Weeks ahead of midterms, voting machines in Tarrant County are put to the test
TARRANT COUNTY (CBSDFW.COM) - Voters put electronic voting machines to the test in Tarrant County, in a unique exercise aimed at building public confidence in the process ahead of the November midterm election.
For about 90 minutes Friday morning, the elections office invited voters to fill out sample ballots on the machines, but also put absentee ballots through a trial run.
They marked them with circles, checks, highlighters, crayons, even nail polish, to add a random element to testing.
In the end, once ballot board members made decisions about the intention on some of the oddly marked ballots, the machine tally on the 56 ballots cast, matched exactly with an in-person ballot-by-ballot hand count done by election staff.
Elections offices are required to test machines before each election, which was happening simultaneously in the county elections office in Fort Worth. The public test though was a new wrinkle added by Elections Administrator Heider Garcia, after questions have lingered about the accuracy of machine counts.
"We'll jump through all these hoops to say, we're trying to be open, we're trying to be transparent, we're showing you the process, the good the bad and the ugly," Garcia said.
Earlier this year, a group spent weeks inside the county elections office, going through boxes of paper ballots from the March 2020 primary vote. They appeared to be looking for irregularities in the votes cast, and the count that was eventually reported.
Last year, voters around the county received postcards promoting a website called "Verify My Voting," asking them to report any discrepancies related to their voting record.
Tristan Martinez, who works for the Tarrant County Democratic Party, was one of the test voters Friday. She said she has 100% confidence in the process, but the test was beneficial to demonstrating how much is done to protect voting.
"I think that we need to, get more people confident, and address their concerns but in a healthy way," she said.