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Residents press Collin County to adopt hand-marked paper ballots and fix election vulnerabilities
Summary
Several public commenters urged Collin County leaders to move to hand-marked paper ballots, raised concerns about ballot-marking device barcodes, small audit samples and contingency plans for internet outages; one commenter provided device cost and renewal figures.
Multiple members of the public urged the court to strengthen local election procedures ahead of upcoming election cycles. Chuck Reynolds warned that Collin County’s voting process relies on barcodes and a limited manual audit sample that he described as inadequate; he called for hand-marked paper ballots, saying, “This is a risk Collin County should never take.”
Lee Moore echoed that view and pointed to recent actions in other states; Moore said hand-marked ballots are a nonpartisan measure to preserve voter intent and cited a prior local instance where 17 'flips' were noted at a McKinney polling location. Avis Novak provided specific procurement figures for ballot-marking devices: she said an initial outlay for 1,800 BMDs was about $4,220 each (totaling roughly $7,000,596) and that a renewal amendment of about $5,547,457.55 was approved with $357,696 for maintenance and firmware licenses. Novak suggested trade-in and printer alternatives to reduce costs.
Debbie Lindstrom asked whether the county has a contingency plan if internet outages disrupt electronic poll books, citing prior AT&T outages in Collin County and warnings from the FBI and CISA about denial-of-service threats. Lindstrom requested training and non-proprietary contingency procedures to preserve ballot secrecy and auditability.
