FACT CHECK: How transparent were Tarrant County elections under Heider Garcia?
Elections administrator Heider Garcia resigned from his position citing a meeting with Tarrant County Judge Tim O’Hare and different ideas for running transparent elections as the reason for his departure.
In the letter to O’Hare dated April 16, Garcia wrote that his “formula to ‘administer a quality transparent election’ stands on respect and zero politics” and that compromising on those values wasn’t an option for him, the Star-Telegram reported.
Garcia has been with the county since 2018, a time when election skepticism was on the rise.
At the beginning of his time as elections administrator, he had his staff pull out the USB drives from voting machines and write down each machine’s serial number for the poll watchers who wanted to see every number, the Texas Tribune reported. Garcia continued the practice for each election year.
O’Hare campaigned for county judge on creating an election integrity officer position that would look into best elections practices and be a watchdog for voter fraud. In February he announced plans for an election fraud investigation unit without prior consultation with members of the Tarrant County Commissioners Court.
Concerns over election integrity were sparked nationally after former President Donald Trump and other Republicans claimed the 2020 election was stolen. Since then, election practices and voter fraud have become popular campaign talking points for Republicans like O’Hare.
What has Tarrant County done to prevent election fraud since 2020?
Efforts to increase public confidence in Tarrant County’s election have been ongoing since 2020.
In 2022, Tarrant County commissioners held a work session meeting to address election concerns voiced by county residents.
“What I hope everybody will learn from the meeting is that we have a very well-thought-out process that we believe is not only very transparent but also maintains, which is our top priority, maintains the integrity of the voting process,” former County Judge Glen Whitley said ahead of the April 26, 2022, meeting.
Later that year, Garcia invited members of the public out to participate in a mock election to test voting machines ahead of the midterms.
How much election fraud has Tarrant County seen since 2020?
The state of Texas announced an audit into Tarrant County’s 2020 election results within hours after Trump’s request.
Initial results from the audit released Dec. 31, 2021, found 12 instances in which someone might have voted in another state and one possible case of a vote being cast in the name of a deceased person. The results also found that Tarrant County had no discrepancies in its manual ballot recount and nearly 31,000 duplicate voter registrations.
Tarrant County found no discrepancies between its electronic and manual counts at seven election precincts, the Star-Telegram previously reported.
The county spent $136,000 — $120,000 in Help America Vote Act Funds and $16,000 in a county match — to improve security equipment in areas like transportation, surveillance and curbside voting. Tarrant County also increased security with its voter registration system.
Tarrant County canceled 13,955 registrations of deceased voters and four registrations for felony convictions. It canceled one registration for non-citizenship, according to the report.
The state’s final 2020 general election results audit report recorded Tarrant County as administering a quality, transparent election.
