Around 4 p.m. on Election Day, Fort Worth’s Connell Baptist Church had already seen hundreds of voters, with hours still to go before the polls closed.
The polling location in the Arlington Heights neighborhood had a 30-person line outside even before workers opened the doors, election judge Lee Henderson said.
"It doesn't feel quite like a final stretch yet because once people get off work, it's going to be a whole ‘nother surge of voters. It's going to feel like two hours in one hour packed together. We still have that coming,” he said, standing outside near the church’s parking lot.
Election judges like Henderson make sure that a polling place runs smoothly.
They pick up election equipment, find clerks to staff their polling location (Henderson rounded up a friend, a clerk he met during another election, and his daughter), and make sure everyone who’s eligible to vote can vote.
“It’s customer service that way," Henderson said.
That might mean helping someone cast a provisional ballot if their voter registration is uncertain, or just Googling other polling locations for people in the wrong county.
"We had a couple voters who were registered in different counties, but both of them are raring to go vote,” Henderson said. “They were going to drive to the closest polling station in Dallas County, drive to the closest polling location in Denton County.”
Henderson has been an election judge for more than a decade. He hasn’t worked every election, but he has worked a lot of them, and all over the place: Watauga, Southeast Fort Worth, Benbrook. For a time, he was an emergency election judge, meaning he went to whichever random location that needed a judge. But usually, he requests to work in his own neighborhood of Arlington Heights.
Henderson has been politically active for a long time.
His day job is working as a political strategist, and he ran for Fort Worth City Council last year. He signed up to become an election judge in 2007 or 2008, after he became a precinct chair for the local Democratic Party, Henderson said.
“It was important for me to understand exactly how elections work inside and out to protect voter rights," he said.
Working alongside Henderson on Election Day was his daughter, Serenada Sanchez, who signed up as an election clerk for the first time. She's always thought voting was super important, but her dad has gotten her to vote in more local races, too.
"He's made it super easy to be like, oh yeah, you can go early vote, or you can go vote this weekend. You can go vote here, here and here, vote as much as you can," she said.
Sanchez is a 20-year-old mass communication student at Texas Wesleyan University, entering her junior year.
One of her big takeaways from the day? She wished she saw more voters from her generation at the polls, she said.
“I've seen maybe like three or five people today come in that are like 2002, 2004, 2000ish. I'm just like, damn, where's my generation?" she said.
Sanchez was the youngest person working at her polling location by far, she said. She wants younger people to get more involved in the political process, especially in local races.
"They think that, oh, voting doesn't matter, voting's not going to get us anywhere, but voting will get you everywhere,” she said. “And you need to start in the smallest spots, especially on school boards."
Tarrant County’s elections, and elections nationwide, have faced baseless accusations of widespread election fraud fueled by former president Donald Trump’s debunked claims the 2020 presidential election was stolen.
One voter made a joke asking if the voting machines were from Dominion, a voting systems company targeted with right-wing conspiracies about voter fraud, Henderson said. Besides that, he did not get any questions about election integrity, but “lots of thank yous from voters for us doing the job.”
One of the main things he's learned as an election judge is that there are so many checks and balances in the system, people can’t “stuff the ballot box,” he said.
"It seems to me, having done this for 14 years, it would be nearly impossible to corrupt the results of the election by the staff that's running the site,” Henderson said. “From using computerized electronic poll books, to checking everybody in with their scanning of their I.D."
Ideally, there’s an election judge from the Democratic and Republican parties at each voting location, Henderson said.
“We don't identify ourselves that way to the voters that are coming in. This is about maintaining election integrity,” he said. “You don't want anybody to have control of one polling site where malfeasance could happen. You want to trust your elections. And so you have both competing eyes watching it every step."
Henderson’s day started at 5:30 a.m. setting up the polling site, and he was finished breaking down the site around 8:30 p.m. Despite the 15-hour day, he said he's likely to work another election in the future, as long as there’s not a conflict with his work — or if he decides to run for office again.
Got a tip? Email Miranda Suarez at msuarez@kera.org. You can follow Miranda on Twitter @MirandaRSuarez.
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