I Voted, But Will It Count?

By Robert Wilonsky Sat., Jun. 16 2007 at 2:44 PM

There was a strange site outside my polling place this p.m.: a Dallas County Sheriff's Department car, parked on the curb at Leonides Cigarroa Elementary School. Looked promising. Turns out, there was indeed a deputy inside, plugging cables into a laptop while a county voting official futzed with the voting machine -- which wasn't working. At all. "The scanners must be dirty," said the woman checking voter registration cards, explaining that the machine wasn't tabulating results, forcing us to deposit our ballots into a holding slot in the brown box.

At around 1 p.m., some 200 folks had come through Cigarroa, which would put voting at our location on pace with the May 12 election turnout -- surprising, to say the least. But it was disturbingly difficult to get a hard count: The women working the polling place guestimated some 187 had been in, while the voting machine read "201" -- which didn't include my ballot and the missus', which were slipped into the slot before dashing out into the afternoon sprinkle. So, ahem, I think I voted. Pretty sure. Not quite. See you at 7? --Robert Wilonsky

Update: Jim Schutze reports that he encountered the same problem when he went to vote this morning, at the fire station at the corner of Belmont and Skillman. "We had to turn our ballots upside-down to get the machine to accept them," Jim reports. "We were told the scanners weren't working, then we were told it was the humidity."

Update No. 2: At 3:13 p.m., we tried to get a hold of Dallas County Elections Administrator Bruce Sherbet, who was out to lunch but expected to return shortly. But elections officials Matt Pulle spoke with said they had had no reports today of machines that were not working -- at least, not till Unfair Park called. You're welcome.

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