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Electronic voting and the machines that collect and store voting records are being challenged in Wharton County’s 329th District Court.

Electronic voting and the machines that collect and store voting records are being challenged in Wharton County’s 329th District Court.

Electronic voting and the machines that collect and store voting records are being challenged in Wharton County’s 329th District Court.

The suit, filed earlier this month against County Elections Administrator Cindy Richter and the full commissioners court, asks for an order stopping the use of electronic voting and requiring ballot records from November 2020 forward to be curated.

Voters in Wharton County use a hybrid system of electronic voting, one using a touch screen vote selection, but generating a physical card. Those cards are then electronically counted and stored.

The suit, filed by John Bieltz of Louise, is a petition for “injunctive relief for preservation of records and against electronic voting systems, barring respondents from using computerized equipment to administer the collection, storage, counting and tabulation of votes in any election indefinitely until proper investigations and reconciliations of the election for 2020 general, 2021 special and 2022 primaries are conducted.”

The suit terms electronic ballot casting as a “black box voting system.”

Wharton County’s electronic voting machines generate a physical ballot each time a voter checks in. That ballot is then taken, by the voter, to a marking machine which loads the ballot. The voter marks the ballot and then carries it over to a ballot box to cast.

All ballots are kept at a secure location 22 months, according to Richter.

Electronic balloting offers county voters more flexibility, she said. “Right now, you can vote anywhere in the county. We’d need more equipment or you would have to vote at a specific poll (if the county were to return to paper ballots), Richter said.

The electronic marking, she added, makes a consistent mark whereas voters wielding pencils may only make a partial one, or make a mark, change their mind and improperly erase.

Standard procedure calls for the number of ballots to be reconciled with the number of voters signed in at Wharton County polls. A list of who voted is generated and posted daily although the confidentially of who voted for whom remains intact.

Post election, the state requires a partial hand count of a precinct selected by the Secretary of State’s office.

The suit questions the security of a system updated and transferred via thumb drive, calling it “an unnecessary, unsecure change that opened election results to manipulation by unauthorized persons.” It adds, “This action is not an election contest issue. It is an action to bring transparency, fairness, honesty and quality to Texas elections.”

Election data in Wharton County stored on is “loaded into a PC not connected to anything but a printer,” Richter said.

The injunction request calls into question software security referencing previous investigations into the system, the “risk associated with using touch screens to do what a voter easily could do with a pen.”

El Campo voters experienced a problem with mail-in ballots, not the physical ballot count or touch screen use, during the COVID-delayed November 2020 vote when 260 wrong mail-in ballots sent out as a result of a proofing error.

Elderly and disabled registered voters received a four-page ballot made up of one first page and three second pages, completely missing pages three and four. All mail-in voters received the option to vote for the unexpired District 1 Council seat.

Posts in the Isaacson Municipal Utility District which has boundaries outside the El Campo city limits had been included on some municipal ballots.

The mail-in ballots were replaced and the election continued smoothly until the final counting when it was discovered that federal mail-in ballots were still outstanding.

Wharton County has had two elections with a less than five-vote margin of victory this year, neither of which prompted a recount.

In the March Republican Primary, Audrey Wessels Scearce collected 1,890 votes to 1,888 for Christa Lynch Albrecht in the Wharton County treasurer’s race. Without a Democratic challenger, the primary win means Scearce will take the office in January.

A four-vote margin of victory was not recounted during the last El Campo at-large city council race, when second place finisher Eugene Bustamante opted not to request one. As a result, Mayor Chris Barbee returned to the city’s leadership post for a second two-year term.

An estimated 95 requested mail in ballots had not been returned when the elections office stopped accepting them at 4 p.m. on the Monday following the Saturday election.

As of that closure, no additional ballots were no longer be counted regardless of when they were post marked.

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