Libertarians ask Texas Supreme Court to make Tarrant County ballot board follow election law

The Tarrant County Libertarian Party has asked the Texas Supreme Court to force the county’s ballot board to follow state election law when auditing the Nov. 3 midterm results, days after a Fort Worth appeals court declined to take action against the board. 

The Libertarian Party filed a petition Nov. 9 with the Supreme Court, again alleging that Tarrant County’s Republican-controlled ballot board violated state law when processing mail-in ballots and verifying provisional ballots ahead of the midterms. That same board will conduct the state-mandated, hand-counted partial audit of the election results expected to start Monday. 

Libertarians allege the Republican controlled-ballot board violated the state election code requiring each political party on the ballot — Democrat, Libertarian and Republican — to have an equal number of members on the board. Election officials create a ballot board of paid citizens before each election to objectively process the mail-in and provisional ballots before conducting the hand-counted audit. 

“If the court doesn’t require Tarrant County to follow the law in this election, then there’s 253 other counties in Texas — and there’s a lot of elections to come — and what they will be allowing is whatever party is in charge of any county in Texas, they just get to appoint ballot boards based on whatever they want,” said Steven Lawrence, an attorney representing the Libertarian Party. 

Amie Super, the Republican chair of the ballot board in charge of scheduling members to count ballots, did not return a request for comment. Tim Davis, the Tarrant County GOP chair who nominated Super for the position, also did not respond to a request for comment. Davis previously told the Report he wasn’t involved in the board scheduling and deferred to Super. 

Kat Cano, the ballot board’s lead Democrat, told the Report that Super assigned her as the team lead for the hand-counted audit, making her in charge of scheduling ballot board members to participate. Cano said she intends to schedule equal members from each party to conduct the audit but declined to comment on the pending litigation. 

Leading up to the election, Libertarians claimed Super scheduled an unequal number of members from each political party to count the ballots, stacking the numbers in Republicans’ favor. 

Under the state election code, the chair of each political party with nominees on the ballot submits a list of people to serve on the ballot board, and the county election board appoints an equal number from each party. The political party whose nominee for governor received the most votes in the most recent election presides over the ballot board, with the party chair’s preferred nominee serving as chair. 

Four days before the election, county officials appointed 14 additional Republicans, three Libertarians and three Democrats to the board, citing concern about being able to process the higher-than-usual number of mail-in ballots. County elections administrator Clint Ludwig said at the time he’d confirmed with the Texas Secretary of State’s office that it was legally permissible to appoint the unequal numbers. 

The Libertarian Party initially asked the Texas Second District Court of Appeals to intervene and require the ballot board to have equal representation from each political party when counting the ballots. The court denied the petition Nov. 3 without citing a reason. 

County officials are scheduled to canvass the election results Friday. 

It’s unlikely that the hand-counted audit would identify any major errors that could alter the outcome of the results due to the significant margins by which Democrats won most offices in Tarrant County, Lawrence said. However, Libertarians said they want the law followed during next week’s audit to avoid setting a precedent.

“We want the law enforced now so that it cuts out the possibility for any future shenanigans,” Lawrence said. 

Cecilia Lenzen is a government accountability reporter for the Fort Worth Report. Contact her at [email protected]. 

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