Tarrant County announces changes to election administration. Here’s what the experts think

As Tarrant County residents head to the polls during early voting, they may notice some changes from the last presidential election.

Your banknotes, for example, now have pre-printed sequential serial numbers; Previously, ballots were stamped with a non-sequential sequence of letters and numbers by a voting machine. After contacting an election official, voters receive a receipt with the phone number for the Tarrant County Election Integrity Task Force, an entity that did not exist in 2020.

These changes are two of a list of 16 announced by County Judge Tim O’Hare less than a week before early voting begins.

“Tarrant County is committed to securing elections and promoting confidence in election results,” O’Hare wrote in a news release.

Not all changes are new; several were in effect for previous local or state elections. Election experts interviewed by the Fort Worth Report say most of the practices O’Hare announced are common-sense strategies for ensuring election security.

“I think overall, these measures highlight the pressures election officials are under to respond to heightened scrutiny,” said Will Adler, associate director of the Bipartisan Policy Center’s Elections Project. “Many of the measures appear to be, for the most part, duplicating measures that already exist.”

These measures include improving the training of judges and electoral clerks; procedures that guarantee the adequate sealing of electoral bags; and enhanced chain of custody procedures for ballot boxes, election judge documentation, ballot box keys for ballot box storage, and provisional ballots. Chain of custody refers to the process or paper record that documents the control or transfer of equipment and materials, such as voting machines or ballots, according to the Center for Internet Security.

“Chain of custody is one of the most important principles of safe and secure election administration,” Adler said. “Most election officials do a great job. I know Tarrant County has done a good job in the past of maintaining a chain of custody, but if they have ideas on how to improve or improve the chain of custody, that’s awesome.”

Emily French, policy director at Common Cause Texas and former voting rights attorney, also praised the cybersecurity checks announced by O’Hare.

“If I talk to an election official, that’s also something I recommend,” she said.

But the two changes most visible to voters — the creation of an election integrity working group and the implementation of pre-numbered ballots — worried some experts.

French said he wants the Texas elections to be held as safely as possible. But in his opinion, election integrity task forces do not help achieve that mission.

“When I see an election integrity task force that has a phone number asking for suspicious election-related activity, what it looks like to me is people turning on their neighbors and accusing them of bad behavior that just doesn’t happen in Texas, at least. at least not enough to need a hotline about it,” she said.

The task force was assembled by O’Hare, Sheriff Bill Waybourn and District Attorney Phil Sorrells, all Republicans, in February 2023. At the time, the trio said they intended to show residents that the county was serious about concerns about electoral integrity.

From its creation until June 2024, the working group received 82 complaints of electoral fraud. Of these, zero resulted in criminal charges.

Tarrant County has been held up at the state level as an example of a secure, well-run election system. An audit of the 2020 general election previously legitimized the election in Tarrant County. At the time, auditors said that the minor voter fraud revealed by the audit would not have affected the election results.

Adler said that while it’s important for voters to know who to contact if they see something untoward at a polling place, exaggerating the possibility of voter fraud in a state where it is incredibly rare could be harmful.

He also noted that there is a potential for pre-numbered ballots to decrease election security rather than increase it, depending on how the elections office implements them. He presented a hypothetical scenario where all sequentially numbered ballots at a polling place are placed in a pile.

“Someone could be at the polling place observing the order in which voters enter to vote and receive a ballot, and then they could reconstruct later, based on those numbers, exactly how everyone who entered the polling place voted,” Adler said. .

O’Hare said the switch to pre-numbered ballots was an important request from constituents and added that it would help increase confidence in elections. When the county approved the switch to pre-numbered ballots along party lines in April, county officials said they would shuffle the ballots and place them on the table to help preserve vote secrecy. At the Charles F. Griffin Subcourt on October 21, a Fort Worth Report journalist observed that ballots were placed on the table rather than stacked.

Whitney Quesenbery, executive director of the Center for Civic Design, questioned whether the county’s implementation of a ballot verification tool in combination with pre-numbered ballots could allow for voter identification. Tarrant County became the first county in Texas to implement the vote verification tool, following the example of Ada County, Idaho. It allows residents to search and view ballot images.

“This offers transparency, but it can also put voters’ privacy at risk depending on what they include in the image or metadata,” Quesenbery said.

Tarrant’s launch of the ballot verification tool came after Texas lawmakers passed House Bill 5180 in 2023, which allowed public access to ballot images and original voted ballots 61 days after an election.

Votebeat and the Texas Tribune reported that in certain cases, these election images could be matched to specific voters. Tarrant County Elections Administrator Clint Ludwig, who is holding his first presidential election in the county after taking office in 2023, previously said his office would work to redact voter information in smaller districts in order to protect confidentiality electoral.

One change noted by O’Hare, the placement of a live-stream camera at the ballot drop-off, became necessary after lawmakers passed a bill in 2021 requiring video surveillance of all areas containing voted ballots until local analysis of the election results was completed. Residents interested in watching the live streams can view them here.

Adler warned that while this type of transparency seems like a good idea, it must also be accompanied by clear explanations to residents about what they are seeing. This is called contextual transparency, he said.

“We have seen in the past that live streaming from election facilities, without context, can be used to tell all kinds of stories,” he said. “Sometimes you can’t even see anything particularly informative there. So sometimes people trying to cast doubt on how elections are administered can take these images and weave a story out of them.”

Adler said that while there may be some problems with individual changes, the practice of announcing these changes publicly is good.

“I think it’s a really good thing for election officials to do these kinds of things, to highlight the changes they’re making to make sure people can trust the election results,” he said. “I think this is very important.”

Regardless of any specific changes, French said he always recommends residents take a look at the municipal elections website to check their voter registration and determine where they want to vote. And if residents have any questions or concerns, Common Cause, along with other organizations in the Election Protection coalition, offers a toll-free nonpartisan voter hotline at 866-OUR-VOTE. Residents can also contact the Texas Secretary of State’s elections division at 512-463-5650.

This article first appeared on the Fort Worth Report and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.