It’s Election Day – and if you haven’t voted you’re running out of time. Voting centers across Tarrant County opened at 7 a.m. today and will close at 7 p.m.
Tarrant County voters have more location choices today than they had during early voting at the county’s 50 vote centers. The county’s elections office is operating a live polling place wait time site so voters can track where wait times are high and low.
During the 12 days of early voting, Tarrant County voters cast 389,306 early votes and 20,745 mail-in ballots. The combined total of 410,051 lagged behind the 2018 early voting turnout of 469,619 in-person and mail-in ballots combined.
Tarrant County’s turnout is consistent with the statewide early-voting outcome, which was also lower than turnout in the last midterm election in 2018.
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 to 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.”
Texans will choose a new governor, lieutenant governor and attorney general, along with other statewide elected leaders.
The marquee Tarrant County race 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, to make 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 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 to voting centers on public transportation.
