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Votes cast after judge ordered polls to stay open checked by Dallas County ballot auditors

Election workers organize voting machines after election day Wednesday, March 4, 2026, in Dallas.
Yfat Yossifor
/
四虎影院
Dallas County's ballot board has worked almost a week straight to review about 2,000 ballots cast after a judge ordered polls to stay open. Election workers organize voting machines on Wednesday, after election day.

Dallas County's ballot board continued Monday evening auditing ballots cast after 7 p.m. on Election Day last week 鈥 when a judge ordered polls to stay open.

The board decides which of the nearly 2,000 ballots to accept or reject.

Dozens of Democratic and Republican board members worked through the weekend hand-counting and checking each ballots' validity.

Texas election code requires all provisional ballots to be accounted for within six days.

Based on preliminary election , no race was close enough to be affected by 2,000 votes.

In one of the most-watched races in Texas, state Rep. James Talarico led U.S. Rep. Jasmine Crockett by more than 83,000 votes statewide in the Democratic primary battle for U.S. Senate, according to Texas Secretary of State results.

As of early evening Monday, the Texas Supreme Court had not issued a final ruling on whether votes cast between 7 and 9 p.m. at Democratic polls on primary election day should be included in final results.

But county Elections Administrator Paul Adams said on Monday that his department will continue working to meet its deadline.

"At this point, we are moving forward under the laws of the state until we hear otherwise from the courts," Adams said.

"We touched base with the [civil] DA's office earlier today [Monday] just to see if there had been any other word from the court," he said. "They had not heard anything at that time and had told us that they would reach out to us if there was anything else that came up, and as of now we have not heard anything else."

The Texas Supreme Court ordered all Dallas County ballots cast by voters in line after 7 p.m. on primary election Day last Tuesday be separated.

That was after hundreds of voters arrived at polling locations where they thought they could vote on primary election day, March 3.

鈥淰oting should occur only as permitted by Texas Election Code鈥 Votes cast by voters who were not in line to vote at 7 p.m should be separated,鈥 the order read.

Dallas County Judge Staci Williams on Tuesday evening had ordered polls to remain open until 9 p.m. 鈥 two hours longer than the 7 p.m. closing time.

The order, signed about 5:30 p.m. Tuesday, shows that Kardal Coleman, Dallas County Democratic Party chair, filed an emergency petition for voting hours to be extended at polling places from 7 p.m. to 9 p.m.

Williams agreed.

鈥溾(T)he Court after reviewing the petition finds that there has been mass confusion as to where to voters[sic] were entitled to cast their ballot on election day, and voter confusion was so severe that the Dallas County Election Department website crashed..."

Williams鈥 order, which was put on hold by the high court Tuesday night, did not specifically distinguish between Democratic polling places and Republican polling places.

However, a pop-up box on the Dallas County Elections Department site stated that 鈥淒emocratic Party polling locations in Dallas County will remain open until 9:00 PM pursuant to Court Order鈥 and that 鈥淩epublican Primary polling locations will close at 7:00 PM as scheduled.鈥

Got a tip? Email Marina Trahan Martinez at mmartinez@kera.org. You can follow Marina at .

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Marina Trahan Martinez is 四虎影院's Dallas County government accountability reporter. She's a veteran journalist who has worked in the Dallas area for many years. Prior to coming to 四虎影院, she was on The Dallas Morning News Watchdog investigative and accountability team with Dave Lieber. She has written for The New York Times since 2001, following the 9/11 attacks. Many of her stories for The Times focused on social justice and law enforcement, including Botham Jean's murder by a Dallas police officer and her subsequent trial, Atatiana Jefferson's shooting death by a Fort Worth police officer, and protests following George Floyd's murder. Marina was part of The News team that a Pulitzer finalist for coverage of the deadly ambush of Dallas police officers in 2016.