Tarrant County Resolves Backlogged Mail-In-Ballot Request Issue

FORT WORTH  (WBAP/KLIF News) – With the mid-term elections just days away, some North Texans had been complaining that they haven’t received mail-in ballots they request weeks ago.

On Wednesday, the Tarrant County Elections Office said it had mailed the last batch of mail-in ballots Monday.

Elections Administrator Heider Garcia said the high demand for voter registrations cards caused a delay in processing mail-in ballots.

“We were getting boxes of registration cards after the deadline that were timely and our concern was that if we didn’t run them…  those would have been illegible voters who wouldn’t had to vote provisionally and we wanted to avoid that,” he said.

Before Tarrant County announced all the requests had been mailed, Fort Worth resident Mike Albritton said he was  concerned his sons attending college out of state won’t be able to cast their vote in time for the election.

His sons are Tarrant County residents but go to school at Yale and Northwestern Universities.

“My biggest fear is that some of those that were processed were not processed in a timely enough fashion that it’s reasonable for the mail to get from here to there and back again,” he said.

Although many North Texas counties, including Tarrant, reported high enthusiasm and record turnouts for early voting, Albritton said he’s worried that young students who were waiting for mail-in-ballots might  become discouraged to vote in the future.

“It’s strikes me as perhaps even unfair that young people who submitted their applications in a very timely way are not seeing those ballots mailed,” he said.

There have been reports of a similar situation in Dallas County.

Election Day is November 6.

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