Early voting resumes Wednesday with fully working voting machines after taking a break Tuesday for San Jacinto Day. Many of the machines across Lubbock County failed Monday – forcing the county to use “emergency ballot procedures.”
“All voting locations are fully operational following a brief issue with the ballot-marking devices at some locations on Monday,” an updated press release said Tuesday evening.
The voting machines would not accept the paper ballots.
Roxzine Stinson, Lubbock County elections administrator, at first thought it was a problem with the paper when she spoke to LubbockLigths.com on Monday. But older paper had the same problem. So, it was not the paper, she said.
She and her staff members were “bumfuzzled,” she said, after trying everything they knew to get the machines working. But then she, her staff and the county’s vendor, Hart InterCivic, figured out the problem and fixed it.
“You can run a cleaning sheet through there to clean those print rollers. And when we did that, evidently we triggered a security toggle in there,” Stinson said.
But no one knew that.
“It didn’t give us an error message or anything. It just wouldn’t take our paper.” Stinson said.
Once they figured it out, they could fix the machines.
“We’ve cleaned before and haven’t had this issue. But our vendor is looking at this to make sure it doesn’t happen again. … We documented it quite well and our vendor has too,” Stinson said.
The county’s press release said, “Because of the temporary delay, The Lubbock County Elections Administration Office and the Lubbock County Judge announce that Early Voting polling locations will have extended hours for voting until 9 p.m. on Wednesday and Thursday, April 22nd and 23rd, and the following Monday and Tuesday, April 27th and 28th.”
Voting locations are listed on votelubbock.gov and LubbockLights.com has alist of early voting locations here. Please check out our City Election ’26 page for information about candidates in City of Lubbock contested races.
