Update: The machines were fixed. Please see our updated story.
Steve Evans suffered the same frustration as other Lubbock-area voters Monday morning. Evans, a former local Republican chair, tried to vote at the 114th Street and Slide Road United Supermarket early voting location.
“I walk into a mess, a feeding frenzy of angry people,” Evans said.
It wasn’t getting better as he waited.
Updated story link: Voting machines fixed, ready for voting to resume Wednesday in Lubbock County
“I finally just hollered, ‘Hey! Yo, people, calm down!’ I didn’t even know what the problem was yet. … We got all those people ushered out of the way and I looked at [the assistant election judge] and said, ‘Honey, what is going on?’” Evans said.
Evans explained to her who he was and how he had previous experience with elections.
“She hands me a piece of paper and immediately I feel it. It’s too damn thick. It’s thicker than normal, and it has kind of a waxy surface on the back,” Evans said.
He tested it and it would not work on any of the machines.
So, it must have been a bad batch of paper, right?
That’s what Lubbock County Elections Administrator Roxzine Stinson thought.
“We went and pulled out the old paper and we were still having the same issue,” Stinson said.
The problem remained a mystery Monday evening when Stinson spoke to LubbockLights.com.
Some voting machines are working. Others failed.
Emergency voting
A press release Monday afternoon said, “We are using emergency ballot procedures.”
Six early voting locations were open and running normally Monday – as listed in the press release. Stinson described the procedure for the remaining locations.
“You will vote on an emergency ballot, which is a yellow sample ballot,” Stinson said.
Those yellow ballots came back to the elections office under guard from sheriff’s deputies and kept secure until the early voting ballot board can count them, Stinson said.
No one votes Tuesday – it’s a holiday
Stinson’s office gets a one-day reprieve from the problem. Tuesday (April 21) is San Jacinto Day in Texas.
“Don’t take this wrong or anything, but I am so grateful that it is [a state holiday],” Stinson said.
Not voting on San Jacinto Day was always the plan.
“Praise God for that, but it gives us some time to try to figure out what is going on because, we have done everything we know to do,” Stinson said.
To make up for Monday, Stinson is seeing if the local cities and schools would like her to extend voting hours for some of the remaining days of early voting. She plans to send out an updated press release when the extended hours are finalized.
Anyone with questions or concerns can call the elections office at 806-775-1338.
At the time Stinson spoke with LubbockLights.com late Monday afternoon, 361 people had checked in at the polls.
Asked if voters were unpleasant with the poll workers, Stinson said, “If they have, my poll workers have not said anything.”
The investigation
Stinson’s staff even pulled out older voter machines from storage and tried them. But they weren’t doing any better.
“Hart InterCivic is our vendor. They sent someone here. They have been through everything. They’ve been on the phone with the engineers and stuff and they absolutely cannot figure out why when some of the equipment’s working and some of it’s not,” Stinson said.
“We have pulled some of the equipment that we’re having issues with and we are overnighting it to our vendor to their office, and they’re going to have an engineer look at it and see if they can figure out what’s causing it,” Stinson said.
They verified the software is correct, Stinson said.
Cables were replaced. Machines were restarted. Old paper versus new paper was tested.
“So, we know it’s not the paper,” Stinson said.
“Bumfuzzled is about the best word I can use,” Stinson said.
Stinson said the voting machines are from 2017.
“They’re supposed to be good for 10 to 12 years,” Stinson said.
But there was a foreshadowing that something was wrong.
A hint of trouble
Current Lubbock County Republican Chair David Bruegel was at the elections office for ballot testing about a week ago. He needed to double check names and other details for the March Primary Runoff (May 26 with early voting May 18-22).
“I was having an experience with the machine ‘paper-jamming’ at the time. I thought that it was just specific to that machine needing its wheels cleaned or something,” Bruegel said.
He brought it up to the election staff. They thought the same thing – just trouble on one machine.
“I was just told it was just that particular machine that needed maintenance,” Bruegel said.
“What confuses me is we used the same machines in the primary and didn’t have the same issue,” Bruegel said.
Stinson said the same thing having run an election just days ago for a local school district with no trouble.
And when her staff tested things for the May 2 election, everything worked. But Stinson said she had a bad feeling.
“We tested it again. We just retested this election last week because – I just – something wasn’t sitting right with me. … Let’s look at it again. And we did, and everything was working,” Stinson said.
