Police investigating ‘staged’ ballot harvesting video from Tarrant County judge race
Fort Worth police are investigating a video shared during the 2022 race for Tarrant County Judge, in which a man appears to admit to committing voter fraud. The video was staged, according to the Democrat in that contest Deborah Peoples.
In September 2022, former Tarrant County Republican Chairman Rick Barnes shared a video in which a man experiencing homelessness told a Fort Worth police officer that he had been paid by Peoples to harvest ballots for the 2020 election.
In the video, the man told the officer that he was fooling people into signing filled-out ballots by making them think they were just confirming information. The video was posted on Gateway Pundit, a website with more false than true claims, according to Poynter’s Politifact.
Peoples was county Democratic chair in 2020. In 2022, she ran against County Judge Tim O’Hare for that seat. Barnes is running for county tax assessor-collector.
Speaking at a press conference outside Fort Worth’s New City Hall on Monday, Oct. 21, Peoples said she had submitted to the police department’s Internal Affairs Office a video of the man saying he had actually been paid by the police officer who recorded the body cam footage to say what he said in 2020.
The video proves that those who shared the video participated in “election interference,” “voter suppression” and “potential collusion” between the police and Republican election officials, Peoples said.
“What I am most sad about is the coercion of an unhoused individual, a very vulnerable person in society,” she said.
Peoples declined to show the video, citing the investigation by the police department’s Internal Affairs Office.
A police department spokesperson confirmed that Internal Affairs had opened an investigation into the video, but could not confirm any specifics about it.
O’Hare and Barnes did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
The man, identified by Peoples as Charles Jackson, went off the radar for a couple years after the video surfaced in 2022, Peoples said. Her campaign had unsuccessfully attempted to find him after its release. Still homeless, he recently contacted her longtime friend Stuart Clegg seeking work, and the two ended up talking about the 2020 video.
“When he called, I said, ‘Hey, what was the deal with this? Why were you doing this?’ And then he said he didn’t want to [say what he said in 2020], he was sorry about it, but the police officer made him,” Clegg said. “‘Made him dance,’ is what he said.”
Also present at the conference were lawyers Steve Maxwell and Art Brender, who said they were expelled from a press conference at the Republican Party headquarters in 2022 at which Barnes admitted the video was unsubstantiated, but shared it anyway.
The video shared by Barnes was a “complete violation of our Constitution,” Brender said. “We have free and fair elections, and they’ve tried to do everything they can to get people … to not believe in the system.”
The video “resulted in multiple death threats being directed at me and my campaign workers,” Peoples said.
“It was scary for her,” Clegg said. “People were calling saying they were going to come kill her and her family and they and all sorts of stuff.”
The allegation that Jackson was harvesting votes for Democrats in Tarrant County mirrors what happened at the national level with former President Donald Trump’s unfounded claims that the 2020 election was stolen from him, Peoples said.
“When we put lies out and we campaign on lies, we are no better than what is happening nationally with their Republican candidate,” she said.
Brender likened the release of the video in 2022 to the debunked film “2,000 Mules,” which helped spread the false claim of voter fraud in the 2020 election.
Embraced by Trump, the film has been debunked by law enforcement and multiple media outlets, and the media company that produced it has even issued an apology to a Georgia voter featured in it who sued the company after he received death threats as a result of its claims.
“It was all fake,” Brender said.
The Tarrant County Sheriff’s Office declined to investigate the video Barnes shared in 2022, citing Sheriff Bill Waybourn’s endorsement of O’Hare.
The office formed the Election Integrity Unit in conjunction with the District Attorney’s Office in February 2023.
“The more it comes under scrutiny, the less it’s an election integrity unit, and the more it’s an election propaganda unit that should concern every single one of us,” Peoples said.
The Sheriff’s Office declined to comment, saying questions should be referred to the Fort Worth Police Department.
District Attorney Phil Sorrells questioned why the matter was submitted to the police department for review.
“Why would someone call a press conference instead of reporting the claim to the proper authority?” he said in a statement. “The Election Integrity Unit deals with facts, not supposition. We would be happy to investigate her claim if she wants to actually file a report.”
Peoples said she chose to report the matter to the police because it involved one of the department’s officers.
“I thought it best to start where I believe the unethical and potentially illegal activity took place,” she said.
Jason Smith, a lawyer Peoples consulted on the matter, said she was well within her rights to hold a press conference, and that the police Internal Affairs Office is the appropriate venue for her complaint.
“It would concern me if the Tarrant DA did not know that the internal affairs division is charged with investigating complaints of wrong doing against police officers,” he said.
Smith has represented multiple Fort Worth police officers and is well informed on the complaint filing process.
Peoples lost bids for Fort Worth mayor in 2019 and 2021, losing runoffs to Betsy Price and Mattie Parker.
“When you put lies out in the universe, but you offer no proof, then that’s all it is — it’s a lie aimed at frightening people and subverting the election,” Peoples said. She chose to make her announcement on the first day of early voting “for people to understand that lies are being told, that people are trying to keep them away from the ballot box.”
She urged Tarrant County voters “to continue to believe in the system, that the system is good, and … to go and vote.”
This story was originally published October 21, 2024 at 1:56 PM.
