The Tarrant County Commissioners Court held a public forum last week to educate residents on the county’s voting process.
According to The Texan, County Judge Glen Whitley said that many citizens had raised questions about the election process during previous court meetings.
However, since the court did not have the items listed on the agenda, commissioners could not respond to those questions directly. For that reason, Whitley decided to set up the election forum and requested that citizens submit their questions in writing before the event.
Tarrant County Election Commissioner Heider Garcia spoke at the forum, reassuring voters that protection and security measures were already in place and were designed to prevent any single person from tampering with or changing vote totals.
After the presentation was over, dozens of voters were given the opportunity to ask questions.
Representatives of Citizens for Election Integrity Texas (CEIT) who attended the meeting voiced concerns about the county’s dynamic numbering system of ballots used in place of a pre-printed sequential numbering system.
The Texas Constitution states in Article 6, Section 4 that “the Legislature shall provide for the numbering of tickets and make such other regulations as may be necessary to detect and punish fraud and preserve the purity of the ballot box; and the Legislature shall provide by law for the registration of all voters.”
The Texas Election Code section 52.062 states that all ballots “shall be numbered consecutively beginning with the number 1.”
The group claims that the system currently in place, in which the voting machine numbers ballots, violates those two statutes.
Election Commissioner Garcia disagreed with that statement, stating that the system meets the criteria and provides additional security because the ballots do not receive a number until they are used.
The forum also addressed a $1.6 million grant issued by the Center for Technology and Civic Life, a group funded in part by Meta, the company that owns Facebook.
Whitley stated that the county election board approved the grant application, and the County utilized that money to purchase equipment and pay poll workers.
The group issued grants totaling $419 million to around 2,500 counties across America to help fund local elections in 2020. Critics, like Hans von Spakovsky, a former Federal Election Commission member, have suggested that the actual intention was a get-out-the-vote ploy to benefit Democrats.
Tarrant County, which includes Fort Worth, generally leans conservative, although the county flipped party lines and voted for Joe Biden in that election.
Another topic was stale voter rolls, with citizens asking about the County’s actions to remove ineligible and dead voters from rolls.
A lawyer named Dan Bates, affiliated with CEIT, said they had compiled 80 pages of voters whose addresses were vacant lots or were otherwise invalid, suggesting that the County was not doing its legal duty to remove those voters.
Troy Havard, the Assistant County Election Commissioner, replied that workers could not remove voters simply because they had not voted in “10 or 15 years.”