Phillips said the decision to track voter redirections came after Denton County Democratic Party election workers tracked redirections in the 2024 May primary runoff and November general elections, following reports of voter confusion. The November 2024 election had 144 polling locations for the county’s 227 precincts.
“I prefer to have our own data when reporting on the percentage of voters who are redirected,” Phillips said.“To get the full picture, this tracking needs to cover all types of elections.”
County election workers previously tracked voter redirections for the May 2025 election, and found that roughly 10% of voters, 1,319 out of 13,188, reported to the wrong voting location and had to be redirected, according to county data. Election workers did not previously track how many redirected voters got to vote.
The context
Denton County voters must vote at a specific polling location in their precinct of residence to vote on election day. Voters can cast their ballot at any location in the county during early voting for both primary and general elections.
In order to eliminate redirects and mitigate voter confusion, activists and the Denton County Democratic Party have advocated for the county to implement countywide election day polling, also called vote centers, which would allow voters to cast a ballot at any polling place in the county, just like early voting.
Activist and former election worker Jane Scholz said she’s been advocating for vote centers since spring 2024, after turning away more than 300 voters when they reported to the wrong polling location during the March 2024 Democratic primary.
Scholz is circulating a petition to implement vote centers, which has gathered roughly 1,300 signatures.
County Republican Chair Melinda Preston has made several statements in opposition to vote centers at Denton County Commissioners Court meetings, citing ballot anonymity and security concerns, as well as the possibility of longer lines to vote.
"While early voting and vote centers offer convenience, they often consolidate polling locations into fewer sites throughout the county,” Preston said at a July 29 Commissioners Court meeting.
Zooming out
Denton County is the only county in the Dallas-Fort Worth area that uses precinct-based polling on election day, while Tarrant, Collin, Dallas, Rockwall, Ellis, Kaufman, Parker, Somervell and Hood counties all use countywide polling, according to the Texas Secretary of State’s website.
Phillips and Deputy Elections Administrator Brandy Grimes said when people move to Denton County from one of the nearby counties, they often get confused by the election process.
“I get just as many confused questions from Republicans as I do Democrats,” Phillips said.
Denton County was barred from participating in countywide polling until 2021 because the state’s election code did not allow for counties that use paper ballots to use vote centers, according to the county elections website. Denton County has used paper ballots since 2017. In November 2021, the state government expanded countywide polling to counties that use hand-marked ballots in Senate Bill 1, per the Texas Secretary of State’s website.
Diving deeper
When a voter arrives at the wrong location, election workers print out directions to the correct location from the electronic poll book, the computer system that election workers use to check in voters. To track redirections, the elections department set the system to print two copies, one for the voter to keep, and one for the county’s records to track redirects, Phillips said. The printout has the voter’s unique identifier, and the elections department can use the printouts with their identifier to see if the redirected persons ended up voting.
Denton County does not have shared primary elections, meaning that the county’s Democratic and Republican parties can run their primary elections at different locations within the same precinct. If the county moved to vote centers, Texas election code allows the county to keep precinct-based voting for primary election day, while running vote centers for the general election, a spokesperson for the Texas Secretary of State’s office said.
“Not only do you have to know the location in your precinct, you have to know which location in your precinct for the party that you want to vote for,” Scholz said. “In most places, they're in two separate buildings, which can be blocks apart or can be miles apart.”
In Precinct 1,000 in Denton County, Democrats held their March 2024 primary at Pilgrim’s Way Baptist Church, while the Republicans ran their primary at Bolivar Baptist Church, more than 3 miles away, according to the Elections Department’s list of polling locations.
Grimes said election workers sometimes fail to ask voters for their precinct and party, which can redirect voters to yet another incorrect polling place during primary elections.
What they’re saying
Denton County Judge Andy Eads said the county Democratic and Republican parties need to agree to hold shared primaries before the court will consider countywide polling.
“It is up to the two political parties to come to an agreement before the Commissioners Court will consider any action on voting centers,” Eads said in an emailed statement.
Grimes said the county has not started the application to apply for vote centers.
What else?
While Texas election code allows counties with vote centers to reduce the number of polling sites, Phillips said he wouldn’t change the number of polling locations until after several elections, and make adjustments based on turnout and election type. Phillips cited Travis County’s vote center implementation as an example.
When Travis County implemented countywide polling in 2012, the county did not reduce the number of polling places until 2017, the Travis County Clerk’s office said in an emailed statement. Travis County started with roughly 200 polling sites in 2012, and now operates between 150 to 180 polling sites, depending on the type of election and expected turnout, the clerk’s office said.
“That is the methodology I would like to do,” Phillips said.
Looking ahead
The Nov. 4 election will have 66 polling locations for the county’s 227 precincts. Precincts can share polling locations as long as the cumulative number of registered voters reporting to the precinct doesn’t exceed 10,000 voters, according to the Texas Secretary of State’s website.
