Crockett Tells Supporters The Race Isn’t Over: ‘people Have Been Disenfranchised’

Citing a legal dispute over voting precinct hours in Dallas, Rep. Jasmine Crockett left her election night party early, telling supporters not to expect final results in the Texas Senate race on Tuesday.

Crockett said thousands of votes from her home base of Dallas County could potentially end up uncounted, as a pair of court rulings over poll closing times led to uncertainty about which votes would be counted.

“We don’t have any of the results because there was a lot of confusion today,” Crockett told her supporters gathered at an election watch party in Dallas, later adding: “We were able to keep the polls open, but I can tell you now that people have been disenfranchised.”

The dispute began in the early evening, when the state Democratic Party said its officials were receiving reports that hundreds of voters were being turned away from precincts after being told they showed up at the wrong location.

A state judge ruled that polls should stay open two extra hours because of “mass confusion” around new rules put in place weeks ago by Republicans who opted out of a joint agreement that would have allowed voters to cast ballots at any polling location in the county.

Crockett’s Democratic opponent, state Rep. James Talarico, had also called for polling places to remain open in Dallas, along with Williamson County, which also has the new rules. Crockett addressed her supporters around 9 p.m. local time, when votes were still coming from all of Texas’ 254 counties.

Talarico and Crockett have been locked in a bitter primary race with racial overtones, largely focused on their contrasting styles and questions about electability.

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, who is himself running for Senate in the GOP primary, stepped in after that initial ruling. He requested the Texas Supreme Court block the lower court ruling — which it immediately did. The Supreme Court ordered election officials to separate any votes cast by those who got in line after the scheduled closing time of 7 p.m.

“What this means is that we will not know what votes are to be tallied from Election Day out of Dallas County,” Crockett said. She told them after 9 p.m. local time that she was leaving for the night and would not make another appearance Tuesday.

Addressing his supporters Tuesday night around midnight local time, Talarico said "every vote must be counted."

"The voter suppression in my home county and Congresswoman Crockett’s home county underscores the gravity of this moment," he said.

Earlier in the day, when reports of voters being turned away began to surface, Crockett held a press conference in which she said “significant” numbers of people had been turned away, and that at one voting site she’d heard that the proportion of people being turned away or allowed to vote was “basically one to one.”

“We have been waiting, we have been getting stories, we have been collecting evidence, because those are the things that you may need, especially if you have some pushback that is coming your way,” she said during the early evening news conference.

Texas has long been a center of voting rights disputes — Crockett first gained national attention as a state representative battling against the state GOP’s move to pass a law that added new restrictions on voting in the state, which she painted as voter suppression. Now, as her Senate campaign winds down, the process of voting is once again in the spotlight.