{"id":198992,"date":"2026-03-10T23:27:24","date_gmt":"2026-03-10T23:27:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/198992\/"},"modified":"2026-03-10T23:27:24","modified_gmt":"2026-03-10T23:27:24","slug":"tarrant-county-poll-workers-blame-voting-machines-for-errors","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/198992\/","title":{"rendered":"Tarrant County poll workers blame voting machines for errors"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Voting<\/p>\n

Voting machines stand ready at the Tarrant County Election Commission on Friday, Sept. 23, 2022, in Fort Worth.<\/p>\n

Amanda McCoy<\/p>\n

amccoy@star-telegram.com<\/p>\n

Tarrant County poll workers told county commissioners about problems they had with the voting machines during the March primary election. Many said hand ballots are the solution.<\/p>\n

The 2026 primary election was Amy Woodward\u2019s 20th election as a judge, but she said her enthusiasm is diminishing because of issues with the machines.<\/p>\n

Between having to reboot machines and spoil ballots with machine-inflicted errors, Woodward said the modernized processes have caused undue stress on poll workers.<\/p>\n

Each of the poll workers complaining about machines called for the county to switch to hand-marked ballots or hand-counted ballots.<\/p>\n

After the Texas Senate District 9 run-off election in January, Elections Administrator Clint Ludwig got approval from the secretary of state to run a hand count audit. The election offered a unique opportunity to run the audit, Ludwig said, because significantly fewer ballots were cast compared to most other elections in the county.<\/p>\n

\u2b50 Our editors also recommend: <\/p>\n

The audit found that the machines were more accurate than the people manually counting votes.<\/p>\n

At the Tuesday meeting, Republican County Judge Tim O\u2019Hare asked Ludwig if the concerns raised by the poll workers indicated more machine issues in the primary election than usual.<\/p>\n

Ludwig said he couldn\u2019t decisively say there were more issues because primary elections require more machines than other elections, meaning there is a higher likelihood of problems. Based on early data, Ludwig said there were more spoiled ballots than usual and his staff is looking into it.<\/p>\n

In the March 3 election, the Republican ballot was two pages long whereas the Democratic ballot was one page. The two pages may have been the source of the issue, Ludwig estimated.<\/p>\n


\n \"Profile
\n <\/a><\/p>\n

Rachel Royster<\/a><\/p>\n

Fort Worth Star-Telegram<\/p>\n

Rachel Royster is a news and government reporter for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, specifically focused on Tarrant County. She joined the newsroom after interning at the Austin American-Statesman, the Waco Tribune-Herald and Capital Community News in DC. A Houston native and Baylor grad, Rachel enjoys traveling, reading and being outside. She welcomes any and all news tips to her email.\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Voting machines stand ready at the Tarrant County Election Commission on Friday, Sept. 23, 2022, in Fort Worth.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":198993,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[150,152,151,3462,54048,409,39579,78626,62308,3860],"class_list":["post-198992","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-arlington","tag-arlington","tag-arlington-headlines","tag-arlington-news","tag-ballot","tag-county-commissioners","tag-election","tag-hand-count","tag-hand-marked","tag-tarrant","tag-vote"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/198992","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=198992"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/198992\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/198993"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=198992"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=198992"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=198992"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}