Video: It Happened Again: Dallas County, Texas ES&S Pollbooks Add Hundreds of “Checked-in Voters”
In November 2022, The Gateway Pundit reported that a Dallas County polling location randomly began to increment voters on the ES&S ExpressPoll pollbooks. As the polls were getting ready to close for the November 8th, 2022 election, poll workers in Dallas County noticed that their E-Pollbooks were adding hundreds of checked-in voters at a time. This took place sporadically for about 15 minutes, with all of the devices settling on inflated numbers.
The Gateway Pundit received an exclusive video showing that that it happened again in Dallas County. On the Nov. 7th election, as polls were getting ready to close, poll workers noticed their ES&S ExpressPoll E-Pollbooks acting in almost the same behavior as 2022: hundreds of votes were added over the course of 15-20 minutes as they were beginning to prepare to close the polls.
The poll book in the video should have had 182 voters, however, the machine randomly began to add more and more voters until finally displaying “1,377 voters checked in”, or 1,195 more voters than should have been displayed.
Further, the Dallas County GOP reported that they experienced “widespread problems with the E-Pollbooks’ connectivity to the internet…it began the first day of early voting with 20-30% of the Voting Centers being offline for anywhere from two hours to half a day.” They claimed the issues continued to Election Day with “many Voting Centers reporting that the E-Pollbooks were offline” with one location being offline until mid-afternoon.
At one polling location, a voter showed as “voted” on one pollbook and as “eligible” on the pollbook right next to it.
The Gateway Pundit article about the E-Pollbook surges in 2022 was “fact-checked” by LeadStories and cited the Dallas County Elections Department and ES&S. In that “fact-check”, they described the system as “state-certified”, however, at the time of the 2022 Election, the Texas Secretary of State website did not have any current certifications listed for the ES&S E-Pollbooks. In fact, the Wayback Machine shows it wasn’t updated until the January 2023 archive with a May 31, 2022 certification date.
Lead Stories goes on to cite the Dallas County “Rumor Control” page that said:
“During the voting period, a qualified voter is accepted for voting at the e-pollbook and the transaction is recorded locally on the e-pollbook. The transaction is also uploaded to a central server hosted by ES&S through an encrypted connection. The central server receives the information, updates the database, and then allows all the other e-pollbooks in the system to download the transaction.
On Election Day, Dallas County processed over 200,000 voters on the e-pollbooks, which uploaded the transactions to the central server in a timely fashion. However, Dallas County noticed that there appeared to be some delay in the downloading of those transactions to the other e-pollbooks.
Once the polls closed at 7 pm on Election Day, the upload traffic on the network decreased and, as a result, the downloads appeared to have sped up significantly. Poll workers at many locations noticed the increased speed and continued downloads on their e-pollbooks after the close of the polls and reported those transactions to Dallas County and other entities.”
They then cite Katina Granger, the then-senior manager of public relations for ES&S, stating the following:
“During Election Day, any activity on the pollbook – including the check-in of a voter – is recorded as a transaction. These transactions are regularly synced through the day with the central database – with each pollbook uploading and downloading transactions. In locations where connectivity is slow or when there is a high amount of volume being shared by the secure network, these transactions may see delays uploading, downloading, and syncing. As connections improve or network volume eases, the pollbooks upload and download transactions which may have been previously delayed – updating data across all pollbooks. This transactional data may continue to update even after the close of polls, as long as pollbooks are connected to the central server, until all data is accurately reflected on each pollbook.”
And lastly, Sam Taylor, assistant secretary of state for communications for the Texas Secretary of State, told Lead Stories:
“Generally speaking, ePollbooks are required to communicate with each other and update in real time throughout the county, showing who has checked in at other polling places so that no voter can try to cast a ballot twice.”
This is how these systems are supposed to function: you vote, it updates the central server, communicates with all the other E-Pollbooks, and then ensures that a voter who checks in wasn’t already checked in at another location.
Further, the excuse that they are delayed because they are in locations where “connectivity is slow” is absurd since these units have priority internet access through CradlePoint and FirstNet as “critical infrastructure”.
What they shouldn’t do is increment the E-Pollbook for every single voter in all of Dallas County, or even that particular precinct. And if they did, the E-Pollbooks at the end of the night would all be in-sync. Poll workers typically keep a paper back-up of voters they checked in just in case something happens to the internet-connected devices. If the E-Pollbook at one voting station reflected every voter in Dallas County, or even in that precinct, this would render a paper back-up useless. The paper back-up would show 182 voters checked in at that station, for example, while the E-Pollbook would show over 200,000 or so for the county, or all the E-Pollbooks would match for that particular precinct.
