Why didn’t Tarrant County Republicans want joint primary elections? Email gives an idea

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The Tarrant County Republican Party opposed holding joint primaries out of a belief that the Democratic Party cheats in elections, according to an email from county GOP Chairman Bo French that was shared with the Star-Telegram.

“Given that democrats routinely cheat in elections, the Republicans in Tarrant County do not trust democrats to touch any part of our election,” French said in an email reply to Democratic Election Judge Bob Dawson. “For that reason, we will only conduct our election separately from the democrats. I hope this makes it crystal clear.”

An audit of the four largest counties in Texas following the 2020 election found few problems in Tarrant County. An initial report released in December 2021 stated that there were 12 instances of people possibly voting out of state and one case in which a vote may have been cast by a dead person.

“Tarrant County administers a quality, transparent election,” said the final report of the audit published in December 2022.

Dawson emailed French in December to ask him why the county does not hold joint primary elections, in which voters from either party can use any machine available to cast their ballots. Instead, Tarrant County held split primaries, forcing Republicans and Democrats to use separate voting machines.

The Tarrant County Republican Party opposed the idea of joint primaries in November when news broke that a Texas law inadvertently could require twice as many election day polling locations. The Tarrant GOP told Gov. Greg Abbott that it did not have the equipment, supplies or personnel for that many locations. A joint primary was out of the question, French said at the time.

“We don’t want people that are not on our team involved in our elections,” French told the Star-Telegram. “These are our elections. We’re going to handle them ourselves.”

French did not respond to a request for comment.

In a response that he wrote but did not send, Dawson said that French appeared to misunderstand how secure elections in Tarrant County are.

“We’re seeing in so many places where Republicans want to take control, they do it just for more their own benefit than what democracy is all about,” Dawson said in a phone interview.

Dawson worked the polling station at Brookside Center in Hurst. His Republican counterpart was Election Judge Bob Harper.

While Harper and his team were able to get Republican voters checked in with relative ease, some people had to wait as long as 30 to 40 minutes for a voting machine to open up. The problem was worsened by the fact that he had only 10 machines for Republicans most of the day after one broke down.

The wait never got long enough to force the line outside the convention center, but voters did grow irritated as they waited while machines on the other side of the room sat unused.

“They would look at me and say why can’t I use one of those machines over there on the other wall that hasn’t been used all day,” Harper said in a phone interview. He had to explain to them the split primary system.

Both Harper and Dawson said they could not understand why Election Day voting was split, unlike the manner in which early voting was conducted.

“We both just kind of were dismayed as to why we had to do it that way, especially since the early voting had all been done jointly,” Harper said.

Harper stressed that he could only speak for himself and not for anyone else in his party, but he said that he fully trusted his Democratic counterparts to run elections freely and fairly.

“I’ve never seen any poll worker or judge trying to do anything underhanded at the election site, and even if they wanted to it would be very, very difficult,” he said. “We were working together all day through mutual problems and stuff. Those people are there to ensure that people are allowed to vote just like I am.”

Harper is not the only Republican election judge to express this frustration to the Star-Telegram.

Todd Hedgcoth’s polling place at the public library in Bedford was “swamped all day,” with lines that occasionally snaked out the door and around the building. Although no voter reported waiting longer than an hour, it was still needlessly frustrating, he said.

“That wait time could have been virtually eliminated had the Republicans been able to use the 11 ballot marking devices dedicated to the Democrats which went largely unused for most of the day,” Hedgcoth said in an email.

Hedgcoth also attributed the long lines to the fact that Tarrant County did not publicize wait times, even though election workers were reporting wait times to county election administrators.

The presence of what he called “useless ballot propositions” also made Republican lines longer, said Hedgcoth, adding that they have “no legislative weight.”

“Many/most voters assume they are voting for or against some sort of amendment to the Texas constitution or other legislative measure,” Hedgcoth said. “In reality, it’s nothing more than a survey that provides the predictable 95%+ partisan agreement.”

Republican Election Judge Kal Silverberg also saw long waits paired with empty Democratic voting machines at the Southwest Regional Library in Fort Worth.

“A joint primary would have made things smoother, because we would have had 18 machines available for use by both parties,” he said. Wait times got to be about 30 minutes in his line.

Silverberg, whose wife Karen served as the Democratic election judge at the same location, said joint primaries would actually serve as a safeguard against cheating.

“What better way to guard against cheating than to put the other party where they can watch them?” he said.

Still, that does not mean that he thinks any cheating is going on in Tarrant County’s elections.

“There is so little opportunity for voter fraud, it’s not funny,” Silverberg said, denouncing baseless claims of unethical poll workers, like the one French made in his email.

“It’s not the allegations, per se, it’s the lack of defense for the election judges,” he said in a phone interview. “We’re having trouble recruiting people because the perception is now, since nobody is saying anything to the contrary, that elections are full of fraud, and who wants to be part of a fraudulent organization?”