More than half of Tarrant voters took advantage of new system. Will we see it again?
Voters took advantage of Tarrant County’s new countywide voting system on Election Day, with 50.81% casting ballots outside of their home precinct.
“That in itself is, I think, a fantastic number,” Tarrant County Elections Administrator Heider Garcia said. Vote centers, “are just magnets for people.”
Previously, voters who tried to cast their ballot outside of their assigned precinct would have to vote provisionally or be turned away. Despite concerns that the new system along with new voting equipment would be too many changes at once, Garcia deemed the program a success.
Voter turnout was at its highest for a November constitutional amendment election since 2005, and Garcia said he thinks countywide voting was a catalyst that helped capture that turnout. However, some residents working the polls pointed to “a few bugs that they have to work out” ahead of the next election.
“This was not a total success. There definitely were problems with this election,” Danna Trowbridge, the secretary and primary elections administrator of the Tarrant County Republican Party, said at a Commissioners Court meeting last month, referring to paper jams and more.
The county hopes to keep using vote centers and join 60 Texas counties that have already adopted the system. It submitted an application to the Secretary of State’s Office last week to use countywide voting permanently. A decision is expected soon, Stephen Chang, a spokesman for the office, wrote in an email Tuesday.
“I have had no one really come to me and say, ‘We want you to scrap the system,’” Judge Glen Whitley said at a Commissioners Court meeting last month. “I think the fact that we had over 50% of the people vote outside of their precinct says that they were very interested in the convenience of the vote.”
Increased voter turnout
Constitutional amendment elections historically see far lower turnout than their gubernatorial and presidential counterparts. But this November saw the highest number of Tarrant County voters in a constitutional amendment election since 2005.
In November, 134,231 voters cast their ballot, or about 11.81% of all registered voters. That’s nearly 2 1/2 times more than the 54,101 voters in November 2017.
Of the 332 polling places open on election day, over 90% saw increased turnout, according to the Elections Department. And 16 of those locations saw an increase in turnout between 1,000% and 3,000%.
Garcia credits that to a new strategy: keeping polling places used for early voting also open on Election Day. Previously, some early voting locations would be closed on election day, and a different site would be used day of.
Keller Town Hall was the county’s busiest early voting location, and it was also the one that saw one of the highest increases in turnout on election day when it was left open on Nov. 5. In years past, Keller Church of Christ was the location used on Election Day, while Keller Town Hall had been exclusively an early voting location. Keller Town Hall saw an increase in turnout of nearly 1,600% compared to Keller Church of Christ’s turnout in 2015, and an increase of almost 962% compared to 2017’s turnout, Garcia said.
Out of the 30 locations that saw the largest increase in election day turnout, 21 were early voting sites, Garcia said, and many of those sites also saw the largest swath of voters from across the county. It’s a tactic Harris County used for nearly 50 of its sites this November, and found similar success with.
“To me, it was largely due to the fact that we stayed in the early voting location and a lot of people who were drawn to it,” Garcia said, “came to the place that they they’d seen open for the last two weeks.”
While proponents of countywide voting often tout its impact on improving voter turnout, Garcia said he isn’t sure it’s accurate to point to vote centers as the deciding factor.
“I don’t know if vote centers is what brought people out. But without vote centers, we wouldn’t have been able to capitalize on whatever it is that brought people out,” Garcia said. “We would have had to turn them away.”
But issues with the new voting machines did force some voters to head to different locations. Garcia previously told the Star-Telegram any equipment issues were due to human error, rather than the equipment itself.
“If anything, having countywide polling places alleviated some of the difficulties of the transition to the new equipment,” Garcia said, noting that people could simply go to another location to cast their ballot if they were experiencing issues at a polling place. “Not ideal, but it helped.”
But a lack of education on how to handle voters that needed two ballots led to some choosing not to vote altogether, said Inna Dietrich who worked as an election judge at Southlake Town Hall.
Voters from places across the county came to vote at Southlake Town Hall, and Watauga voters needed two pages to fit all of their selections, Dietrich said. For some voters, that wasn’t clear, and rather than inserting a second page, they accidentally reprinted over the first one — invalidating it, Dietrich said.
“Some people got frustrated and left. They didn’t want to do it again. That’s the little glitches that they’re going to have to work out, to make sure that the polling places are aware that if you’re a resident that requires two ballots, you at the onset get correct instructions,” Dietrich said.
Garcia said he was surprised to hear of problems inserting the first page twice, because when the ballot is accepted, it should automatically drop in the ballot box — preventing it from being inserted a second time.
Katherine Egan Bennett lives in Southlake, and worked the polls at the Airport Area YMCA in Bedford. She said the flexibility was a pleasant surprise for some voters at a nearby location with long lines when a poll worker let them know they could avoid the wait and use the YMCA location instead.
“If you’re in a public location, like a YMCA, a library, or a school where there’s other activities going on, then you might get some people to vote that might not vote otherwise, just because it’s so convenient,” Bennett said.
Overall, both Bennett and Dietrich said they felt the new countywide system was a beneficial one, and suggested publicizing the availability of other locations more, by possibly including wait times online or a list of the nearest polling places at each location.
Potential poll closures
If the Secretary of State’s Office grants the county with a “successful” status, vote centers would become a fixture of future elections. Garcia stressed that countywide voting essentially offers many of the same benefits as early voting.
“We have the same technology, the same instrumentation, the same safeguards, the same processes,” Garcia said. “We’re just doing it one more day in a lot more places.”
But there could be less polling places in the future. Under the countywide program, counties are permitted to cut the number of polling locations that would have existed under the precinct system by as much as 50%.
That’s not necessarily a bad thing, said Robert Stein, a political science professor at Rice University, who is studying Harris County’s implementation of vote centers. Stein said his research has shown that vote centers can both increase the quality of the voting experience and reduce the costs of conducting elections.
Tarrant County Commissioners pledged not to eliminate polling locations until after the 2020 presidential election to allow data on voting behavior to inform any potential cuts.
The question to consider then, will be: “What have people been doing now that they have a choice?” Garcia said.
In Tarrant County, the Citizens Advisory Committee recommended a reduction of 45 locations, or about 13%, based on a set of criteria, which included factors such as a location’s turnout, ADA accessibility, whether it is within two miles of another location, the precinct’s minority population and more.
“You have to study it,” Stein said. “No two elections are ever the same, for obvious reasons.”
In Harris County, Stein has been researching how vote centers affect factors such as when and where people vote, their satisfaction with voting and how voters change behavior over time, with the goal of building a model to estimate the likelihood a person will vote, in addition to where and when they likely will.
“We’re not maximizing profit here or maximizing voter satisfaction at the lowest cost per vote cast,” Stein said, noting that the costs of running an election — like buying new equipment — are high, while voter turnout often remains relatively low.
But potential closures made Dietrich wary about unintended consequences, noting it would be “a balancing act” to ensure longer lines wouldn’t be created at remaining locations, ultimately making voting less convenient.
“We have pretty low voter turnout already, so I would be nervous to do anything to reduce (locations) any further, especially for people of a lower socioeconomic class who may not have cars or access already,” Bennett said.
For now, officials will have to wait and see how residents take to the new system, before they determine how to change it.
“Let’s get to that point,” Garcia said. “You just have to wait and see how people choose to do it.”
This story was originally published December 13, 2019 at 6:00 AM.
