Tarrant Republicans, stop obsessing over fraud and focus on getting more votes | Opinion
Wednesday’s announcement that Tarrant County Judge Tim O’Hare, District Attorney Phil Sorrells and Sheriff Bill Waybourn are starting an election integrity unit should not come as a surprise to anyone following local politics.
Cracking down on voter fraud (real and imagined) was a particular campaign promise of O’Hare’s and a fairly transparent effort to assuage a certain part of his voter base.
Politicians of every rank and stripe live and die on fulfilling their campaign promises. O’Hare is just doing what he said he would.
What is perplexing about the announcement, however, is why conservative politicians such as O’Hare, Sorrells and Waybourn indulge voters who remain so focused on fighting election fraud in their quest for electoral victory when there is bountiful evidence that shifting the focus would bear more fruit and win more elections for their party.
The 2022 midterms were a case in point.
In the months after the election’s lackluster results, national Republican Party leaders had somewhat of an epiphany about their failed election strategy. While this epiphany didn’t necessarily apply to Tarrant, the lessons for the party are universal.
Laser-focused on election integrity, courtesy of former President Donald Trump’s relentless efforts to “stop the steal,” they trained their sights on tightening up voting requirements and stamping out fraud. They could have been pursuing early and absentee voting, and ever-more-important big picture efforts such as increasing voter turnout.
I’ll be the first to admit that I have never been a fan of early voting. So many things can change, and so many things can come to light about a candidate in the days leading up to an election.
In the last election cycle, Sorrells secured a last-minute endorsement from the former president before the GOP primary. And in a prior City Council election, candidate Eric Richerson was restored to the ballot after wrongly being removed just before early voting began.
Events like these can affect a potential vote or even discount a vote and may justify delayed ballot casting, especially for an undecided voter.
But most party loyalists won’t be affirmed or dissuaded by any kind of pre-election surprise.
If the state allows its voters to cast their ballot weeks before Election Day (Texans get almost an additional two weeks to vote) they might as well take their votes to the bank as early as possible and should be encouraged to do so.
That’s what the Democrats have been doing for years and with much success.
The same is true for absentee and mail-in voting, another election activity frowned upon by Republicans who claim it is ripe for fraud.
As one GOP official put it plainly to Politico in the aftermath of the midterm elections, “We have 99 problems and mail-in voting is one.”
Indeed, the biggest problem the GOP seems to have is its devotion to the myth that higher turnout ensures Democratic victory.
There is ample evidence to dispel the idea that there is any correlation between voter turnout and partisan outcomes. I won’t bore you.
More concerning is what commentator and election expert Chris Stirewalt explains, that by focusing solely on election integrity as some outsize evil (evidence to the contrary), “Republicans may be shutting out their own potential supporters among low-propensity voters who might support their candidates.”
In other words, the GOP obsession with fighting fraud may have a deterrent effect on low-propensity voters who might otherwise support Republicans but are either fearful or simply turned off by the party’s tactics.
To be clear, fraud does occur — but not to the scale that the need for a voter integrity unit would suggest.
And while small margins matter in low turnout elections (think of the recent Fort Worth ISD bond that barely scraped by) we know that local prosecutors have addressed past cases of fraud. We have every reason to believe Sorrells would be just as vigorous in doing so.
In these leaders’ defense, Tarrant County holds a special place in the minds of conservatives; it is the last red big-city county in the state and one of the few in the nation.
It makes sense, to a certain degree, that Republican leaders would want to do everything that is legally and ethically within their power to preserve this most precious political gem.
And were the tables turned, Democratic officials would be doing the same.
But it’s certainly worth asking, at what point do such efforts become not only futile, but self-destructive?
It might be time for the Tarrant GOP to start having that conversation.
This story was originally published February 13, 2023 at 5:31 AM.
