supreme Court later stayed the order, and said ballots cast by voters who weren’t in line by 7 p.m. should be separated pending a final ruling. For their part, Republicans did not request an extension of voting hours.
Dallas County has used countywide vote centers since 2019. Local Republican leaders said Tuesday’s shift would boost voter confidence. Williamson County also used precinct-based voting on Tuesday.
Dallas County and party officials said they had warned voters ahead of time that election day rules would be different. The Dallas County Elections Department sent text messages, mailed notices, and ran social media and streaming ads urging voters to cast ballots early and reminding them they would need to vote at their assigned precinct if they waited until election day, according to Nicholas Solorzano, a spokesperson for the Dallas County Elections Department.
The county also stationed nonpartisan “election navigators” outside at least 75 polling locations to redirect voters who showed up at the wrong site. Dallas County Republican Party Chair Allen West said the party had publicized the changes as well and framed the return to precinct-based voting as a matter of trust in the process. Kardal Coleman, chair of the Dallas County Democratic Party, told Votebeat that Democrats have “called, texted, we’ve sent mailpieces. We’ve run a full campaign.”
“There are a lot of infuriated voters”
At the Anita Martinez Recreation Center in West Dallas, election navigator Juston Marine stood outside with a county-issued tablet, stopping voters before they entered.
“Are you here to vote?” he asked. “Can I see your driver’s license? Can you choose your party? I’m just trying to make sure you’re in the right location.”
Marine said he was redirecting every second or third voter who approached. He lost count of how many people he had sent elsewhere.
“There are a lot of infuriated voters,” he said.
Some cursed at him. Others had driven across the county only to learn they were in the wrong place — including one example of a voter who traveled from Balch Springs to West Dallas and was then redirected to Cedar Hill.
Ashley Feldt, who recently moved to West Dallas from East Dallas, arrived at the site with her fiancé. Marine told her she was actually assigned to vote at Hexter Elementary, miles away. Unsure she would have time to get there before polls closed, she told her fiancé — who was assigned to the recreation center — to go ahead and vote without her.
James Crolley, an Election Day inspector assigned to 12 locations ranging from downtown Dallas to Trinity Groves and West Dallas, said that voters were also surprised to find that voters assigned to the same precinct, but who vote in different parties, often weren’t voting at the same sites.
“If you had always voted at Mockingbird Elementary as a Republican, and you go there today, and you’re like, ‘Why am I not able to vote? This is my spot,’ that caused a little bit of conflict,” he said.
The problems were not confined to Dallas.
Williamson County Republicans also returned to precinct-based voting and adopted a different counting process for their primary. Instead of using precinct scanners to tabulate votes throughout the day, Republican ballots were to be placed into separate boxes by precinct and scanned centrally after polls close, according to Connie Odom, a spokesperson for Williamson County.
Odom said in an email that reconciliation rules and manual review of some ballots mean few, if any, Election Day results are expected before midnight. The Democratic primary there is using the county’s traditional scanner system.
In Eastland County, which moved away from vote centers to enable hand-counting of ballots, election workers at the county courthouse said they had told about 68 voters by late morning that they were at the wrong location.
Jennie Trejo and Keri Mitchell of Dallas Free Press and Carrie Levine, Nathaniel Rakich, and Natalia Conteras of Votebeat contributed reporting.
Jessica Huseman is Votebeat’s editorial director and is based in Dallas. Contact Jessica at jhuseman@votebeat.org.