As Tarrant County residents head to the polls during early voting, they might notice some changes from the last presidential election.
Their ballots, for example, now have preprinted sequential serial numbers; previously, ballots were stamped with a nonsequential string of letters and numbers by a voting machine. After they check in with a poll worker, voters receive a receipt with the phone number for the Tarrant County Elections Integrity Task Force, an entity that didn’t exist in 2020.
Those changes are two on a list of 16 announced by County Judge Tim O’Hare less than a week before early voting began.
“Tarrant County is committed to secure elections and fostering confidence in the election results,” O’Hare wrote in a news release.
Not all of the changes are new; multiple were in place for previous local or state elections. Election experts interviewed by the Fort Worth Report say a majority of the practices announced by O’Hare are common sense strategies to ensure election security.
“I think overall, these measures highlight the pressures that election officials are under to respond to heightened scrutiny,” Will Adler, associate director of the Elections Project at the Bipartisan Policy Center, said. “Many of the measures seem like they’re mostly doubling down on the measures that already exist.”
Among those measures are enhanced training for election judges and clerks; procedures ensuring proper sealing of ballot bags; and improved chain of custody procedures for ballot bags, election judge paperwork, ballot storage box keys and provisional ballots. Chain of custody refers to the process or paper trail documenting 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 for how to enhance or improve the chain of custody, that’s awesome.”
Emily French, the policy director at Common Cause Texas and a former voting rights attorney, also praised the cybersecurity checks announced by O’Hare.
“If I talk to an election official, that’s something that I’m recommending as well,” she said.
But the two most noticeable changes for voters — the creation of an elections integrity task force and the rollout of prenumbered ballots — concerned some experts.
French said she wants to see Texas elections run as safely and securely as possible. But in her view, elections integrity task forces don’t help accomplish that mission.
“When I see an election integrity task force that has a phone number asking for suspicious election-related activity, what that looks like to me is people turning against their neighbors and accusing them of bad acting that simply doesn’t happen in Texas, 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 it was intended to show residents the county took election integrity concerns seriously.
From its inception to June 2024, the task force received 82 voter fraud complaints. Of those, zero resulted in criminal charges.
Tarrant County has been held up on the statewide level as an example of a well-run, secure elections system. An audit of the 2020 general election previously legitimized elections in Tarrant County. At the time, auditors said the small amount of voter fraud revealed by the audit would not have affected the results of the election.
Adler said while it’s important for voters to know who to contact if they see something untoward at a polling location, overhyping the possibility of voter fraud in a state where it’s incredibly rare can be harmful.
He also noted there is a potential for prenumbered ballots to decrease elections security rather than increasing it, depending on how an elections office rolls them out. He posed a hypothetical scenario where all sequentially numbered ballots in a polling place are placed in a stack.
“Someone could be in the polling place watching the order that voters come in to cast and receive a ballot, and then they could potentially later reconstruct, based on those numbers, exactly how everybody who walked into the polling place voted,” Adler said.
O’Hare said the switch to prenumbered ballots was a top request from constituents, and added that it would help with trust in elections. When the county approved the switch to prenumbered ballots along party lines in April, county officials said they would mix up the ballots and lay them out on the table to help preserve vote secrecy. At the Charles F. Griffin Subcourthouse Oct. 21, a Fort Worth Report journalist noted ballots were laid out on the table rather than stacked.
Whitney Quesenbery, executive director of the Center for Civic Design, questioned whether the county’s rollout of a ballot verifier tool in combination with the prenumbered ballots could enable voter identification. Tarrant County became the first county in Texas to implement the ballot verifier tool, following the lead of Ada County, Idaho. It allows residents to search for and view ballot images.
“It offers transparency, but can also risk voter privacy, depending on what they include in the image or metadata,” Quesenbery said.
The rollout of the ballot verifier tool in Tarrant 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 instances, those ballot images could be matched to specific voters. Tarrant County Election Administrator Clint Ludwig, who is running his first presidential election in the county after taking over in 2023, previously said his office would work to redact voter information in smaller precincts in order to protect ballot secrecy.
One change noted by O’Hare, placing a live-stream camera in the Ballot Board storage room, became required after lawmakers passed a bill in 2021 requiring video surveillance of all areas containing voted ballots until the local canvass of election results is completed. Residents interested in viewing the live streams can see them here.
Adler cautioned that while this kind of transparency sounds like a good idea, it should also be accompanied by clear explanations to residents about what they’re seeing. This is called contextual transparency, he said.
“We’ve seen in the past that context-free live streaming of ballot facilities can be used to tell all sorts of stories,” he said. “Sometimes you can’t even really see anything particularly informative on there. So sometimes people who are trying to cast doubt on how elections are administered can take that footage and weave a tale with it.”
Adler said while there may be some issues with individual changes, the practice of announcing those changes publicly is a good one.
“I think it’s a really good thing for election officials to do this sort of thing, to highlight the changes that they’re making to make sure that people can trust the results of the election,” he said. “I think that’s really important.”
Irrespective of any specific changes, French said she always recommends residents poke around the county elections website to double 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 free nonpartisan voter hotline at 866-OUR-VOTE. Residents can also reach the Texas Secretary of State’s elections division at 512-463-5650.
This article first appeared on Fort Worth Report and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.