Early voting ends in Texas; Dallas County sees more than 620,000 voters in two weeks

DALLAS – Nicole McFarland has been voting since former President Bill Clinton was in office. On Friday she was an early voter for the first time.

“I'm having surgery on Monday, so I have to vote early or I won't be able to make it at all,” McFarland said.

She was one of more than 23,000 voters at the Frentz Park Branch Library who cast their ballots before polls closed Friday at 9 p.m.

“Everyone knows we got off to a rough start,” said Heider Garcia, the Dallas county administrator. “We had some problems to overcome. But the turnout also concerned us because people showed up to vote.”

Garcia said the department had to fix an issue with the e-Pollbook software on the first day of early voting that caused screens to go black, error messages to appear and the wrong ballot to be printed for some voters.

By Friday, three hours before polls closed, more than 620,000 votes had been cast. Garcia said ballots arrived in two weeks, with an expansion of seven precincts. In 2020, the November presidential election lasted three weeks and produced around 720,000 votes.

“So in two weeks we can do almost what we did in three weeks four years ago. And that, I think, is a testament to how much people voted out there,” Garcia said.

Passion boiled over in some counties, but Garcia said nothing required an arrest or medical attention. He said the confrontation between the opposing sides needed to be de-escalated.

Voter Kyle Knowles said the voting process was just as safe as it was in 2020.

“It went pretty smoothly,” Knowles said. “Like the last one I did.”

Garcia said Friday evening that staff will dismantle polling stations and move equipment to a secure area monitored by a live-stream camera until they remove storage drives from each vote-counting machine on Tuesday.

Polling stations open at 7 a.m. and close at 7 p.m