The dynamics of what has traditionally been Democratic leaning primary elections in Bastrop County saw a significant shift on Tuesday as Republican voters showed up in numbers almost three times greater than their party’s average turnout for primaries.
With 5,768 total ballots cast by Republican Party voters compared to a total of 2,973 by Democrats, the GOP turnout not only exceeded predictions, but also caught election officials off-guard in terms of the number of ballots ordered for polling precincts.
Off the 21 polling precincts for Republican voters, eleven were forced to bring in photocopied emergency ballots due to the original optical paper ballots running out, according to Bastrop County GOP Chairman Albert Ellison.
The development in turn caused final count delays of close to an hour and a half as election officials were forced to transfer votes by hand from the emergency ballots to additional normal optical paper ballots that were ordered from Austin at the last minute on Tuesday.
When asked on Thursday about the ballot shortage, Bastrop County Elections Administrator Nora Cano said the situation could not have been predicted.
“There was an unprecedented amount of people coming in. There were new people coming in who had never voted in a primary,” Cano said.
Ellison also stressed the unexpected outcome.
“I have a clear conscious we did everything we could,” Ellison said. “Nora and I were both giving due attention to what was developing but there just wasn’t any way to anticipate what came.”
According to Cano and Ellison, GOP turnout in primaries has traditionally averaged between 1,800 and 2,000 voters. As a result, just over 3,000 Republican ballots were originally ordered. An additional order of ballots was then made in the midst of early voting that indicated a potentially strong GOP showing. Yet even the second order would not be enough ballots to go around and left Ellison and Cano ordering 2,700 more on election day itself.
“By about 10:30 a.m. we started getting calls from election judges saying they were already running critically low,” Ellison said. “It became clear pretty quickly that even ordering for double the turnout we normally have would not be sufficient to get us through the day.”
When asked about polling lines or any potential complications, Ellison and Cano emphasized that no voters were turned away due to unavailable ballots. The worst part of the shortage, they said, was the stress on election judges forced to watch ballots dwindle away without knowing if they would be replaced. The delay at the end of the night and the additional work transferring ballots by hand was also less than ideal.
“Unfortunately in this situation the number of people outnumbered the amount of ballots on hand but nobody was rejected or turned away,” Cano said.
Ellison was even more optimistic.
“I was real pleased with how it went,” Ellison said. “Ultimately we kept ahead of the demand and that was the number one goal for me.”
Tuesday’s primary election is the first in more than two decades where the number of Republican ballots cast have exceeded the number of Democratic ballots cast.