Galveston-area ballots found missing races

GALVESTON — When Janie Torres opened her fiancé’s mail-in ballot on Friday night, eager for him to cast a vote for her cousin, Mark Salinas, to be Galveston County sheriff, she encountered a problem: Salinas’ race was missing from the ballot.

“That’s the first thing I want to make sure, is we vote for Mark,” Torres said. “I had seen it wasn’t on there, I flipped it over because it’s double-sided and I’m like, ‘It’s not on here.’ I reached out toMark and said, ‘How do we vote for you it’s not on the ballot?’ ”

The Galveston County sheriff’s race not the only countywide seat omitted. The ballot was also missing two district judge races, as well as a district judge candidate and county tax assessor candidate who are running unopposed.

Salinas, a Democrat, was dumbfounded. He called a friend who lives near his cousin in Hitchcock, who told him that the entire precinct received ballots missing the races. Salinas immediately notified the county Democratic Party chair to reach out to the Galveston County clerk’s office to remedy the issue before the start of early voting on Tuesday.

“(The ballots) were sent out last monthand they didn’t catch-that,” Salinas said. “This is amajor problem because you have six candidates for three races, and they’re not listed.”

The Galveston County ballot errors come at a time when voter confidence in the mail-in ballot system is already being tested by both state and federal officials. President Donald Trump has actively discouraged the practice by claiming it can lead to widespread voter fraud. On Friday, a federal judge temporarily blocked Gov. Greg Abbott’s order limiting mail ballot dropoff sites to one per county. Attorney General Ken Paxton on Saturday filed an emergency motion for a stay on that decision.

But the GalvestonCounty ballot issue flummoxed candidates on both sides of the aisle. The incumbent county sheriff, Henry Trochesset, a Republican, said Saturday

afternoon he had not heard about the errors until notified by the Houston Chronicle. Another Republican incumbent, Judge Lonnie Cox of the 56th District Court, was also unaware.

“This is the first I’ve heard of it,” Cox said. “Hitchcock’s kind of a small area, but it could happen in other places.”

Dwight Sullivan, the Galveston County clerk, said on Saturday that, so far, the flawed ballots were relegated to the single Hitchcock precinct. In total, 55 mail-in ballots in that precinct were missing the five county races, which Sullivan saidwas a result of simple “human error,” resulting in part because of an expanded ballot this November. Many local elections that typically happen in May were moved to November due to the COVID-19 pandemic, resulting in hundreds of different ballot styles for counties like Galveston to mail out.

“Our staff, we’re conducting, I believe, 22 entity elections on top of the presidential, the statewide and the county races,” Sullivan said. “It was just an error the programming team made and we’re gonna fix it.”

The clerk’s office will resend the 55 faulty ballots immediately and allow voters to mail in updated forms. The faulty ballots that may have already been mailed in would be invalidated as soon as the official count begins on Election Day.

“The ballot board, which is made up of both parties, would witness all of this,” Sullivan said.

John Young, who chairs the Galveston County Democratic Party, said he was concerned the clerk’s office would not get the ballot issues fixed in time for the start of early voting, and wondered if normal ballot machines also had errors.

“The problem is because there’s so many ballot styles, we need to get proof copies of every ballot style and if I got them right now it would probably take me the next 8 hours to go over all of them,” Young said on Saturday.

Some countywide candidates whose races were missing, like George Lindsey, a Democrat running for the 56th district court judgeship, questioned the lack of “quality control” and ballot proofing in the clerk’s office. Lindsey noted that the errors weren’t simply on one section of the ballot, as the presidential race and statewide races listed above the countywide elections, and local races listed below them, were unaffected.

“It is still deeply concerning why these particular races were left off,” Lindsey said. “Quite frankly, we don’t have enough details, I think, to understand what happened.”

For Janie Torres, the error on her fiancé’s mail-in ballot only crystallizes how chaotic the coming weeks can be as voters figure out a safe way to cast their vote. For weeks she worked to register voters and heard widespread concerns about whether mailing in ballots would be secure.

“So many people just want to bring (the ballots) in person,” Torres said. “A lot of people are really scared to use the mail-in service right now.”