Dallas County recount turns up 9,149 new ballots but doesn't swing any races

A Dallas County recount turned up 9,149 ballots that were missed on Super Tuesday, but the new votes did not affect the outcome of any race.

Through the recount — which was prompted by vote discrepancies discovered last week — county election officials found 6,818 votes Wednesday that were not included in their initial tally of votes in the March 3 Democratic primary and 2,331 votes that were left off the results of the Republican primary.

More than 329,000 votes were cast in Dallas County during early voting and on election day. The county is still processing mail-in ballots and provisional votes.

A state district judge ordered the recount Tuesday at the request of Dallas County elections administrator Toni Pippins-Poole. The county asked to redo its vote count after discovering it missed ballots from 44 tabulating machines used on election day. Dallas County officials realized they were missing votes when they were unable to reconcile the count of voters who checked in at some polling places and the number of votes recorded.

The vote totals compiled last week came from flash drives from tabulating machines set up at every polling site, but the recount was based on paper ballots.

Dallas recently switched over to voting equipment that allows voters to fill out their ballots on touch screen machines that then mark up paper ballots. Those ballots are then fed into a machine to be scanned and tabulated.