The polling place at Comstock Middle School in Southeast Dallas opened 3 hours late May 1.
Dallas City Council candidate Yolanda Williams, who lost her contest, was also the precinct chair at Comstock. Williams said the poll judge told her the delay was due to a lack of extension cords to operate poll equipment.
“People came and they found out they couldn t vote and they left. So I don t know if they went to the other places, but she wasn t telling them where they could go and vote as well,” Williams said.
All the polling places had been used in past elections with few problems.
Dallas Mayor Eric Johnson led the push to refuse the county’s new payment request.
“In a low turnout election like these council races are, some of them being decided by a couple of dozen votes, you should be outraged at this. We re paying for this,” Johnson said.
The Mayor had endorsed District 7 candidate Donald Parish Junior, who finished third on May 1 by just 25 votes to miss the opportunity for the June runoff.
The run-off will include second-place candidate Kevin Felder, the district’s former council member, and incumbent Adam Bazaldua.
Several of the late opening polling places were in District 7.
Dallas Mayor Eric Johnson calls Election Day issues at nine voting sites ‘disturbing.’ City refuses to pay county $1.5 million for runoffs
Mayor Eric Johnson said that they’ll never know how many people failed to vote on Election Day.
Signs mark an official polling location outside the George Allen Courts building in Downtown Dallas, during the first day of early voting, on Monday, April 19, 2021.(Ben Torres / Special Contributor)
7:49 PM on May 12, 2021 CDT
Almost two weeks after Dallas voters were turned away from several polling sites that didn’t open for hours most in South Dallas the city’s elected leaders refused to commit paying nearly $1.5 million for the county to oversee the June 5 runoff elections.
Dallas Polling Sites Were Down for Hours on Election Day We’ll never know, I suspect, how many people literally did not get to vote in this election that wanted to, Mayor Eric Johnson said.
By Alex Macon
Published in
FrontBurner
May 12, 2021
5:58 pm
Snafus downed
at least 10 9 polling locations for as many as four hours during Dallas City Council elections on May 1, showing that there were more Election Day problems than had been previously reported. [
Update: 9 polling locations were temporarily closed, with other issues reported at two others; the original headline of this story has been changed to reflect that.] This emerged Wednesday as City Council members grilled Michael Scarpello, the county’s election administrator. They further decided in a 11-3 vote (one council member was absent) to tell off the Dallas County Elections Department by refusing to pay it to run the upcoming runoffs scheduled for June 5.