Opinion ID: 1662010
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: Union National Guard Armory

Text: Twenty-six electors voted challenged ballots at the Union National Guard Armory polling place. Through inadvertence, polling officials failed to count any of those ballots. The ballots contained 19 additional votes for Lide, 5 additional votes for Williams, and 2 ballots with no vote for a member of the Dallas County Commission, district 2. The vast majority of electors who cast challenged ballots at Union had their oaths administered by a clerk at the polling place, not by an election inspector as § 17-12-3 requires. Accordingly, the parties presented testimony from 19 of those electors in order to cure defects in their oaths. In its final order, the trial court stated that it had considered 21 of the 26 challenged ballots cast at Union and that, of those, it had counted 16 votes: 14 for Lide and 2 for Williams. The court stated that the five ballots considered and rejected by it were rejected because the voters did not live in district 2 or their oaths were insufficient. Williams contends that the trial court acted improperly in refusing to consider five of the challenged ballots cast at Union. We can infer from the record that the five challenged ballots not considered by the trial court were not considered because the oaths of those voters were defective and the voters did not testify at trial to cure the defects. Thus, under § 17-12-3, the trial court's decision not to consider those ballots was proper. Williams also contends that the trial court erred in rejecting five of the challenged votes of voters who testified at trial. Only three of those rejected votes were for Williams. [2] A review of the record reveals that one of the five persons who cast challenged votes for Williams supplied an insufficient address on her oath, and, although she testified at trial, her testimony did not prove that she lived in district 2. Another person who cast a challenged vote for Williams identified her signature on an oath, but stated that she did not remember reading the oath and did not remember the inspector asking her to swear to the information therein. A third person who cast a challenged ballot for Williams testified that he was registered to vote, but that he had no voter-registration card in his possession and could not remember when he had registered, although he believed that it was more than 10 years before the election. Thereafter, he stated that he voted for the first time (by challenged ballot) in the November 1992 election. Under the ore tenus rule, the testimony of these three witnesses supports the trial court's finding that three challenged votes for Williams were due to be rejected.