The Tarrant County Election Integrity Task Force exists to investigate local election complaints. But when asked how many people have been punished as result of those investigations, the county doesn’t know the answer.
The county’s top Republican officials announced the formation of the task force in February, even though election crimes are rare in Tarrant County and around the country. Critics warned the task force could intimidate voters and election workers.
Tarrant County District Attorney Phil Sorrells and Sheriff Bill Waybourn, whose agencies run the task force together, denied any desire to influence election results. They just want to root out crime, they told reporters and officials.
The Tarrant County Sheriff’s Office has received 77 complaints since the task force was formed, along with 31 emails “regarding general concerns of voters,” DA’s Office spokesperson Anna Tinsley Williams wrote in an email. Of those complaints, the sheriff’s office has referred one case for prosecution, and the DA’s office is considering whether to pursue it, she said.
The task force also referred some cases back to local law enforcement agencies, which may have ticketed people, but the DA’s office doesn’t know how many, Tinsley Williams said.
“You would need to check with local law enforcement agencies to see what citations they have issued,” she said.
The Tarrant County Sheriff’s Office also could not say how many people had been cited over election complaints.
“Some tickets may have been written at the local level, but we wouldn’t be involved with any of those cases,” Sheriff’s Office spokesperson Robbie Hoy wrote in an email.
Tinsley Williams and Hoy denied interview requests for this story.
Complaints remain unknown
KERA submitted a public records request in May for copies of all complaints that had been submitted to the task force to date.
The DA’s Office, which handles the county’s public records requests, asked the state Attorney General’s Office for permission to keep those complaints secret.
The DA’s Office argued that because the complaints include the identifying information of people who reported crimes, and that “some resulted in citations,” they should not be released, according to a letter the DA’s Office sent to the state Attorney General.
The Sheriff’s Office provided the Fort Worth Report with some examples of complaints submitted during early voting back in May.
“Some of those issues included complaints about poll workers to questions about a candidate’s eligibility to participate in the election,” Hoy wrote in an email to the Fort Worth Report.
The makeup of the task force also remains unclear. Two prosecutors and one investigator work on election issues at the DA’s office, Tinsley Williams said. When asked who is assigned to the task force on the sheriff’s side, Hoy did not answer.
Around the country
Election enforcement units have been created in Florida, Georgia and Arizona. That is a problem for voting rights experts like Atiba Ellis, a law professor at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio.
"I honestly think it is tantamount to voter intimidation," Ellis said. “Of course, the irony is that the state is being the voter intimidator. And this would seem to be a wild departure from what the role of the state in elections ought to be."
To Ellis, governments should make it easier for people to vote, and not spend their time chasing the “specter” of voter fraud, he said.
"The rhetoric of voter fraud creates an atmosphere where people fear that their elections will be attacked by some mythical boogeyman who doesn't actually exist," Ellis said.
News reports have found that election enforcement efforts can have a chilling effect on lawful voters. When Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis announced the arrests of 20 people for alleged voter fraud, those arrests scared people away from voting even in neighboring Alabama, The Marshall Project reported.
Tarrant County Judge Tim O’Hare, a proponent of the Election Integrity Task Force who helped announce its formation in February, did not respond to a request for an interview for this story.
At that February press conference, O'Hare pushed back against the idea that the task force could scare voters and election workers.
"Who would we be intimidating? People that are cheating? People that are committing crimes?” O’Hare said. “Well, we want to intimidate them, and we want to find them, prosecute them to the fullest extent of the law, and let them know that that's not going to happen here in Tarrant County.”
Got a tip? Email Miranda Suarez at msuarez@kera.org. You can follow Miranda on X @MirandaRSuarez.
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