Tarrant County sees hundreds more rejected mail-in ballots than it did in 2018
Nearly 950 mail-in ballots were rejected in Tarrant County during this month’s Democratic and Republican primaries, mostly because of an identification requirement in Texas’ new election law.
The law, which went into effect in December, requires people to include their driver’s license number, election identification certificate number, DPS personal identification number or the last four digits of their social security number. That number must identify the “same voter identified on the voter ’s application for voter registration,” the law states.
Numbers from the Tarrant County Election Department show there were 945 ballots rejected total in the Democratic and Republican primaries. Most of those — 815 — were related to the ID requirement. Of the 815 rejections, 812 were in the Democratic primary.
Of the 945 rejected ballots, 13 were rejected for non-ID related reasons and 117 involved voters who opted to cast their ballots in person.
There were 11,423 mail-in ballots returned through March 8 — 5,924 in the Democratic primary and 5,499 in the Republican primary.
In the primaries, the mail in ballots are rejected by ballot board representatives affiliated with their respective party.
“There’s work to do to make sure it is understood what needs to be done to fill out those properly,” said Tarrant County Election Administrator Heider Garcia.
In the 2018 primary, there were 42 rejections out of the more than 9,600 mail in ballots received in the Republican primary and 41 ballots rejected out of the more than 7,000 ballots received in the Democratic primary.
Senate Bill 1 does include a process for people to correct errors on their ballot. In Tarrant County, there were 590 ballots that were initially in question but able to be fixed.
There have been more than 18,700 rejections combined in some of the states largest counties during this month’s primaries, according to The Texas Tribune.
This story was originally published March 11, 2022 at 6:57 PM.
