Gov. Greg Abbott urges Tarrant County Republicans to help count mail-in ballots
Gov. Greg Abbott is calling for Tarrant County Republicans to volunteer as ballot counters as the county expects to redo up to 18,000 defective mail-in ballots.
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.
Abbott’s announcement comes after 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.
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 printing problem is expected to affect roughly 17,000 to 18,000 ballots, said Heider Garcia, Tarrant County election administrator at the emergency meeting. Depending upon how long it takes elections workers to verify and get ballots into the counting system, it could delay the results of some winners and losers of some elections — particularly in close contests. 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 could not be reached for comment regarding the governor’s announcement.
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.
