How many times are we going to waste resources looking for Tarrant County vote fraud? | Opinion

The attorney general can’t find it. The secretary of state had no luck, either. Even people so sure elections are crooked that they spent their own time poring through Tarrant County ballots came away with nothing.

But here we go again: Tarrant County’s top elected officials announced Wednesday that they’re forming a special unit to investigate voter fraud. Prosecutors under District Attorney Phil Sorrells and investigators and deputies from the office of Sheriff Bill Waybourn will add the work to their current duties, the Republican leaders said.

Give County Judge Tim O’Hare and the others credit for following through on campaign promises, we suppose. O’Hare won the GOP nomination and general election last year pledging to create an election monitor position. This arrangement, he said, “is even better.” Sorrells and Waybourn have frequently vowed to fight fraud, too.

But it’s a political pursuit more than a legal or investigative priority. The judge, sheriff and DA aren’t the first Republicans to indulge their base voters’ irrational belief that every election is tainted and some outright stolen. And they won’t be the last.

O’Hare pledged that the new arrangement wouldn’t have an appreciable cost to taxpayers because current employees will merely take on the additional work. The reality is, though, that something else won’t get done as a result, especially if the bosses make this a priority.

The sheriff’s office and DA are already straining with work and struggling with worker recruitment, retention or both. Sorrells asked county commissioners for more than $840,000 to hire more staff — before he even took office. So, we’re surprised to learn there’s this kind of manpower available.

There’s a huge intangible cost as well. As we’ve mentioned before, this paranoia about the voting and counting process leads to abuse of election workers, who are already hard to recruit. It strains Tarrant County Elections Administrator Heider Garcia’s operation at a time when the state is constantly layering on tasks.

Election fraud does happen, and it’s a serious crime. It should be vigorously investigated and prosecuted. But we’re confident Sorrells can handle it in the regular course of business. Most cases evolve from mail ballots, and the state has significantly tightened those rules. And it’s not common in the larger elections that get so much attention; it’s generally done in close local elections.

This unit, though, isn’t about ensuring the integrity of races for school board or constable. It’s the ultimate product of a stubborn insistence by some that Donald Trump really won the presidency in 2020 and the even weirder conviction that he was cheated of votes in Texas, which he won by several points, and in Tarrant County, which he narrowly lost to Joe Biden.

O’Hare, Sorrells and Waybourn have not gone that far, particularly regarding Tarrant County. They insist that additional attention will, if little fraud is found, build confidence in election results.

That’s only true if these Republican leaders are willing to stand up for the county’s operation and tell the true believers that Tarrant runs smooth, fair, honest elections. Would those conspiracists even listen, though? They’ve rejected the findings of a state audit under Secretary of State John Scott, a Fort Worth Republican, which declared that Tarrant County runs a “quality, transparent election.”

Even indirect evidence from the office of one of their fellow travelers, Attorney General Ken Paxton, hasn’t deterred them. Paxton opened nearly 400 investigations between January 2020 and September 2022 and secured just five convictions, according to the investigative outlet ProPublica.

If Paxton, a Republican who has fully embraced the notion that Trump was robbed, can’t find evidence, it’s hard to imagine Tarrant County investigators will.

O’Hare, Waybourn and Sorrells have the conservative bona fides to lead against this damaging obsession with finding vast fraud. We’d like to think they will, but the creation of this special unit isn’t an encouraging sign.