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Questions remain about Denton Co. polling locations missing on Texas Secretary of State’s website

AUSTIN — Nearly a week after this year’s primary elections in Texas, it remains unclear why the secretary of state’s website did not show polling locations for some areas of Denton County for at least half the available voting hours last Tuesday.

Rep. Michelle Beckley, D-Carrollton, who won the Democratic primary in the district last week first noticed the issue the night before Election Day. She said she was sending last-minute voting reminders to her supporters with information about their polling locations when one voter responded that they could not find it on the secretary of state’s website.

Beckley said she checked for her polling location and the website did not have the information. She then checked the polling locations for other supporters and found that two polling locations, covering six precincts were not showing up on the secretary of state’s website.

The two polling locations, Castle Hills Community Center and the Rosemeade Recreation Center, held both Republican and Democratic primaries. Unlike in Dallas County, there were no reports that Denton County had failed to count ballots.

new law passed last year, requires counties and the secretary of state to post on their websites all existing notices related to the electoral process, including poll site locations and their hours of operation.

Around 10:30 p.m. on Monday before the elections, Beckley sent out a tweet notifying the secretary of state’s office of the issue.

“When the [Texas Secretary of State] can’t get the Election Day polling site information for a sitting State Rep., we may have a voting suppression issue,” she wrote.

Stephen Chang, spokesman for Secretary of State Ruth R. Hughs, responded to her tweet saying Carrollton, which Beckley represents, is contained within three counties which may have led to the issue. Chang asked Beckley to send him a private message if she needed more information.

Beckley said she did not follow up with Chang because the issue should be resolved publicly and because she was busy urging her supporters to go vote. She told voters to check the Denton County website and a website set up by the Texas Democratic Party for their polling locations.

When asked about the issue, Chang told The Dallas Morning News the issue was resolved on Election Day. He did not give any more information and referred further questions to Denton County elections officials.

The Denton County website had information on all the polling locations on Tuesday.

But the secretary of state’s website, which was offline for about an hour and a half on Election Day, did not have polling locations for some Denton County precincts for much of the day.

Frank Phillips, elections administrator for Denton County, said he was not sure how the issue happened.

“I’m honestly not clear if it was something on their end or ours,” he said.

Phillips said the county, like others across the state, sent their polling locations to the secretary of state’s office in January. At that point, he said, the state did not raise any issues.

But around 12:50 p.m. on Election Day, with nearly half the voting hours in the day gone, officials with the secretary of state’s office called Denton County election officials to tell them they were missing information for some of their precincts on the state’s website.

“My crew pulled it up and they’re looking at it on the state website and said ‘This isn’t what we entered’ and I think they found two or three precincts not posted. And we had it fixed within 5 minutes,” Phillips said.

Beckley said she did not see the fixes on the secretary of state’s website until about 3 p.m. Other than Chang’s tweet, she said, no one in the office contacted her to try to resolve the issue.

“They never reached out to me and they never reached out to my office to find out what I was talking about,” she said. “I think they should have reached out and got some clarity.”

In January, Keith Ingram, chief of the elections division for the secretary of state’s office, told lawmakers the state had struggled to comply with the new law requiring online posting of election information because they needed more staff to work with the counties.

In November, the first election after the law went into effect, Ingram said counties had to input dates and hours for every polling location manually to the state’s election management system. The secretary of state’s team would then take that information and put it on its public website.

For the March election, he told lawmakers, the system was more automated because the locations had already been entered. County election officials could now change the voting hours for polling locations during early voting and election day.

“Our system extracts that information on the newly designed website,” he said at a House Elections Committee hearing.

Last week, the Mexican American Legislative Caucus, the Texas Black Legislative Caucus, and the Legislative Study group said they were pulling together to investigate voting issues during the March 3 primary.

“We want to hear from elections experts, government officials, and impacted voters to arrive at concrete solutions for November,” Dallas State Rep. Rafael Anchía, who heads the Mexican American Legislative Caucus, said in a statement. “We must do everything in our power to protect the right to vote and enhance access to the ballot box in Texas.”

The missing Denton County polling locations on the secretary of state’s website are one of the items the group plans to tackle.

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