Reports recording an increase in rejected mail-in ballots after two recent Tarrant County elections are inaccurate due to documenting errors, elections officials told the Fort Worth Report.
Public filings with the Texas Secretary of State’s office show Tarrant County rejected 38% of mail-in ballots cast during the nationally watched Texas Senate District 9 runoff election and 18% of mail-in ballots during the November election that included the first round of the Senate race and 17 amendments to the state constitution.
However, county officials maintain those figures reflect flaws in election reports because of a “poorly designed” state form used to count results.
Mail-in ballots are reported by category: those sent out to voters, those returned by voters and those rejected by the local ballot board.
County Elections Administrator Clint Ludwig told commissioners during their March 10 meeting that ballot board members mistakenly combined the portion of unreturned ballots, 36%, with the portion of rejected ballots, 2%, which led to 38% being incorrectly recorded for the total of rejections in the January runoff.
Tarrant County rejected about 40 ballots each in January’s runoff and in November, which saw a 1.3% rejection rate, said Kat Cano, the county’s lead Democratic ballot board judge. Cano partners with Amie Super, the Republican ballot board judge, to lead their respective parties’ review of ballot returns.
“In a county as large as Tarrant County, no, you shouldn’t be having an error of that magnitude,” said Mark Jones, a political science professor at Rice University in Houston.
Human errors are always possible, Jones noted, but county officials should correct an error “the moment they’re aware of it.”
Cano said the county’s actual rejection rate is higher than she prefers, but not as drastic as it seemed.
“Rejection rates are a big concern for all ballot board members because it sucks to tell a voter that their vote won’t count, but our rejection rate — while not ideal — is not that dire,” Cano wrote in a March 7 email reviewed by the Report.
Under state law, ballot board members may reject votes under few circumstances, such as when they’re not properly placed in a ballot box or if two or more ballots are folded together improperly. Irregularly marked ballots are usually still counted, as long as the voter’s intent is clear.
The filing mistakes became public about two weeks after they were identified by Janet Mattern, president of the League of Women Voters of Tarrant County, a nonprofit devoted to increasing civic engagement and voter education. Mattern decided to “double check” Tarrant’s election filings after county officials conducted a hand-counted audit of the District 9 runoff — an effort she called “unnecessary” in February.
Mattern emailed Ludwig on Feb. 23, alerting him of what she called a “significant increase” of rejections and asking for an explanation, according to a copy of her email reviewed by the Report.
“My main concern is: Why didn’t anybody want to respond to me sooner about what was going on?” Mattern said Monday, 15 days after her email.
Ludwig replied to her the same day, noting that ballot board judges lead the county’s ballot-counting process, according to a copy of his email reviewed by the Report.
“I do not want to speak for the ballot board or speculate on reasons for the increase,” Ludwig wrote Feb. 23. “I will leave those items to the ballot board to discuss.”
Neither judge provided clarity until March 7, when Cano wrote to Mattern explaining how she was “misreading” the documents. Cano later told the Report that Mattern’s email was a “reasonable interpretation of the numbers on the form” that she has to explain to others each election.
The “election reconciliation” form Tarrant County’s ballot board uses to file vote totals with the Texas Secretary of State’s office is a one-page document that includes six spaces to record mail-in ballot numbers. The labels and organization of the spaces on the page are confusing, Cano said Monday.
“I’ve been asking them to fix this form for years and years and years,” Cano said, referring to the state office. “They don’t want to hear it, and so we kind of have to scramble.”
Filling out a form may seem simple, but elections workers spend long hours staffing the polls on Election Day, then count and verify thousands of ballots under a tight deadline, Cano noted. Both parties are required under state law to submit results no later than 24 hours after polls close.
Worker fatigue likely led to the errors in the January and November reports, she said.
“When people are tired, their brains stop working properly, they get inattentive,” Cano said. “They’re more likely to make mistakes. It doesn’t matter how many people you have looking at something.”
Super, Cano’s Republican counterpart, did not return a request for comment. Tim Davis, chair of the Tarrant County GOP, declined to comment, deferring to Super and Cano.
January’s election was the first Tarrant County runoff for a Texas Senate race in recent years, Ludwig said, noting there isn’t a similar race to compare that rate to. The runoff elections for local races in 2023, 2024 and 2025 averaged 2.6%, he said.
“This is not an apples‑to‑apples comparison, as the (joint election runoffs) have much lower turnout and far fewer absentee ballots cast,” Ludwig wrote to the Report via email.
Mattern said she’s confident the errors didn’t impact the results of either election. Still, she worries what precedent such an error could set for “more contentious” elections in the future.
The biggest impact could be on voter trust, Jones said, especially amid growing partisanship on the commissioners court.
Although Texas county elections offices are nonpartisan, they fall under the authority of a partisan court.
Tarrant’s Republican-led efforts — such as last summer’s county redistricting to increase the court’s GOP majority — damaged public trust among many Democratic circles, Jones noted, which could increase suspicion or scrutiny around the mail-in ballots.
“There’s just less trust,” Jones said. “When you have this decline in trust, there’s a tendency to view anything that is somewhat unusual through a partisan lens.”
Such mistakes are more common — and perhaps more understandable — in smaller counties, where “one person is doing everything on a computer from 1998,” he added.
Mattern asked commissioners during their March 10 meeting to ensure the forms are amended, again criticizing the resources used to audit the Senate District 9 runoff.
“I ask the county to not waste money on recounts,” Mattern said. “Use the money to train election workers, have more polling locations, hire more election workers and provide more voting machines.”
Cecilia Lenzen is a government accountability reporter for the Fort Worth Report. Contact her at cecilia.lenzen@fortworthreport.org.
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