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Around 40 volunteers with a conservative group questioning the integrity of Texas election results, as well as that of some election administrators, have begun a review of thousands of ballots from Tarrant County’s March 2020 GOP primary election.
Volunteers with the group, the Tarrant County Citizens for Election Integrity, told Votebeat Friday that their goal is to ensure the results of the election were accurate. Members are specifically counting votes in the Republican primary for U.S. Senate, in which Sen. John Cornyn won with 73% of the vote in Tarrant Countyover his closest challenger, who won 13% of the county’s votes. The group also alleges a range of fraudulent activities related to the 2020 November general election in Tarrant and other counties across the state but has offered no evidence to support the allegations.
“We’re not here as Republicans or Democrats,” said John Raymond, a volunteer with the group. “A lot of people don’t have faith in our elections, so we’re just here counting, making sure that what the secretary of state’s numbers say are right.”
“There’s nothing wrong with the election,” Tarrant County Election Administrator Heider Garcia said. “But the ballots are now public and it’s their right [to inspect them], and we will do everything that we have to do to make sure they can exercise their right to inspect public records.”
The group’s tallying of ballots — spurred by unsupported claims of voter fraud and of flawed election audits in Texas — began more than a week ago. In contrast with high-profile reviews of ballots elsewhere in the country, such as the 2021 review ordered in Maricopa County by the Arizona state Senate, the Tarrant ballot inspection has until now attracted almost no notice. In fact, even the secretary of state’s office said it had previously been unaware of Citizens for Election Integrity’s ballot review. But it’s unlikely to be the last such effort.
Volunteers have arrived daily at the Tarrant County election administration office’s ballot board room, which is where absentee ballots are typically counted.
The group members inspecting ballots work in shifts — a morning shift from 8:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. and afternoon from 12:30 to 4:30 p.m. — as they progress through more than 300 boxes collectively holding more than 300,000 ballots. On Friday morning, about 15 volunteers sat in pairs at tables and flipped through all the ballots, one box at a time. Some volunteers compared the information on the ballots to data on their laptops. Some members of the group were also seen holding up the ballots up against the light. It’s unclear what they were looking for.
The tallying of the ballots will likely continue in this way for the next two weeks, Raymond said.
Charles Wedemeyer, another volunteer for the group, said he believes there’s a lot of unnecessary secrecy in the county’s elections.
“The act of voting is secret, but that’s it. The rest of it is public,” Wedemeyer said. “The citizens own this deal. But we had to wait 22 months to do this. It’s important for the records to be secure and protected but it’s not secret. The ballots should be available within five days.”
