Tarrant County dealing with a shortage of ballot board members

Tarrant County is adding more ballot board volunteers because of a shortage and the urgent need to finish counting defective ballots.

FORT WORTH, Texas - Tarrant County called an emergency meeting Monday morning because of a shortage of workers on the ballot board.

Elections Administrator Heider Garcia said the shortage is due to COVID-19 and social distancing concerns.

“We want to make sure make sure that we have enough resources to finish this job,” he said.

The county is dealing with ballots being rejected because the scanners were not able to read the barcodes. Those ballots are in the process of being replicated and verified.

“Once we get to Tuesday night, if we haven’t finished duplicating the ballots that were defective, we have to continue counting until we have processed everything that was received by election day,” Garcia said.

Garcia says the reason they are preparing to work through the night is because he says thousands of mail-in-ballots were likely defectively printed by Runbeck, a company based in Arizona.

“Think about at grocery store self-checkout. It won't scan. A cashier cleans it up and it goes through. It's that problem,” Garcia said. “But not that something is covering it. It is that it wasn't printed well.”

That means ballot board members oversee the making of a new ballot that can then be scanned. Garcia estimates 5,000-10,000 ballots need to be remade.

“I want people seeing this to not worry about things being thrown out because we are doing what we are supposed to do if we have to do it slower,” Garcia said. “I am okay, but we will do it the way the law says to do it.”

Runbeck said in a statement that they are still working to investigate if the problem is printing related or scanning-related.

Garcia said the secretary of state's office and representatives from the Republican and Democratic Party are observing the process to remake ballots that can't be scanned.

“They are all pretty confident things are being done the right ways,” he said.

Ballot board volunteers will need to work in pairs continuously until everything received before 7 p.m. on election night is counted. They won’t be allowed to stop, go home and return the next day.

Garcia asked both the Republican and Democratic parties to submit more names of volunteers who can be available overnight and in that situation if needed.

The board on Monday voted to approve those new members.

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