Tarrant County Election Machines Put to the Test

“For those of you that believe you can change or manipulate results on the machines, I encourage you to do so,” said Tarrant County Elections Administrator Clint Ludwig. “If something doesn’t work, we want to know.”

He stood before a small group of concerned citizens, ballot board members and county employees Monday morning to conduct a public test of the voting machines Tarrant County residents will use to cast their votes in the Nov. 5 general election.

Attendees included poll watchers, past election workers, members of the media and a representative of an election integrity organization.

The state mandated test was a way for the elections administration to “pull the curtain back” and show how elections are conducted in the county, Ludwig said.

“This is a chance for you all to see what occurs with that ballot, what the process looks like,” he said.

Ludwig invited them into the elections administration’s new warehouse to choose voting machines from racks towering overhead, then asked them to do their best to rig the mock election.

He also took participants on a quick tour of the warehouse, showing them the overflow ballot cage that cameras will live stream to the public on election day.

Janet Jones is a former election worker who is now on the ballot board. She worked a recount in April of ballots in the Republican primary race for constable in Precinct 1. She wanted to test the mail-in ballot for things she had seen in past elections, such as voting for a listed candidate and a write-in candidate on the same ballot.

“I saw several ballots where it had this filled in and then it had someone else’s name,” she said as she filled in a mock absentee ballot. “I’m seeing how it counts that.”

Meanwhile, others had already gone through voting on the in-person machines, and Ludwig got the room’s attention, saying he was about to “do what you would never do.”

He reached down to open the ballot box below the scanner, grabbed the voter’s ballot and asked her to pass it through the machine to have it counted again.

The scanner spit the ballot out back to her.

“It rejects it because it recognizes this has already been passed,” he said.

After the in-person voting, David Lambertsen, the Republican presiding judge of the ballot board, and Katherine Cano, the board’s Democrat alternate judge, led the group through the process of adjudicating mail-in ballots with marking issues.

The ballot board is a separate entity from the county elections administration. Its members are appointed by the parties and its judges are approved by the county commissioners. They have their own independent decision-making authority when it comes to how to accept mail-in ballots.

Cano and board members representing the Republican and Libertarian parties demonstrated how they determine how votes are cast. They passed the ballots through a scanner and a computer program revealed which ones contained marking issues that required adjudication.

They showed how on several ballots, such as the one filled out by Jones, that marking a listed candidate and writing in another is considered an overvote and is not counted.

If a voter marks the wrong candidate and wants to change their vote, the ballot board members look for signs that clearly indicate the mistake, for example writing off to the side, “This one,” and an arrow pointing to the desired candidate. Votes marked this way were counted.

One of the ballots passed through the scanner was filled out with pencil that was not dark enough for the scanner to read, so Cano and the other board members helped fill in the correct votes in the computer system.

Ballot board members always adjudicate in odd-numbered groups, so that any differences of opinion on how a vote should be cast are resolved by majority vote.

None of the voting machines are connected to the Internet, Ludwig said. The only part of a polling location that will be plugged into the Internet will be the Poll Pad voter check-in software, and this is to ensure that voters cast ballots in one location only.

“When you check in at location A, it now updates and it sends all the other poll pads you’ve checked in, so if you walk to B and try to vote again, you can’t because it’s updated,” he said.

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency has performed physical assessments at both of the elections administration’s locations and cybersecurity assessments on all its testing and operations.

“Tarrant County elections are extremely secure,” Ludwig said, expressing a sentiment shared by others at Monday’s test.

“I’ve been on the ballot board since 2011,” said Lambertsen. “I’ve seen a lot of ballot systems, and this is the best one we’ve had.”

Tarrant County voters will once again be able to check wait times on the county elections website on election day, making it easier to avoid long lines, Ludwig said.

He also wanted to let voters know how the county will be releasing election results, so that there is no confusion or suspicion about how they are being reported. The early voting results will be posted at 7 p.m. on Election Day. The next set of results will be posted at 9 p.m., and they will publish updates every hour on the hour until the last polling location’s results come in.

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