During an emergency meeting on Nov. 2, the board appointed 32 Democrats and 24 Republicans, bringing the total number of people manually checking mail-in ballots up to 136. The increased number of people counting ballots also comes as several scheduled workers pulled out at the last minute over fears of the coronavirus, according to county officials.
In order to manually check the ballots, between 10,000 and 12,000 ballots will have to be duplicated, said Tarrant County Judge Glen Whitley.
“We thought we could do them quicker. But over the weekend, when we did some samples, it's a slower process than we had thought,” Whitley said. “We're in the process now of scheduling [workers] to come in and work.”
State law allows mail-in ballots in counties with populations over 100,000 to be counted after the polls close on the last day of in-person early voting. Those results will not be released until after the polls close on Election Day, Nov. 3.
With ballots having to be duplicated, Whitley said, avoiding ballots being counted twice is “a big concern.”
“The first priority is making sure that we maintain the integrity of the ballot,” Whitley said.
According to the county judge, the mail-in ballots are fed into a machine, and if a ballot is rejected, it is then reviewed by a team of at least two people of different parties. Once the ballot is confirmed to not have been counted, it is passed along to a second team who then duplicates the ballot so it will feed into the machine. Once it is duplicated, it is printed once more and checked by a third bi-partisan team to ensure the votes were correctly entered.
The longer and slower process of manually counting mail-in ballots may result in some ballots not being counted until Thursday or Friday after Election Day. However, Whitley said the delay should not affect results.
“We're talking about maybe 1% of the ballots that have been cast maybe not being counted for a couple of days,” he said.
Tarrant County Elections Administrator Heider Garcia could not immediately be reached for comment.
