Warning about E-Pollbooks

​  Press Release From the Campaign Headquarters of Tami Brown Rodriquez, Dist. 9 City Council Candidate

     Dallas County Elections Department has announced that it will introduce its new "e-Pollbooks" (electronic pollbooks) just before the upcoming May 4th city wide City Council elections. The e-pollbooks are supposed to take the place of the paper poll record and signature books that have been used for over 100 years. The timing and the vagueness of the exact function of these e-pollbooks has raised suspicions of advocates of preventing voter fraud like Dallas City Council Dist. 9 candidate Tami Brown Rodriquez:

      "How these iPad computers are to be utilized to verify voter legitimacy is highly in question," Ms. Brown Rodriquz states, "There are a lot of questions that have been raised: Are the voters supposed to sign on the iPad? e-signatures are always terrible, so how are the signatures to be verified with the voter's voter registration card? Are the e-records up to date? What if there is a computer glitch or the system goes down on election day? And, with only 1 week of training available ahead of time, how can all the hundreds of poll workers be trained ahead of time?"

      Tami's experience as a poll watcher in the past showed her there was wide spread voter fraud and irregularities in Dallas County elections, an experience which contributed in a paramount fashion to her decision to run for Dallas City Council. Election integrity is one of her core platform planks. 

      The timing and implementation of the new e-pollbooks is indeed suspicious. For example, seven sessions of training are being offered to poll workers to learn how to operate the pollbooks, but only 2 training sessions are being offered by the County Elections Department to train workers on voter ID authorization and verification, and these two training sessions will only occur AFTER early voting has already started. There was also no word from the Dallas County Elections Department on whether or not there would be a paper print out record of the voters registered on the system and their signatures. "That's a real problem," Brown Rodriquez concludes, "By law, electronic voting machines must produce a paper print out at the end of the day, but here in Dallas, election judges have been notoriously slack about requiring that. We have no word on whether these new pollbooks will even produce any kind of printed record. Otherwise the data just disappears, and 'wham!' you have a real fear then of election fraud."