Tarrant County picked a new elections administrator Friday to replace Heider Garcia, who resigned earlier this year after he said he faced political pressure from Republican County Judge Tim O’Hare.
The Tarrant County Election Commission voted unanimously to hire Clint Ludwig, the chief deputy of the Tarrant County Clerk’s Office, on Friday morning. His start date is Aug. 1.
“I am extremely honored to have been selected as the Tarrant County Elections Administrator,” Ludwig said in a statement. “I will approach this opportunity with great enthusiasm, tenacity, and a commitment to excellence. You can trust that I will further Tarrant County’s legacy of conducting free and fair elections that express the will of the people.”
The elections administrator is in charge of running Tarrant County’s elections process. The previous administrator, Heider Garcia, submitted his resignation in April, because he said he couldn’t run a fair, unbiased election alongside Republican Tarrant County Judge Tim O’Hare.
O’Hare denied that he pressured Garcia to quit.
Garcia’s resignation led U.S. Rep. Marc Veasey, D-Fort Worth, alongside other local Democrats, to request a federal investigation into O’Hare’s actions and the county’s Election Integrity Unit.
See here and here for some background. How much worse could it have been? This much.
Tarrant County officials are considering hiring as election chief a prominent Republican donor and activist who has baselessly criticized the security of the county’s elections and appears to have no previous experience running an election.
Karen Wiseman and two other applicants — Clinton Ludwig, the county clerk’s chief deputy since 2017, and Fred Crosley, the former chief financial officer of the county’s public transit service, Trinity Metro — are finalists for the job. The Fort Worth Star-Telegram first reported the finalists’ names Tuesday.
The county received at least 20 applications for the position through its online recruitment portal after elections administrator Heider Garcia submitted his resignation in April.
Garcia, known as one of the most respected elections directors in the state, said in his letter of resignation he was leaving due to political pressure from his new boss, conservative Tarrant County Judge Tim O’Hare. Since former President Donald Trump began to make baseless allegations of fraud in connection with the outcome of the 2020 election, Tarrant County — the state’s largest swing county — has been at the center of unfounded election fraud conspiracies.
In a text message to Votebeat, Garcia said county officials’ selection of a heavily partisan finalist for the job such as Wiseman — who, like O’Hare, has been a top Tarrant County GOP donor — did not surprise him.
Garcia said such politically motivated decisions are what drove him to resign. There’s “an expectation that the [elections administrator] will play politics,” he said and added that he hopes there are “enough reasonable members of the Elections Commission that will not vote” for a partisan candidate, given that the job is meant to be nonpartisan.
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The group Wiseman has been associated with, Citizens for Election Integrity, has since 2021 publicly questioned the outcome of the 2020 presidential election in Tarrant County and, without evidence, accused Garcia of “rigging” elections since he took the position in 2018.
Led by Fort Worth lawyers Dan Bates and Bill Fearer, the group has spread election conspiracy theories, including false claims that the county’s voting machines are connected to the internet and that people’s votes can be manipulated. The group, along with others across the country that have spread falsehoods about election administration, opposes the use of modern technology to run elections.
A day after Garcia’s resignation in April, during a Tarrant County Commissioners Court meeting, Wiseman spoke against the county’s vote to renew a contract with the vendor of software the elections department uses to run its electronic poll books. The electronic poll books have voter registration information and help poll workers quickly check in voters at polling locations, which also prevents them from voting at more than one location. The electronic poll books are not used to count votes. The software has been certified by the Texas secretary of state, but Wiseman alleged it was “easily hackable” and had “plug-ins that can manipulate election data.” Wiseman did not offer evidence to back up her claims.
And since Garcia resigned, she said, “should the new elections administrator be allowed to review and select their own program?”
Citizens for Election Integrity has also questioned residents at addresses pulled from voter rolls. Wiseman herself sent letters to voters asking them why they voted outside of their neighborhood. Voters in Tarrant County can legally vote at any polling site. Last year, Wiseman was also involved in the group’s review of thousands of physical ballots of the 2020 primary election in search of unspecified irregularities.
Bates, the group’s head counsel, also represented Wiseman in a lawsuit she filed last summer against Tarrant County and Garcia in an effort to obtain election records related to several past elections, which were at the time not yet public by law. Wiseman sought a long list of things, including “all early voting, absentee, provisional, and day-of-election paper ballots; all cast vote record (CVR) electronic data for all voting methods (absentee, early, and day of voting); all provisional ballots/votes, regardless of whether they were included in final vote counts or not; absentee ballot envelopes; and all paper ballots that were re-created by the ballot board of election workers for any reason.”
I have no idea how good an elections administrator Clint Ludwig will be – he has some very big shoes to fill – but this would have been a total disaster. Honestly, just the fact that a malefactor like Karen Wiseman was on the short list is enough for the Justice Department to give Tarrant County a thorough trip through the wringer. And yes, it would be very nice if Tarrant County Dems could break through at the countywide level next year; the quickest answer to this kind of threat is to win power. At least now maybe that can be done without a boulder being tied to every voting rights activist in the county.
If only R.F. O’Rourke had spent more time here and less in the Muleshoes of the state, Tarrant might have a Democrat county judge now.