Tarrant County declares an election emergency, needs more mail-in ballot counters
The Tarrant County ballot board on Monday took the emergency step of hiring more workers to count the faulty mail-in ballots that can’t be read by ballot-sorting machinery.
An extra 56 people — 32 Democrats and 24 Republicans — will be brought in to sort through the ballots that can’t be sorted by the elections office’s high-tech machinery, because of a printing problem that was discovered last week.
The printing problem is expected to affect roughly 17,000 to 18,000 ballots, said Heider Garcia, Tarrant County election administrator. Depending upon how long it takes elections workers to verify that those ballots are legitimate and get them into the counting system, the result could be a delay in learning the winners and losers of some elections — particularly in close contests.
In all, there will now be up to 136 people manually checking mail-in ballots, working in potentially overnight shifts after the polls close Tuesday. The county ballot board on Monday morning approved the list of additional election workers during an emergency meeting.
Later in the day, Gov. Greg Abbott called for Tarrant County Republicans to volunteer as ballot counters. Abbott has asked James Dickey, the former chairman of the Texas Republican Party, to organize volunteers in the county, according to a Monday press release. Tarrant County Republicans, who are not on the ballot, can volunteer and should contact Rick Barnes, chairman of the Tarrant County Republican Party.
The governor is calling for volunteers so that “the election process remains transparent,” he said.
When a ballot’s bar code cannot be read by the mail-in ballot sorting machinery, those ballots have to be manually recreated by election workers — who work in pairs, with each member from a different political party. The elections office has two weeks after election night to redo ballots, but Garcia said they will work to get it done well before then.
Garcia said the extra workers are needed because many of the 80 people who originally agreed to work on the ballots are now unavailable to come in — many fearing that they will contract the coronavirus while working in tight spaces in the election office.
“We are having a shortage of ballot board members available from the list we had originally appointed in our last meeting,” Garcia told the ballot board, which is made up of county elected officials and the chairs of both major political parties.
“It’s for a variety of reasons,” Garcia said. “Most of them have expressed concern about the pandemic, and having to work with multiple others around them. It’s certainly difficult to achieve social distancing.”
The ballot board unanimously approved the addition of the new workers.
While thousands of mail-in ballots are expected to be redone, 666,752 in-person ballots that were cast during the early voting period and the more than 40,000 mail-in ballots that the county has processed already will be posted at 7 p.m. Tuesday, Garcia said at a press conference after the meeting.
He projects that an additional 200,000 voters will cast their ballots on Tuesday.
Tarrant County Republican Party chairman Rick Barnes said he supported the hiring of additional workers, but didn’t think the elections office had made full use of the original 80 or so names that were submitted to work on ballot verification.
“We have at least three members of our sitting ballot board who have never received a phone call from anybody to come work,” Barnes said.
Deborah Peoples, Tarrant County Democratic Party chair, added: “I have people that are waiting right now. They want to know when to expect a call.”
Tarrant County Judge Glen Whitley said election workers would get additional compensation for working through the night.
This story was originally published November 2, 2020 at 11:04 AM.
