How Texas’ new voting law is working: A Q&A with Elections Administrator Heider Garcia

In March, Tarrant County voters cast their ballots for the first time under Texas’ new wide-reaching voting law, Senate Bill 1.

While Texas lawmakers said it would protect election integrity, voting rights advocates worried it would disenfranchise voters. They pointed out issues like emboldened partisan poll watchers, limited voting hours and the removal of drive-thru voting locations.

Fears about voter suppression soon materialized. The primary election saw 945 mail-in ballots rejected, mostly because of an identification requirement in the election law. Absentee voters have to include their driver’s license number, election identification certificate number, DPS personal identification number or the last four digits of their Social Security number when submitting their ballot. And that number must be the same as the one on their voter registration application.

With the midterm election now underway, the Election Integrity Protection Act of 2021 is again being put to the test in Tarrant County. The Star-Telegram spoke with Elections Administrator Heider Garcia about what voters should expect when heading to the polls.

Are you seeing any issues related to SB 1 during the early voting period?

No, I think the kind of trial stage of this whole thing was the primary in the early months of the year, especially with the mail ballots and those ID numbers. We’re seeing a better response. And also people have put in annual applications, so some of them who put in an application in March didn’t have to put in another one. Once they worked out their issues through the year, they’re all fine.

Hundreds of mail-in ballots were rejected when SB 1 was implemented, what are you seeing this time around?

We’ve seen a lower number of ballot requests. Probably a little more than half of what we had in 2018. So there’s definitely I guess a lack of motivation to use mail ballots. I couldn’t tell you what’s motivating it. Is it lack of trust? Is it confusion? But we have less ballot requests this year than we did four years ago.

Have you seen any changes when it comes to poll watchers in Tarrant County?

Poll watchers were always allowed there. It certainly makes it clearer that they can’t be obstructed, but they couldn’t in the past anyway. It’s just explicit on some things that were implicit in the past. We haven’t had any issues with poll watchers. I’ve been visiting polling places every day. I don’t know that I’ve seen a single poll watcher during early voting. We’ve always had poll watchers, we always encourage poll watching, we welcome them. We want to make sure that candidates and the parties have their eyes and ears at the location to make sure that everything is done according to the law. And in the time I’ve been here, I honestly have not had a single issue with anyone being out of line. Yes, sometimes people get a little passionate and you have to kind of help them cool off a little bit, but it’s never been something that can’t be handled, or a problem.

How about drive-thru, 24-hour voting and access to drop boxes?

Twenty-four-hour voting and drive-thru voting, those were not allowed in the code anyway in the past. Drop boxes were never legal in Texas and we have never used them, I don’t know that any county has actually used drop boxes in Texas. What lawmakers did was make explicit what was kind of implicit. These things couldn’t be done, which is why we’ve never done them in Tarrant County. This was a law that just made it very clear that certain things that were being tried out were just not part of the law.

The law also says that counties had to add live cameras inside the count facilities. What has Tarrant County’s experience been with that added measure?

We added them towards the end of last year, early this year. They had to be in place for the first election of the year, which was the March primary, and they’re on right now. You can go on our website and click on the link and see the ballot board working and the tally room and see everything happening. It’s just another measure of transparency. It doesn’t really affect us other than the cost of running them and setting them up, but now they’re just up there on the roof and they’re streaming and we keep doing our job.

For people who haven’t voted since 2020, should they be expecting any changes in the voting process?

Tarrant County residents are smart enough to understand that they have the opportunity to go vote. We go above and beyond, we have 50 early voting places open. They’re all set up, they’ve all been running. Voting is open through the weekend as usual. If you look at the ratio of voters to locations, I think Tarrant County is one of the ones with most locations given our number of voters in early voting. We understand that people really appreciate that we’re doing everything we can. I don’t think they’ll be intimidated. I know there was a lot of concern as the law was being discussed. But at this point, we’ve had four elections — the primary, the runoff, the municipal and its runoff — with these laws in place and we haven’t had a single issue. We’ve had a lot of questions, yes, we’ve had a ton of public records requests, but the conduct of the election hasn’t been disrupted and I think people have noticed that. They know there’s no reason to feel intimidated or worried to go vote.

What kinds of concerns are you hearing from Tarrant County voters?

We have these groups that are working on election integrity around here and they put in public records requests, they’ve asked how the system works, they don’t agree with some of the laws. But we always tell them the same thing that we don’t get to pick and choose which laws to follow. We’ve told them, they have to take it down to Austin and ask lawmakers to put it in place if that’s what they want, but it’s not something that we can decide not to do. Some of them have gone even as far as telling us there shouldn’t be early voting and we say “Well, it’s in the law. We have to do early voting. We cannot choose to not do it.” So that’s been the kind of discussion that we’ve had with these groups.

What has the county been doing to quell worries and encourage residents to vote?

We’ve done a great effort through the year to just address concerns and rumors. So we spent a lot of the year working with the public and the commissioners court. We did this big event back in April to address all those concerns and questions and everything. It’s been mostly just answering and educating voters and the general public on how things work to show that the process we have in place is reliable and accurate.

What kind of turnout are you expecting in Tarrant County for the midterm election?

It’s impossible to predict. We have to prepare for 100% and then we just wait to see how many people show up and just process whatever comes in.

Any tips for voting in Tarrant County?

Early voting is underway. The weather’s great. I always tell people my recommendation is don’t wait till Tuesday. The last day, you have a flat tire, we got a bad storm, whatever, then you don’t have tomorrow to vote, so the sooner, the better. The weekend is always our low turnout point in time, you’re gonna find shorter lines. We have plenty of resources on the website. We have a map of the wait times, so you can find a place that maybe has a shorter line. Your sample ballot, if you come in prepared, it’s a shorter, quicker trip to vote. So my recommendation is just vote as soon as you can.