Parker County remains firmly red in mid-term voting

While Greg Abott comfortably carried Texas against Democrat Beto O’Rourke by about 11 percentage points, Parker County gave him a much bigger boost, awarding Abbott almost 83 percent of its votes, 67 percentage points above O’Rourke in Tuesday’s mid-term election results.

U.S. Rep. Kay Granger, whose new district includes the northern portions of the county, had an even bigger margin against Democrat Trey Hunt, pulling 85.7% of the vote among voters who live in her district, a whopping 70 percentage point difference.

U.S. Rep Roger Williams, whose new district will cover the southern portion of the district, ran unopposed.

The only other local race was for Parker County Sheriff, where Sheriff Russ Authier outpolled his Libertarian opponent Russell Hess, 50,423 to 8,967.

Reporting delays attributed to early, write-in ballots

Residents who are accustomed to seeing early votes reported promptly at 7 p.m. had an unaccustomed wait to see results on Tuesday.

Elections Administrator Crickett Miller said the delays in reporting were attributed to the large number of write-in ballots and the process of certifying early votes.

“There are numerous processes that have to occur in order to tally all of the votes,” Miller told The Community News. “Mail in ballots have to be processed and verified by the early voting ballot board, then processed into the central computer, and then to the count computer.

“Once Central Count Station begins, all early voting scanners must be checked through the chain of custody and tapes ran on each early voting scanner and verified, and then processed into count.  Once everything from ballot by mail and early voting has been loaded into count, the write-in candidates must be processed to the candidate that is the certified write-in, which is a tedious process and takes a long period of time.”

Miller said each write-in has to be assigned to the certified candidate name.

“There were four races (one local) that had write-in candidates,” Miller said. “Every step must be checked and verified prior to going to the next step.  We want to make sure that everything is processed and cured correctly.  If you watched the live stream last night you could see that the early voting ballot board and central count were busy from early morning to late last night.”