The Texas Secretary of State decertified the Election Systems & Software (ES&S) electronic pollbooks in December, just two months after several problems in Dallas County emerged during the first day of early voting in the 2024 General Election.
The systems are used to check in registered voters who show up at the polls to cast their ballots.
Keith Ingram, the former director of elections, initially approved a previous version of the decertified system (ExpressPoll 7.1.3.1) on January 23, 2020.
Christina Adkins, the current Director of Elections, approved an updated version (7.2.6.0) on May 7, 2024. Her certification letter noted that ES&S made minor modifications to meet specific functional requirements. She sent an updated certification letter on August 21 for ExpressPoll 7.2.6.3.
The testing laboratory, Pro Verification & Validation, Inc. (Pro V&V), which runs a largely defunct website, purportedly tested the system to ensure it met Texas’ technical standards for e-pollbooks. The SOS Elections Division then tested the system for functional standards as required.
Yet, according to the decertification letter issued only four months later, the ES&S e-pollbook system failed seven technical and three functional standards.
Alicia Pierce, assistant secretary of state for communications, implied that extensive periods of high voter turnout caused these issues. As such, the SOS plans to revise its certification standards to add testing to include whether the devices can function error-free over extensive periods during those conditions.
According to the official statement from the Dallas County Elections Department, however, these errors first occurred “early morning” on day one of early voting—not days into early voting or later on the first day under high voter turnout.
Adkins’ decertification letter also cited ES&S’ failure to give written notice within two hours of its first knowledge of an incident. She stated that the SOS first learned of the incidents from the impacted counties; ES&S’ written notice only came after its inquiry.
Furthermore, Adkins’ letter admits that ES&S’ “solution was implemented for some counties,” meaning that of the 61 affected counties, some continued using equipment during the 2024 General Election that the SOS knew failed ten state standards.
An ES&S company spokesperson emailed Votebeat, “Our records indicate that the November 2024 election was the first time this particular issue was reported.”
But this is not the first time Texas counties have had such an issue with their e-pollbooks.
In 2020, Williamson County had similar problems. Although it used Tenex software, it resides on ES&S hardware via Express Link per its annual license. Some e-pollbooks assigned voters the wrong ballot style, while others did not display precincts on ballots. These events influenced former Williamson County Elections Director Chris Davis to resign. He now works in Travis County.
“This situation does not help voter confidence in ES&S, our election systems, or even the Secretary of State,” said Advancing Integrity Director Christine Welborn, an advocate for accurate and accountable elections. “The only real fix for this is we have to go back to precinct-based voting. People have really lost confidence in the electronic pollbooks, and counties need the ability to choose paper pollbooks.”
Plank 221 of the Republican Party of Texas platform advocates precinct-only voting and paper pollbooks, which would eliminate countywide e-pollbook systems—and by extension, countywide voting.
“Early voting is essentially countywide polling, so if you have early voting in more than one location, you have to use electronic pollbooks,” said Welborn. “We have to get to a point where counties can choose whether or not to use electronic pollbooks.”
With municipal elections only three months away, affected counties must either replace the decertified systems with another vendor’s system or wait for an ES&S update, which the SOS must first approve. Counties would also need to train election workers, creating a tight deadline.
Dallas County is currently in the process of switching to a new vendor for e-pollbooks.
Welborn suggests that the SOS ease Texans’ doubts by walking them through the certification process and showing how other certified systems work. This way, voters can rest assured that they don’t have the same problems as ES&S. Putting all system and vendor training material online would reduce the training burden on counties.
Despite these issues, the ExpressPoll system can still make a return in an updated version.
“This decertification does not preclude the vendor from submission of any future versions of the ExpressPoll system for consideration for certification,” Adkins’ letter concluded. “However, certification will not be granted unless each of the issues identified above are fully resolved.”
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