Republican leader claims 5,547 duplicate voters in Tarrant County. We checked his claim
Update: After publication of this article, Tarrant GOP Chair Bo French said on social media that Elections Administrator Clint Ludwig “confirmed there are in fact thousands of duplicate registrations where one is in Tarrant County and the other is in another county.”
The data French referred to in that post was not the same data he presented last month, Ludwig said in an emailed statement.
“Tarrant County Elections was presented a new list than the one previously provided by the District Attorney’s Office,” he said. “The list appeared to show registered voters in Tarrant County that were also registered in another Texas county. We are aware that this list was referred to the Texas Secretary of State, the chief election officer for the State of Texas.”
He did not specify how many duplicate voters were identified, and did not respond to a request for follow-up questions.
As party chair, French sits on both the county Elections Commission and Elections Board. He did not respond to a request for comment on Ludwig’s statement.
Voter fraud claims popped up in August at DPS drivers license offices in Fort Worth and Weatherford, where the wife of a friend of Fox News personality Maria Bartiromo saw a “massive line of immigrants” waiting to register to vote.
A DPS spokesperson told the Star-Telegram none of it was true and that the false story was “kind of racist.”
Earlier this month, former CBS News correspondent Lara Logan cited no sources when she said on social media that Texas is in “real danger” from Tarrant County sending out 7 million mail-in ballots. After the Star-Telegram debunked the claim, Logan issued a “correction,” claiming that she’d meant to say it was in Harris County.
And last week, Tarrant Republican Party Chair Bo French issued a “Massive update” to a story he’d shared on social media in September, claiming that attorneys in the Tarrant County District Attorney’s Office had found a list of alleged duplicate voters to be “credible.”
In the post, French claimed that the county attorneys showed the list to the FBI and the Tarrant County Elections Administration “who both said it was misinformation. (not shocked) They said our data was not accurate and should not be trusted. (also not shocked).”
The DA’s Office said it reports duplicate registrations to the Texas Secretary of State, but that it had not received a voter list from French.
“We received and reviewed information about duplicate voter registrations,” the DA’s Office said. “Individuals registered in multiple counties have been and will be referred to the Texas Secretary of State, the chief election officer for the State of Texas.”
French said that the Secretary of State had committed to “to clean it up ASAP.”
He told the Star-Telegram an investigator in the DA’s Office told him they presented the data to the FBI and county elections officials. “Neither thought there was an issue,” he said.
The Star-Telegram contacted the FBI regarding French’s statement. A spokesperson said there was no record of a complaint made with the bureau about duplicate voter registrations in Tarrant County.
Elections Administrator Clint Ludwig told the Star-Telegram he reviewed a list from the Election Integrity Task Force, and it was not made up of new duplicate voter registrations, but rather existing ones that had been changed. The two most common changes are of names and addresses, he said.
“All individuals which were researched on the presented list were found to have only one voter registration in Tarrant County,” he said.
Still, his office notified the Elections Division at the Texas Secretary of State, which is tasked with notifying counties of duplicate registrations, to inform them of the concern.
A spokesperson for the Secretary of State said that the office does not have the power to remove voters from rolls, only to notify counties of issues like duplicate registrations.
“Our office is working to facilitate a meeting with county officials and the district attorney’s office,” the spokesperson said. “It is the responsibility of the county to review and maintain voter rolls though our office can alert counties to voter registrations that need additional investigation and can advise on the process.”
Thousands of duplicate voters in Tarrant County?
French said his claim that the DA’s office found his data credible supported a theory he published in September outlining “How Democrats are Planning to Cheat in the Election.”
The post in which he outlined his theory had over 291,000 views as of Wednesday, Oct. 9.
Extended voting hours, fraudulent ballots counted and illegal mail-in ballots were among the examples French gave to back up his claim of voter fraud in the 2020 election.
“The steal could have been stopped, but cowardly judges across the nation refused to even hear the cases,” he said.
But judges did hear those cases.
Former President Donald Trump and his allies filed 62 lawsuits alleging voter fraud between the general election on Nov. 3, 2020, and Jan. 6, 2021, the day a group of his supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol building. They lost 61 of those cases, according to a Democratic election lawyer consulted by USA Today.
The one case the campaign won was in Pennsylvania, where a judge ruled that voters who had failed to provide proper identification were not allowed to go back and cure, or correct, their ballots three days after the election. President Joe Biden won the state by more than 81,000 votes.
French compared the 5,547 duplicate voters he and his supporters found to the “razor-thin” margins of error the county has seen in recent elections. He noted the 4,308 votes Democrat Beto O’Rourke had over incumbent Republican Ted Cruz in the 2018 Senate race, and the 1,826 votes that gave Biden the win in Tarrant County in 2020.
His theory states that Tarrant County contracted with a printing company in New York — “Yes, New York—a blue state,” he wrote — to print and mail absentee ballots. Any ballots for voters with incorrect addresses would get stuck in a post office, and valid ballots would be left sitting in the printing company’s facilities back in New York, French said.
His theory also involves the assumption that all of the alleged duplicate voters on the list to which he referred were created by a single entity, “which is plausible given radical Leftist groups like Battleground Texas are doing everything they can to ‘turn Texas blue’,” he wrote.
But the company printing Tarrant County’s ballots is in Minnesota, not New York, according to Ludwig. And any ballots with address issues would not sit in a post office, but would be returned to the county elections office. County election officials would then contact voters to correct the ballot, he said.
“The U.S. Postal Service has special handling instructions for expediting the delivery of ballots … that would keep them from being held at a postal facility,” Ludwig said.
French said he got the New York printer from a list of approved vendors, but said that the state in which it is located ultimately does not matter.
“If they are using one in Minnesota, I would argue it’s no different. Why are we outsourcing critical election services to a blue state or any other state, for that matter?” he said in an email.
He also rejected Ludwig’s explanation of how the postal service handles election mail.
“There are instances where bulk mail, if the address is broken never leave the mail center,” he said. “This happens when the barcode is rejected. Many of the second registrations (the duplicates) have a broken address (undeliverable).”
‘The point is impact’
Whether a claim of voter fraud is based more closely on reality, such as in French’s alleged duplicate voters, or more outlandish claims like Logan’s 7 million mail-in ballots, the point of spreading one is more about initial influence than holding up to scrutiny, according to Calvin Jillson, a political science professor at Southern Methodist University.
“Reality isn’t quite so much the point, the point is impact,” he said. “Overstating, even overstating dramatically — and so dramatically that it couldn’t possibly be true — might actually increase its impact.”
Jillson said claims end up becoming self-fulfilling prophecies. If the candidate favored by those who make claims of voter fraud loses, the election was rigged. If they win, then the supporters effectively rooted out fraud and ensured the integrity of the election, he said.
But peddlers of false voter fraud theories beware, for the strategy could backfire, said Mark Jones, a political science professor at Rice University.
The idea that their elections aren’t secure could influence some voters to not show up on election day, he said, pointing to the 2020 Senate runoffs in Georgia. Trump’s claims of voter fraud in that state caused Republican turnout to decline and cost the party those two Senate seats and its majority in that chamber.
“One potential effect is that it mobilizes [supporters] to turn out to make sure that they counter [voter fraud], but then another response is that they can begin to believe that it’s futile and therefore they don’t participate,” he said.
This story was originally published October 9, 2024 at 1:16 PM.
