The Tarrant County elections administrator says at this point, it’s unlikely that all defective mail-in ballots will be replicated and counted by seven tomorrow night, when the polls close for the last time.
Last week it was determined that there was an issue with thousands of mail-in ballots in Tarrant County due to a printing error. As a result, those ballots will need to be replicated onto clean ballots so that they can be scanned and counted.
Tarrant County elections administrator Heider Garcia says this will not have much impact on the results that will be posted at that time.
Garcia is looking for people to help in the processing of those defective ballots; saying that under state law, the counting must continue 24 hours a day until finished.
After a defective ballot is replicated, two people from opposing political parties will go over it to ensure that it exactly matches the original.
"Members of both parties sit down, and they copy from this to a blank copy so that it can be scanned and counted," says Garcia. "Our goal here is to make sure we don't improvise but protect the integrity of the ballot and follow the process outlined in the law, which is to use the remake to correct defective ballots that cannot be counted in the automated way."