Tarrant County election official confident in primary results after reporting delay
Tarrant County’s top election official expressed confidence in Tuesday’s election results after an equipment malfunction caused hours of delays.
“We stand by the work we’ve done, we completely guarantee they convert the accuracy and the integrity of the results,” said Tarrant County Election Administrator Heider Garcia.
Officials released the county’s early voting returns after polls closed at 7 p.m. on Election Night, but it wasn’t until early Wednesday morning that election night numbers were available — obscuring who was leading in local races for county judge, district attorney and others.
Garcia said there was an issue with a machine in a tabulation room that’s used for unofficial results on election night. Every voting machine has two USB drives that store identical copies of results, he said. The results from one of the drives are fed to a machine via internet to a server. This allows the public to get quicker unofficial results on election night.
However, Tuesday night the computer that receives the unofficial results malfunctioned, Garcia said. What exactly happened is unclear, as officials still have to diagnose the problem with the vendor and the Texas Secretary of State.
After troubleshooting with the vendor, Garcia said the decision was reached that efforts needed to focus on expediting the official results transmitted manually from the second USB drive. Usually, these figures would have come late in the night and been crosschecked on Wednesday with the unofficial results transmitted digitally.
“Plan B for this scenario basically means we cannot wait until tomorrow,” Garcia said. “We need to move those USB drives quicker to our office to read them in as they come in so we can post the official results.”
Election results are not final until they’ve been canvassed, and more ballots are expected in the coming days as mail in ballots are returned and provisional ballots reviewed.
Tarrant County Judge Glen Whitley late Tuesday stressed that “the integrity of the ballot is the most important thing.”
“Computers are great when they work, and they’re crappy when they don’t,” Whitley said.
Heider pointed out that an audit of Tarrant County’s election results in 2020 found few issues. The system keeps a paper trail and the county is required to conduct a partial manual recount by hand to verify the machines counted accurately, Garcia said.
The county also had live streams going as votes were counted, as required under Texas’ new election law, Senate Bill 1. Garcia added that poll watchers were reviewing the process.
“I think these are plenty of guarantees, or at least plenty of reasons, that we have to tell people you can be confident in the results,” he said.
Tarrant County also experienced problems with the tabulation of ballots in 2020 when mail-in ballots were rejected over defective bar codes. The error led to delays as election workers copied the ballots so they could be counted.
“It had nothing to do with the machines,” Garcia said. “It was a it was a printing error issue with the company that printed the absentee ballots. So the issue there had nothing to do with our technological platform.”
Tarrant County has used the Hart InterCivic Verity Voting System since August 2019.
This story was originally published March 2, 2022 at 4:16 PM.
