New questions about dead people requesting ballots for the March Primary highlight an expanded investigation of Dallas County voter fraud that started with May municipal elections.
Dallas County Election Supervisor Toni Pippins-Poole said Tuesday that nearly 40 mail-in ballots completed and returned for counting were rejected from final tabulations. Many had signatures that did not match signatures on original voter registration applications.
“All of them will be scrutinized by the DA’s office,” Pippins-Poole said.
New concerns about possible irregularities began before the March primary when the election office received boxes filled with applications that were supposedly completed by individuals with assistance from someone else.
“We were receiving so many applications in a Fed Ex box, four- or five-hundred at a time,” Pippins-Poole said.
All of them came from one single return address which would have been forbidden if it was a campaign office, but it was not.
“We had to go through the normal process because it did meet the qualification,” she said.
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Four of the applications came from voters who were dead and those addresses did not receive ballots. Ballots were sent to the rest of the applicants, but the election office kept track of them all and found 459 of those were completed and returned for counting. The 459 received special review from a ballot board which rejected 40.
A court order that sequestered suspicious mail in ballots from the May elections was extended in February to include March ballots as well. All of them have been saved for the ongoing investigation.
Because it is an open criminal case, Pippins-Poole declined to name and of people on the ballot requests or the return address on the Fed-Ex boxes.
She urged voters in future elections to be vigilant against people tampering with mail in ballots.
“If you don’t know them, if they’re just knocking on the door, you’ve never seen them, do not give your ballots to them,” Pippins-Poole said.
The office of Republican Dallas County District Attorney Faith Johnson declined any comment on the investigation.
The final count left Democratic District Attorney Candidate John Creuzot ahead of Elizabeth Frizell with a margin of less than 600 votes. Frizell had suggested she may request a recount but at the close of business Tuesday, the Democratic Party office had received no recount request from Frizell.
