Good.
Good to see you again.
Well, thank you.
I'm glad you remember me.
My name is Jane Scholes.
I live at 9913 Silverwalk Way in Denton.
This is Robson Ranch.
I'm a voter.
I'm an election worker, and I'm a voter registrar.
And I'm here to talk to you today about countywide
Election Day voting, aka vote centers.
I'm going to share with you the results of a
count of the number of registered voters who were redirected
from polling places during the May 28th primary runoff and
the November 5th general election.
But first, before I do that, a little history.
So I spoke to you about this about almost exactly
a year ago.
And since then I've been educating myself.
I've been going around the county talking to a lot
of folks about this all over the county.
I've been going to club meetings, church gatherings, and neighborhood
events.
And here's what I've learned.
A lot of your voters get turned away from polling
places on election day.
Every time I ask at a meeting who this has
happened to, a lot of hands go up.
Okay?
This is not a rare occurrence.
Most of these people don't understand why this happened to
them.
And when I tell them that this does not happen
in 99 other counties in Texas, they are puzzled.
And when I explain to them that their county commissioners
could fix this problem, could have fixed it for the
last four years, but refused to do so, they don't
like it.
Some of them get angry.
But we needed more than just a show of hands.
We needed facts.
So we needed to know how many voters actually get
redirected from polling locations on Election Day, and the county
up till now has not chosen to count this.
So on May 28th and November 5th, election workers and
judges counted them.
Thanks to their work, I can tell you that an
estimated 15%, that's one in every six voters,
in the May primary runoff on election day, were told
they could not vote at the first polling place they
visited.
On November 5th, the biggest election turnout this county had
ever had, has ever had 11%, more than 7,000
registered voters were redirected, according to our count and
the estimate that comes from that.
This demonstrates the need for you to act to give
your voters election day vote centers now.
Now, the people who have done this study would be
happy to meet with all of you to answer your
questions individually about how we did the count and why
we think this change is necessary.
I contacted your offices back in January and February and
tried to set up meetings for this group.
Only one person responded.
That was Mrs.
Mitchell.
And we had a lovely meeting with Mrs.
Mitchell a couple of weeks ago.
She asked questions, we asked questions, we had a wonderful
cordial discussion.
It was a very productive meeting.
But we're not giving up.
I'm going to contact all of you again, and I'm
going to see if you're willing to meet with us
now.
Cordial, informational, and with that, I'll just add one
last thing.
Yes, ma'am.
Assuming that the floor that the Texas legislature doesn't choose
to put the rest of Texas in the same mess
that Denton County is in on election day, you're going
to hear a lot more from us starting the summer.
Thanks for your time.
Perfect.
Thank you.