On 22 November 2020, Heider Garcia, the elections administrator for Tarrant county, Texas, was awake in his living room until around 3am, unable to sleep over fears that a stranger might show up at his house, he recalled.
An account had posted his family’s home address on Twitter during weeks of false conspiracy theories and death threats about his role in the 2020 election. Donald Trump’s supporters refused to believe that Tarrant county, a major, diverse county that encompasses the cities of Fort Worth and Arlington, had broken its Republican voting patterns for Joe Biden.
Garcia spent Thanksgiving break installing security cameras – but he didn’t quit his job or stay quiet in the wake of the threats. Rather, as he detailed in his 2022 Senate testimony, his office devoted the next 18 months to championing transparency, from releasing public records to speaking with skeptics.
Garcia “has an open door, he would answer the phone, and he would walk people through the process”, said Paul Gronke, a political science professor at Reed College and the director of the elections and voting information center. “A lot of election officials are not willing to be as open and transparent as that.”
But after weathering attacks from the outside, Garcia was driven to quit in April by events closer to home. His resignation letter alluded to differences with a Republican county judge who has catered to election deniers. The judge helped set up a taskforce focused on investigating and prosecuting election crimes, which critics view as doing little but feeding the anxious climate around elections.
Across the US, conservative officials who entertain Trump’s falsehoods about the 2020 election have raised alarms about voter fraud, despite a dearth of evidence that it’s a problem. Some election skeptics have sought positions that influence how local elections are run, persisting even as their attempts to win and interfere with elections have mostly failed.
Tarrant county exemplifies the fallout of this movement in one of the most populous counties in the country. Democrats have asked the US justice department to intervene to protect voters of color in Tarrant county from intimidation. The county judge has dismissed their concerns as “partisan” and “pathetic”.
After Garcia resigned, the hiring process to replace him included a candidate who, as an election “integrity” activist, went to a voter’s home to deliver a letter questioning their choice of polling place.
Garcia declined to comment on his resignation. But he said that politicians who focus on election integrity like to play the hero, and it will continue as long as they are rewarded for it. “There is absolutely no evidence of any wrongdoing anywhere,” he said. “Yet it seems that there’s still a quest to find a villain.”
Meanwhile, the taskforce, which handles complaints through the sheriff’s criminal investigations division and is part of the public integrity unit in the DA’s office, reports no filed cases. But Texas Democrats see it as part of a bigger problem.
State representative Chris Turner, a Democrat in Tarrant county, called it “one more element in a years-long Republican strategy at the national, state and local level to undermine the confidence in our elections, to provide a pretext for disputing the results of elections when they don’t go your way”.
A new taskforce
Tarrant county has over 2 million people, about half of whom are Black, Latino or Hispanic, according to the 2022 census estimate. Republicans have maintained their long hold on the county, even as voters slimly rejected Trump in 2020. Democrats paint last year’s election of county judge Tim O’Hare, a former Tarrant county Republican party chair, as an ideological shift to the right.
O’Hare campaigned on finding voter fraud, though an audit of the 2020 election by Republican state leadership determined that the county’s election was “quality” and “transparent”. He has fanned doubts about voting methods and echoed allegations that his opponent, the county’s former Democratic party chair, led “a sophisticated vote-harvesting operation”. She called the allegations “libelous”, according to the Fort Worth Star-Telegram.
O’Hare did not respond to requests for comment.
In February, after the election, O’Hare, the county sheriff, Bill Waybourn, and the district attorney, Phil Sorrells, also elected Republicans, announced the taskforce focused on election fraud.
The county already had a way to submit election complaints through the secretary of state’s office, but Republicans said the taskforce would give people a central place to file complaints and bolster confidence in elections.
The taskforce began printing a non-emergency number for the sheriff’s office on voting receipts, as recently as the June runoff election.
The Tarrant county commissioner, Alisa Simmons, a Democrat, said she fielded a few calls about the phone number. “People were confused by it and uncomfortable with it,” she said.
The taskforce is “a publicity stunt”, said Kat Cano, who previously served as the alternate judge of the ballot board and central counting station, and the Democratic member of the public testing board, which together conduct elections oversight.
“They wanted to look like they were doing something about elections integrity,” she said.
Julie McCarty, CEO of the True Texas Project, which boosted false claims about the 2020 election and has ties to O’Hare, questioned why Democrats were so concerned about the unit. “I can only assume it’s because it thwarts their plans to cheat,” she wrote in an email.
As of the 6 May election, the sheriff’s office had received seven complaints in the days before the election, ranging from rude poll workers to a candidate being too close to a polling station entrance; all were closed with no criminal activity found, a spokesperson wrote in an email. The DA’s office has two incidents under investigation and no cases filed, according to their spokesperson.
“The taskforce is working as designed,” Sorrells wrote in an email. “Legal and fair elections encourage more people to vote because they know their vote counts.”
In other states, Republicans have announced election integrity units in a climate where Trump has sought to undermine elections for his own benefit, despite the lack of evidence that voter fraud is a serious issue. Many have little to show for their efforts, or, as is the case in Florida, are prosecuting people with felony convictions who mistakenly thought they could vote.
Criminalizing and investigating voting has long been used as a tool of intimidation, voting rights experts say, especially of voters of color. Crystal Mason, a Black woman, was sentenced in Tarrant county to five years in prison for mistakenly casting a provisional ballot in 2016 when she was on federal supervised release.
The taskforce’s orbit is also broader than voters. Democrats say the 2021 election restrictions in Texas already made it more difficult to recruit election workers, who are nervous about making a mistake, and the taskforce heightens that concern.
In May, someone posted an anonymous YouTube video of Cano from 2022, doing what she called “normal work” with the ballot board, but insinuating that she was manipulating ballots. (In the video, a sheriff’s deputy appears to almost always be in the room.)
With the atmosphere around the taskforce, she said, “any kind of accusation then becomes a sort of exercise in paranoia”.
She didn’t know if she was actually reported. But the fear, along with concerns about public perception, contributed to her decision to resign at the time, she said. “I didn’t know whether they were going to try to make an example of me the way they made an example out of Crystal Mason.”
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A resignation
Garcia submitted his letter of resignation in April, just under three weeks after he testified in Austin on behalf of the Texas Association of Elections Administrators. They opposed a bill to eliminate countywide polling locations, which has been a focus for election fraud activists.
“Judge O’Hare, my formula to ‘administer a quality transparent election’ stands on respect and zero politics; compromising on those values is not an option for me,” he wrote. “You made it clear in our last meeting that your formula is different, thus, my decision to leave.”
O’Hare, in response, said that supporting the creation of the taskforce was “all about quality, transparent elections”.
Garcia, who had held his position since 2018, had over a decade of experience working for Smartmatic, a voting technology company in the private sector, a position that put him in direct opposition to election denialism.
John Scott, who served as the interim Republican Texas attorney general, told Votebeat that Garcia was the “prototype” for an election administrator.
“We defended Garcia on a regular basis to [those] who came to us so upset,” said McCarty.
Elections administrators are the “stewards of democracy”, who work on everything from making sure citizens have access to the ballot to serving as the first point of contact for voter registration, said Gronke.
“It is very disturbing when Garcia, who has shown such openness to talking with everyone, felt that his position was simply just not tenable any more,” he added.
A poll of local election officials published by the Brennan Center for Justice in April found that 30% had been “abused, harassed or threatened” because of their roles. And it’s not just voters they are concerned about: more than half were somewhat or very worried about political leaders interfering with how they do their jobs in the future. As recently as June, an elections director in Arizona resigned, citing attacks from Republican officials.
In Tarrant county, Democratic officials highlighted both Garcia’s resignation and the taskforce in their May letter requesting an investigation from the justice department. “O’Hare has consistently challenged Mr Garcia’s efforts to uphold the integrity and racial fairness of our elections,” they wrote.
O’Hare responded to their letter in a statement that did not mention Garcia. “Let me be clear: this ‘letter’ is a political document. It alleges no actual wrongdoing or facts,” he wrote.
‘Strange times’
O’Hare was part of the commission picking Garcia’s replacement. One candidate who advanced was Karen Wiseman, a Republican poll watcher who hand-delivered a letter to a lawful voter questioning their address during the fall 2022 election according to the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, and challenged a contract renewal for instrumental elections software that was needed for the June runoff.
Garcia told Votebeat in a text message that he wasn’t surprised to see a partisan candidate in the mix. There is “an expectation that the [elections administrator] will play politics”, he said. (Wiseman did not respond to requests for comment.)
The vast majority of elections officials treat their jobs as non-partisan, according to elections experts. Some people, however, view “these positions not [as] umpires, but as players”, said Lawrence Norden, senior director of the Brennan Center’s elections and government program.
“They have some role to play, not in just following the rules, but in helping to determine the outcome.”
It’s still a “tiny minority”, he emphasized. But some of the problems he has seen range from giving improper access to election equipment to refusing to certify elections.
Ultimately, in Tarrant county, another candidate, Clinton Ludwig, who was chosen for the job, definitively said “no” when asked if he had any reason to doubt the results of the 2020 election, according to Allison Campolo, the departing Tarrant county Democratic party chair who was on the hiring commission.
O’Hare picked people who were “to me, very highly partisan”, she said, though she ultimately felt the hiring process was fair.
“I don’t think he’s a partisan individual,” she said of Ludwig.
Simmons, the Democratic commissioner, expressed concern that Ludwig has no experience in elections administration. “Everybody should be concerned about that,” she said.
Ludwig declined to comment in an email, noting he hadn’t started his job yet. But in a statement, he pointed to his 20 years of experience in the Marine Corps. “You can trust that I will further Tarrant county’s legacy of conducting free and fair elections,” he wrote.
Campolo and O’Hare both praised Ludwig.
But the taskforce – and the environment around it – only adds to “how difficult it is to do an election administrator’s job”, Campolo said.
“We’re in strange times,” Garcia said.
Sam Levine contributed reporting
Source: US Politics - theguardian.com
