Early voting for next Tuesday’s (Nov. 8) election ends at 7 p.m. today. Voters may cast in-person ballots at any of the county’s 50 vote centers.
Earlier this week, Tarrant County election officials advised voters to disregard a letter circulating in a Fort Worth neighborhood that may have been intended to confuse voters.
A letter posted on Twitter identifies the sender of the mail as someone connected to a group “investigating the integrity of our local elections.” The letter further states that “we are noticing some anomalies in the data for the current election and would like to confirm if we have an issue or if the data is correct.”
“There are an unusually high number of people that live in our neighborhood, traveling to the Stop Six area vote when there are many Early Voting sites between here and there,” the letter said.
Tarrant County election officials responded on the social media site that “voters have the choice to vote at any location open in the county” and “choosing a location far from your home does not indicate an ‘anomaly,’ it just means it was convenient for the voter.”
Tarrant County Elections Administrator Heider Garcia told NBC 5: “I think it’s looking for trouble that’s not there. There’s no other way to describe it. It’s nonsense.”
The marquee local race in the midterm election is the contest between Republican Tim O’Hare, a far-right conservative, who has been endorsed by Trump, and Democrat Deborah Peoples, a retired vice-president for AT&T.
A former mayor of Farmers Branch, O’Hare made national headlines for his efforts to ban landlords from renting to undocumented immigrants, making English the official language of Farmers Branch and to stop funding programs serving children of undocumented immigrants in the community, which has a large Latino population.
Numerous lawsuits resulting from those policies were ruled unconstitutional by a federal court and cost the city about $6.6 million in legal fees, according to The Dallas Morning News. O’Hare is a former chair of the Tarrant County Republican Party.
Peoples, the first black woman to be elected chair of the Tarrant County Democratic Party, twice ran unsuccessfully for mayor of Fort Worth, once against former Mayor Betsy Price and the second time against current Mayor Mattie Parker.
Tarrant County is offering free rides on public transportation throughout early voting and on Election Day.
Polls will be open from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. on Tuesday. Voters can cast their ballots at any of the county’s Election Day voting centers.
