TCC questioned 2024 TAD election multiple times before error was admitted
Over a year before the 2024 Tarrant Appraisal District election error was publicized, members of the Tarrant County College board were raising questions about the additional votes they had been allotted.
Last week, the TAD Board of Directors decided in a special-called meeting to begin an investigation into how TCC was allocated nearly 200 more votes than it should’ve had based on how much tax it imposes.
At the meeting, called after the board chairman publicized the error, Chief Appraiser Joe Don Bobbitt said someone in his office had made the mistake, and he should have caught it.
Though it is usually the chief appraiser’s duty to distribute the 2,000 votes proportionately across the taxing entities (school boards, cities, the county, etc.) so they can vote for the TAD board members, Bobbitt said he delegated the task because he was “involved in other things.”
“This was my mistake,” Bobbitt said. “We should have caught it. I should have brought it to the board. I failed to do so at the time, I didn’t see a way in the tax code to correct the issue.”
TAD board member Callie Rigney said her main concern is that Bobbitt knew about the issue but hadn’t made the board aware.
If the mistake had not been made, Bobbitt said he believes the results would have been the same, according to an email he sent the person who found the issue in June 2025. He told the board that’s the reason he didn’t bring the issue up to them.
In September 2025, TCC Chief Financial Officer Pamela Anglin questioned the drastic drop in votes allotted. TCC has 126 votes in the 2025 election, when it had 505 votes in 2024 and 307 in 2023.
“I think we may have received more votes last year than we should have had,” Anglin wrote to Bobbitt’s assistant on Sept. 18.
Bobbitt responded within hours saying, “It appears that in 2024 the Tarrant County amount was copied and pasted into the TCC’s row as well giving y’all more votes. However, I don’t believe the amount of error was enough to impact the outcome based on vote distribution.”
This exchange, obtained by the Star-Telegram through public records, occurred before the error was publicized or revealed to the TAD board.
TCC questioned if the votes allotted to it was correct a year earlier as well.
Shannon Wood, who has been on the TCC board since 2021, was the first board member to raise questions about the sharp increase in votes at the Sept. 19, 2024, TCC board meeting.
TCC board attorney Antonio Allen said he would look into the matter. At the next meeting on Sept. 26, 2024, he said Senate Bill 2 had made an impact on how TAD’s election was being done, but had been assured by someone at TAD that the numbers were correct. Senate Bill 2 changed the makeup of appraisal districts for larger counties, adding three publicly elected members to the board.
TCC spokesperson Reginald Gates said he cannot recall who TCC spoke to at TAD.
With that answer, Wood said having nearly two-thirds more votes than the previous year was still alarming to her, but she trusted Allen.
“He also said that this was the greatest increase in votes of any taxing entity,” Wood told the Star-Telegram. “So I still thought ‘There’s something not quite right here.’ But again, when he verified with TAD, they told him the numbers were correct. So I don’t see anything he could have done differently.”
Wood said that she understands now that the whole thing was just a clerical error. Since she was elected to the board in 2021, she said this is the only TAD election error she’s aware of.
“I don’t feel like this is something that we should be overly concerned about,” Wood said. “I am concerned, and I was concerned then. But now we know the reason for the numbers being wrong. It was a clerical issue. I don’t want to drag it out. I don’t feel like really anyone’s to blame, except for whoever moved the numbers across the spreadsheet. And that could happen to anyone.”
If this was a frequent occurrence, it’d be another story, Wood said.
Moving forward, Wood said she hopes TAD will learn from the mistake and instate checks and balances.
The next TAD board meeting will be at 9 a.m. on Wednesday. Chair Rick Barnes said the board will decide on who will conduct the third party investigation.