The Texas Supreme Court temporarily blocked a lower court order to keep Dallas County polling sites open two extra hours Tuesday, throwing votes cast during the extended hours into question.
The state’s top court ordered all ballots cast by voters who were not in line before 7 p.m. local time to be separated from the rest of the day’s votes. The court issued a similar ruling for two polling locations in Williamson County.
The rulings were the latest development in a muddled situation in the two Texas counties that led Democratic Senate candidate Jasmine Crockett to tell her supporters at a watch party: “We will not know election results tonight.”
In Dallas County, the confusion is rooted in election conspiracy theories about voting machines, which propelled the Dallas County GOP to abandon countywide voting in favor of precinct-level voting and led, Democrats say, thousands of voters to show up at the wrong polling site.
Earlier in the evening, a Dallas County judge ordered Democratic polling sites to stay open for an additional two hours for the Texas primary to give voters a chance to cast their ballots.
Previously, including during early voting, voters in the two counties could cast ballots at any countywide voting locations., But casting ballots Tuesday was limited to party-specific precinct polling sites, confusing many people about where they were supposed to go. Some voters were turned away, while others cast provisional ballots, Texas Democratic Party Executive Director Terri Burke said.
“Around one-third of the voters are having problems,” Burke said in a phone interview, adding that she believed redistricting and the move to precinct-based voting in the counties contributed to the confusion.
Generally, political parties in Texas oversee primary election voting. Democrats and Republicans often administer elections jointly and outsource the operations to county election officials, who have opted in recent years to have countywide voting centers that allow voters to cast ballots wherever is most convenient for them.
But Dallas and Williamson counties chose to run their primaries separately, at the precinct level. That move forced Democrats to do the same.
In Dallas County, propelled by election conspiracy theories about the security of ballot-counting machines, Republicans made the change in hope of hand-counting their ballots — a process that election experts want can lead to errors and delayed results. Dallas Republicans ultimately abandoned their plans to count ballots by hand because of the high costs. But the plan for people to vote at the precinct level went forward.
Voters who joined the line at polling sites after 7 p.m. local time cast provisional ballots, which the Texas Supreme Court has ordered to be kept separate. It’s unclear whether those ballots will be counted, but they could be critical — Dallas County is Crockett’s home and a key base of support for her.
Burke told NBC News that voters were encouraged to cast provisional ballots but that if voters cast provisional ballots at the wrong polling sites, by law their ballots won’t be counted.
Crockett blasted Republicans over the confusion.
“Both Dallas and Williamson county voters have grown accustomed to countywide voting, including on Election Day,” her campaign said in a statement. “This effort to suppress the vote, to confuse and inconvenience voters is having its intended effect as people are being turned away from the polls. We are monitoring the situation and working with our local county party to explore all solutions, including an extension of Election Day voting hours.”
The campaign of Crockett’s main opponent in the Democratic primary, James Talarico, said in a statement: “We are deeply concerned about the reports of voters being turned away from the polls.”
Dallas County GOP Chair Allen West, who pushed for the change to the primary election, said the confusion was Democrats’ fault.
“That’s on them. You didn’t see us asking for an injunction. We did a good job of explaining the process to our voters,” he said in a phone interview Tuesday evening.
