Dallas County Republican mail-in ballots were 'hand duplicated,' Democratic election judge reports

[TexasTowelie]

AUSTIN — A report from a Democratic election judge for the March 1 primary indicated every Republican mail-in ballot cast in Dallas County had to be reproduced manually in order to be counted.

Dallas attorney Louis Bedford IV, who was the local Democratic Party’s appointed election judge for Dallas County’s central counting station during the March 1 primary, created a report this week highlighting numerous issues with voting equipment and staffing shortages that he said affected the election.

Bedford’s report outlines several issues that occurred during early voting and on Election Day for the primary. Those included a technical issue with every Republican mail-in ballot that forced election staff to manually enter ballots into voting machines.

Bedford said ballots had to be “hand duplicated by the Central Count staff during the counting process.” That amounted to 2,777 Republican ballots that election staff had to manually enter into voting machines.

Read more: https://www.dallasnews.com/news/politics/2022/04/08/dallas-county-republican-mail-in-ballots-were-hand-duplicated-democratic-election-judge-reports/

[barbaraann]

1. What? I cannot understand what this means and the article is behind a paywall.

Can anyone explain? It just doesn't seem right.

[abqtommy]

2. I went to the link and found this:

[In response to an inquiry from The Dallas Morning News, Dallas County Elections Administrator Michael Scarpello said those ballots were not hand duplicated. After discovering a “flawed” process in programming mail-in ballots that “allowed too much room for human error when programming mail ballots,” staff realized those ballots could not be read by high speed ballot scanners.

“In response, we did not hand duplicate the ballots, as stated in the report, but we input the results of each ballot manually into electronic voting machines,” Scarpello said in an email.

Though the ballots were all counted in a timely manner, the revelation of the programming process flaw comes as Republicans already are expressing skepticism about mail-in voting, especially in blue-leaning counties. The March 1 primary was the first conducted under new election rules that required mail-in voters to provide ID numbers or partial social security numbers when voting by mail.]

Looks like the new reTHUG mail-in voting rules have screwed up their own vote counts.
I wonder what steps were taken to verify that all Democratic votes were counted...

NOTE:When I went to the link I didn't encounter a paywall. This stuff happens.

[barbaraann]

3. Thank you! Here's another article I found about Scarpello's management:

Mismanaged City Election a Million-Dollar Mistake for Dallas County
Dallas City Council voted against paying more money for a June runoff after county’s “egregious failure” administering the May election.
By Erin Anderson
|May 14, 2021

Dallas County’s new elections administrator, Michael Scarpello, may have made a million-dollar mistake mismanaging the May municipal election in the city of Dallas.

The city is refusing to pay Scarpello’s elections office an additional $1.4 million to conduct a runoff election in June, after hearing from Scarpello during Wednesday’s Dallas City Council meeting about polling-place problems that kept an unknown number of voters from casting ballots on May 1.
...
Dallas voters had hoped Scarpello would be an improvement over his predecessor Toni Pippins-Poole, who retired at the end of November 2020 following a controversial nine-year tenure marred by mistakes and allegations of incompetence and corruption.

Scarpello’s first effort in Dallas has cost the county the confidence of its biggest city and its voters, plus a million dollars.

https://texasscorecard.com/local/mismanaged-city-election-a-million-dollar-mistake-for-dallas-county/

Yikes! These problems don't seem normal.

[abqtommy]

4. Thanks, that's interesting, indeed. reTHUGS would like us to think that what they do

is normal but we don't have to fall for that.

[jaxexpat]

5. Incompetence, too, is often an "engineered" commodity, apparently.

This could turn out to be another of those mistakes which will happen again and again and again because if it breaks according to someone's schedule, don't fix it.

Just saying. I have no data. It just smells like a duck.

[Rebl2]

8. Sounds suspicious

to me. Did they change votes of democrats ballots to republican votes since they had to manually input the ballots?

[KS Toronado]

6. What happened to all the Democrat's mail-in ballots?

[barbaraann]

7. I wondered that, too. It is all very, very strange. n/t

[Septua]

9. I just hope the election judge made a video

Dallas attorney Louis Bedford IV, who was the local Democratic Party’s appointed election judge for Dallas County’s central counting station during the March 1 primary, created a report this week highlighting numerous issues with voting equipment and staffing shortages that he said affected the election.

If not, the claim will be a "conspiracy theory"...we got enough of them now.