These voter fraud claims circulated in Tarrant County. What happened to them?
In the months leading up to Nov. 5, the theories abounded: from “massive” lines of noncitizens registering to vote to Tarrant County sending out millions of unlawful mail-in ballots.
But since Election Day, the promoters of these theories have not had much to say about them.
“They’re still partying,” said Calvin Jillson, a political science professor at Southern Methodist University.
“The preparation by the Republican National Campaign and its supporters to lay the groundwork to challenge an election that they lost is no longer necessary, so I don’t expect them to pay any more attention to it,” he said. “Most of the claims had no evidence behind them, and so I think that we’re going to hear less about those claims.”
This trend has been seen nationwide, according to Rick Hasen, a UCLA law professor and political scientist.
“The claims of fraud coming from the right were premised on the idea that only Democrats cheat, and that enough Republican voting would make the election ‘too big to rig,’” he said in an email exchange. “The abandonment now shows this was more of a political talking point than a genuine concern.”
The Tarrant County District Attorney’s Office said its Election Integrity Task Force has “reviewed about 30 inquiries” into possible voter fraud in the election and is still investigating a few of them, a spokesperson said.
“So far, none have resulted in criminal charges,” the spokesperson said.
An election win ‘too big to rig’
“Too big to rig” was how Tony Carpenter described Donald Trump’s victory.
Carpenter is the Tarrant County resident who said that a voting machine changed his vote for president from Trump to Kamala Harris on the first day of early voting.
“He won by a tremendous amount,” Carpenter said. “Still doesn’t mean they didn’t try to, you know — maybe it wasn’t an attempt to rig the election, but it was a malfunction of some sort for sure.”
After a video of Carpenter describing his experience outside the White Settlement Library went viral, a member of the Trump campaign contacted him and asked him to sign an affidavit regarding the alleged vote switch, but he has not heard from them since.
The Trump campaign did not respond to a request for comment.
An acquaintance told him a story of the same thing happening to another voter at the same location, but that the person threw her ballot away and left, rather than spoiling the ballot, fixing her vote, and having it counted, as he did.
Hart InterCivic, the company that manufactures Tarrant County’s voting machines, said its machines “cannot and do not” change votes.
Carpenter continues to firmly believe that there was “something wrong” with Tarrant County’s elections. When asked if he thought that his and other theories would have been promoted further had Trump lost the election, he said, “Probably.”
Other Tarrant County voter fraud theories posited before Election Day
The Star-Telegram followed up with others who shared voter fraud theories to ask if they planned to continue to call for investigations into them.
Fox News host Maria Bartiromo, who said on social media in August that “massive” lines of immigrants were seen registering to vote outside driver’s license offices in Weatherford and Fort Worth, did not respond to a request for comment.
Although it was quickly debunked, her post prompted the Texas Attorney General’s Office to launch an investigation into noncitizens registering to vote in the state. That office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Likewise, Lara Logan, a former CBS reporter who posted in early October that Tarrant County was sending out 7 million mail-in ballots, did not respond to a request for comment.
After her theory was debunked on the day it was posted, Logan issued a “correction” that stated she had been wrong about the county and that those millions of absentee ballots were being sent out in Harris County. They weren’t.
Also in October, Tarrant GOP Chair Bo French posted that there were over 5,500 duplicate voters in the county, people registered in both Tarrant and another Texas county. As party chair, French sits on both the county Elections Commission and Elections Board.
After the Star-Telegram checked the theory, French posted on X that Tarrant County Elections Administrator Clint Ludwig had confirmed the duplicate registrations. Ludwig responded then by saying that the list to which French referred in that post was different from the list that was initially presented to his office.
“It wasn’t a theory,” French said in an email. “Clint Ludwig confirmed they were duplicates as they were registered in 2 counties. Talk to Clint.”
Ludwig was not available for comment.
The future of voter fraud claims
The voter fraud theories of 2024 may have fizzled out after Election Day, but voters can expect to hear more of them the next time they participate in the democratic process, according to both Jillson and Hasen.
“I would not count out future claims like this when it is politically expedient,” Hasen said.
What started as accusations have now become the party line to toe, Jillson said.
“The Republican claim that was initially Donald Trump and only a few others — that the 2020 election was stolen — then became Republican Party orthodoxy,” he said. “And so I think it remains Republican Party orthodoxy that elections are fraught with corruption, and only when Republicans win so big as to overcome the corruption do they win the election. If they lose, the assumption is that the corruption was just too extensive to be overcome by their majority.”
Some Democratic supporters have cried voter fraud following Trump’s election, Hasen said, but the theories remain fringe for now.
“We’ve seen a bit of conspiracism on the left now with the election results favoring Trump,” he said. “But so far, fortunately, the claims seem to be more at the edge of the Democratic Party and not from its leadership.”
This story was originally published November 15, 2024 at 10:07 AM.
