Here’s Talking Points Memo with a closer look at what happened in Dallas in March and where all that is coming from.
Since the 2020 election, right-wing activists have accelerated their efforts to curtail access to voting by promoting conspiracy theories around voter fraud and electronic voting machines. What the Dallas case demonstrates is that those fervid ideas are increasingly being woven into the fabric of how elections are run. It also shows the consequences: thousands of voters unclear on how and where to vote, muddied results, and an official on the primary ballot intervening to throw out votes whose late arrival was prompted by the chaos.
Dallas has grown rapidly in recent years, attracting the kinds of corporate headquarters that West blamed for bringing in Democratic voters. (The county has in fact voted Democratic in the last five presidential elections.) That growth brought in large numbers of immigrants from South Asia and Muslim-majority countries to the area, which has, in turn, led to local and national far-right activists holding the area up as a supposed example of nonwhite immigrants replacing “heritage Texans.”
Amid these demographic shifts, the local Republican Party is doing all it can to exert control over how elections are carried out. But briefly getting some of what voter fraud conspiracy theorists wanted has broken open a fissure in the local GOP. West, who initially said that the primary chaos affected Democrats more than it did Republicans, reversed himself and agreed to countywide polling for the May runoffs (He’d claimed he was trying to avoid “a lawsuit alleging willful and intentional voter disenfranchisement.”). After a revolt from within the party, he resigned.
Now, with the May runoffs less than 20 days away, the county GOP is suing to override local elections officials and run the election by precinct voting again. They’re alleging “sabotage,” and tried to refer West for criminal prosecution. The mess has gotten national attention from political figures like House Administration Committee Ranking Member Rep. Joe Morelle (D-NY), who traveled to Dallas for a hearing about the fiasco as part of his task force on preventing election interference.
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When countywide polling first came to Texas in 2006, Lubbock County Elections Administrator Roxzine Stinson told TPM, it faced little opposition. She saw it as a plus: the change made it easier to vote, allowing people to vote depending on where they were in the course of Election Day.
“They didn’t have to rush back home to their neighborhood vote center to be able to vote,” she said. “They were able to go to any location that was open on Election Day.”
Lubbock was an early test case, but it soon spread across the state. Dallas County adopted it in 2019.
The system works, under Texas law, through electronic voting. That, Stinson said, is what prevents people from voting multiple times at several precincts. She said that it wasn’t until after the 2020 election that she began to notice people protesting the change.
Voter fraud alarmists in Texas singled the system out largely because it relies on electronic voting machines. They became an obsession after the 2020 election, in which Trump and national Republican officials tried to pin the President’s defeat on Italian satellites supposedly zapping voting machines. In the case of attorney Sidney Powell, it was partly due to the exploits of “Spyder,” a fake military intelligence expert cited in court filings to allege that electronic voting machines had been hacked.
During the Biden administration, that spread into activism against electronic voting machines and the voting systems that go along with it. In Texas, conservative movement activists accused countywide polling of allowing people to vote “two or three times” at a May 2024 state Senate hearing. One activist, Christine Welborn of Advancing Integrity, a nonprofit associated with right-wing activist and 2020 election denier Cleta Mitchell’s Election Integrity Network, called ending it a “a sound reform that’s going to rebuild trust in elections.”
There’s so much background to this story: Here, here, here, here, here, and here. And there’s more to this story, so read the rest. As the story notes, voting centers will be used for the runoff, but there’s still an appeal pending to the Supreme Court, so until voting actually starts we can’t be sure of what will happen. Early voting starts Monday, but this fight is about voting on May 26, and I don’t know what the drop-dead date is for that. What we can be sure of is that the energy among the most florid election conspiracy purveyors is still on the upswing. None of this is going away anytime soon.