Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick isn’t happy with Tarrant County Judge Glen Whitley and how the county has handled its problem with defective bar codes on mail-in ballots. Whitley shot back and said Patrick should keep his nose out of local government.
Patrick was upset with reports that not every mail-in ballot the county has received may be counted on Election Night, he said Tuesday on the Chris Salcedo Show on WBAP-AM.
But then later in the day, Whitley went on the Rick Roberts Show on WBAP-AM and said he’s hopeful that the county’s ballot board will finish counting the defective mail-in ballots by 7 p.m. Wednesday.
“The lieutenant governor blaming the county is a very good indication that he doesn’t understand how the process goes,” Whitley told the Star-Telegram. “He just needs to keep his nose and business down at the state and let the local people take care of the local [government].”
On Monday, the Tarrant County ballot board took the emergency step of hiring more workers to count the faulty mail-in ballots that can’t be read by ballot-sorting machinery. An extra 56 people — 32 Democrats and 24 Republicans — will be brought in to sort through the ballots that can’t be sorted by the elections office’s machinery, because of a printing problem that was discovered last week.
The extra workers are needed because many of the 80 people who originally agreed to work on the ballots are now unavailable to come in — many fearing that they will contract the coronavirus while working in tight spaces in the election office.
“It’s just not acceptable,” Patrick said on the show, without offering a solution. “It’s bad enough when it happens in a Democrat-run county.”
“Tarrant County is the largest Republican-controlled county in the state, they outta be able to get their votes in. The voters have the right to know by Election Day.”
Patrick said some close Texas House races in Tarrant County may not be decided Tuesday night. The House seats up for grabs in Tarrant County include District 92, 93, 94, 96 and 97. In all of these races, Democrats have raised an unprecedented amount of money. Gov. Greg Abbott himself has poured money into some of the Republican candidates in these districts to fight back against Democratic fundraising.
The county said there are faulty bar codes on about 17,000 to 18,000 mail-in ballots. As of Tuesday, the county had received about 69,000 of the 89,000 ballots it sent out. Ballots postmarked on or before Tuesday will be counted if received by Wednesday.
Because the ballots cannot be read by the sorting machinery, they have to be recreated by election workers who work in pairs, with each member from a different political party. The elections office has two weeks after election night to redo ballots, but officials said they will work to get it done well before then.
Pairs look at the returned mail-in ballots one at a time and, if both members agree that the ballot is in proper condition, the ballot is then ready to be counted. However, if, both members can’t agree on the condition of the ballot, the ballot is put aside so that a larger election board group can make a final decision on it.
In all, there will now be up to 136 people manually checking mail-in ballots, working in potentially overnight shifts after the polls close Tuesday. The county ballot board on Monday morning approved the list of additional election workers during an emergency meeting. There was a shortage of workers because some of the older workers had coronavirus concerns.
This story was originally published November 03, 2020 4:07 PM.
