An anxious murmur about election integrity in the 2024 election is sweeping through DFW.
Former Texas House of Representatives candidate Barry Wernick has raised concerns about bad actors who can vote on behalf of another person without their knowledge or consent.
Wernick’s October 22 post on X reads: “BREAKING: COMPLAINT FILED WITH SOS AGAINST DALLAS COUNTY ELECTIONS. Tonight, I filed a complaint with @TXsecofstate against the Dallas County Elections Department after going to the DCED website to view my “sample ballot” only find out what I was looking at was not a sample.”
🚨BREAKING: COMPLAINT FILED WITH SOS AGAINST DALLAS COUNTY ELECTIONS🚨
🧵Tonight, I filed a complaint with @TXsecofstate against the Dallas County Elections Department after going to the DCED website to view my "sample ballot" only find out what I was looking at was not a sample.— Barry Wernick (@Wernick4Dallas) October 23, 2024
Wernick continued in a thread, “It appears that Dallas County uses reporting & other website features from Clarity Elections, also known as SOE Software, located at 5401 W. Kennedy Blvd. Suite 100 Tampa, FL 33609. This is the company that publishes our ballots online and also provides Election Night Reporting.”
Then Wernick got to the meat of the issue: the ballots available online are not just random sample ballots but the exact ballot a citizen would use to vote for the various candidates in their jurisdiction, complete with Dallas Elections Administrator Heider Garcia’s signature.
After clicking on the link & being transferred to the Clarity Elections portal, instead of seeing a sample ballot, I viewed a downloadable & printable .pdf file of my actual die-cut mail-in ballot with a colored stamp of the initials (HG) of Election Administrator Heider Garcia. pic.twitter.com/hKd4uL254C
— Barry Wernick (@Wernick4Dallas) October 23, 2024
https://x.com/Wernick4Dallas/status/1848924612744061292
“After clicking on the link & being transferred to the Clarity Elections portal, instead of seeing a sample ballot, I viewed a downloadable & printable .pdf file of my actual die-cut mail-in ballot with a colored stamp of the initials (HG) of Election Administrator Heider Garcia,” Wernick said.
The lawyer went on to explain that all of the requisite official markings were on the ballot and “[because] there is no law against publishing an actual mail-in ballot, anyone with access to a registered voter’s legal first name and last name and the same voter’s birth date could easily and legally print out or digitally manipulate that voter’s ballot.”
Wernick highlighted the serious consequences of this possibility.
“Then that person could illegally and potentially surreptitiously inject it into the system thereby disenfranchising and diluting my vote, in this instance, and any other registered voter’s vote without getting caught,” he said before pointing to the case of Rick Weible.
The Dallas Express was able to repeat the process with Wernick’s name and other Dallas residents.
You may remember Rick Weible when he broke into an ES&S accumulator and also broke the Internet:https://t.co/TDwox0DOON
— Barry Wernick (@Wernick4Dallas) September 27, 2024
In Wernick’s telling, Weible reached widespread attention from being featured in the documentary Vindicating Trump. He added, “You may remember Rick Weible when he broke into an ES&S accumulator and also broke the Internet:”
“Rick will be weighing in on the details surrounding why this is so dangerous when it comes to opening up the potential for election fraud. In fact, when I showed him what I had found & referenced what he exposed in Vindicating Trump, he said, “This is worse. It’s next level,” Wernick added.
The actual ballot images are not locked, encrypted, or watermarked in any way, and therefore must be taken down from the Internet to protect against the violation of not just my civil rights, but others' guaranteed by our national and state constitutions.
— Barry Wernick (@Wernick4Dallas) October 23, 2024
Then he made his call to action, “The actual ballot images are not locked, encrypted, or watermarked in any way, and therefore must be taken down from the Internet to protect against the violation of not just my civil rights, but others’ guaranteed by our national and state constitutions.”
Dallas County Elections Administrator Heider Garcia has repeatedly insisted upon the security of Dallas’s elections, although he has not publicly spoken about the issue raised by Wernick.
Garcia is a figure that many either revere or despise.
“If you were building a prototype for an election administrator, you would just copy Heider Garcia,” former Secretary of State John Scott reportedly said.
However, not everyone feels this way. Garcia is routinely criticized by some election integrity activists in Texas, who view him negatively for a variety of reasons, from perceived incompetence to participating in alleged shady election dealings during his time working in the Philippines.
Wernick previously told DX that he became interested in election integrity issues after a series of irregularities in his extremely close primary race against Rep. Morgan Meyer (R-University Park), which was ultimately decided by around 500 votes. He said he saw issues ranging from missing ballot seals to absent election judge signatures.