A special thanks to Stephanie Draper for standing up to advocate for our Voting Centers at...

Thank you. And good morning to the commissioners. My name is Stephanie Draper, and I have been a resident of Denton County for over 20 years. Now I have also been an election judge. And I can tell you right now, that is only two things are the hardest part of being an election judge.

Yeah. One is you got to make sure that you got all the counts and you haven't missed anything. The second one is when you have to turn people away to vote. That hurts my heart when people take the time off of work, try to leave school to go out to go and vote, and they get turned away.

For an example, I was an election judge over in Louisville, and right there in the center, there's like this one precinct here and another one a little bit like 15, 20 minutes away. I had a student that came through there and they were so excited because this is their second time to do their civic duty. I had to turn them away.

And they're like, Miss Stephanie, I'm sorry, but I have to go back to school. I don't know if I'm gonna be able to come back to go vote before 7 o'clock deadline. So we probably missed that vote. Then we had a disabled person that took a minute to get out of his car, get on the get in get into his motorized wheelchair just to go up

the ramp and be told, I'm sorry, sir, they moved you from the courthouse, you gotta go to the church. And he told me, he's like, why can't y'all get it together? This is not a Republican problem or a Democrat problem. This is a people problem, and we need to fix it, and we need to fix it now. So I'm asking y'all to please put that on your

agenda to make sure that we can have voting centers throughout the county on election day to help the people because Denton is growing and it's growing fast. Thank y'all for your time.