Safeguards In Place To Protect Ballots In Texas And Beyond: 'It's Happening Out In The Open'
DALLAS-FORT WORTH (CBSDFW.COM) - As votes are still being counted, disinformation about the process to tally results in key battleground states – and even in North Texas – is spreading.
Election Day has turned into "Election Week."
"The message is to remain patient," said Rodney Anderson, Chair of the Dallas County Republican Party. "There is a process to go through to check the ballots."
That process is still playing out in North Texas, though the vast majority of votes have already been counted.
"So all the work you're seeing done in Pennsylvania and Michigan today and yesterday, we did that in Texas two weeks ago," said constitutional attorney David Coale. "Our system is set up to get this done as it's happening instead of waiting around until the last minute."
While Texas law allows votes to be processed early, election officials in Pennsylvania can't begin to count ballots until polls close on Election Day.
Every state has multiple safeguards so voters can trust the election results.
"There is a system in place, a lot of checks and balances, to try to make sure that everybody's ballot that is legally cast is counted and it's counted fairly," said Anderson.
The counting isn't shrouded in secrecy.
"It's happening out in the open," he said. "It's happening with lawyers on both sides standing by, election workers on both sides standing by."
Dallas County election workers are still receiving military and overseas ballots, which will be counted Monday.
Tarrant County Elections has been working around the clock to duplicate and verify 16,000 defective mail-in ballots.
They still need to process almost 12,000 provisional ballots.
"Speed is not near as important to us as the integrity of the ballot," said Rick Barnes, chair of the Tarrant County Republican Party.
Barnes says just because election workers are still counting ballots, there's no reason to think there's any illegal activity or fraud still going on.
"The people that do this, do it for a living," Coale said. "People spend their entire careers, working in state agencies handling election security and election ballot counting. There are best practices."
All 254 counties in Texas have until November 17 to certify their election results.
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