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Last week, a once-respected national journalist brought a whole lot of unwanted attention to Tarrant County’s elections department when former 60 Minutes reporter Lara Logan tweeted misinformation regarding mail-in ballots for the Nov. 5 general election.
On Oct. 2, Logan quote-tweeted a post from the Dallas County GOP alleging that the county will be using questionable voting system components in the upcoming election. In her post she aimed her keyboard to the west of Dallas County, writing “Texas is in real danger from fraud in this election – Tarrant County is trying to send out 7 million mail in ballots & there is no sign enough people are taking this seriously. Ken Paxton & his office realize the threat. But too many are complacent & ignoring this.”
In pretty quick fashion, Logan’s claim was debunked. It didn’t take much to do so for a number of reasons, but the Tarrant County Elections Administrator Clint Ludwig told the Fort Worth Star-Telegram that Logan’s baseless allegation was, in fact, false. At that point, his office had received just under 23,000 requests for mail-in ballots, had sent out only 4,705 and had received 81 of those back.
Later, Logan would note on her X account that she had been mistaken and had meant to claim that Harris County, not Tarrant, had been guilty of mailing millions of ballots – again, without offering any evidence to support her claim. She even seemed to get her geography wrong when attempting to correct herself, writing “Correction: This should have read Harris County, Houston. NOT Tarrant County, Dallas.”
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Once upon a time, Logan was a prominent voice in the CBS News empire, where she became a star as a 60 Minutes contributor and as CBS News’ chief foreign affairs correspondent. But since she left CBS in 2018, Logan has been a leading voice for conservative-backed conspiracy theories of all kinds. Scroll for a bit on her X timeline and you’ll see that she, like U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, thinks people can control the weather, but she’s also a vocal supporter of the right-wing efforts of the Dallas HERO amendments that we wrote about for this week’s Observer cover story.
Voting by mail has become one of the hottest of hot buttons since the 2020 presidential election. Former president Donald Trump has long cited fraudulent mail-in ballots as being partly to blame for his loss in the 2020 election, although no proof of widespread fraud of any kind has been found from that election, and every lawsuit that has been filed on the matter has been defeated or dismissed.
In Texas, Texas Attorney Gen. Ken Paxton has made what he has referred to as “election integrity” a primary issue as he has sought to create tighter restrictions for voting, although there hasn’t been any proof of widespread voter fraud in any recent statewide election.
Logan chose the wrong county to pick on. Tarrant County seemingly goes out of its way to be transparent with its mail-in ballot numbers, posting updates to its website regularly. As of Oct. 8, several days after Logan’s social media post, Tarrant County had sent out 24,329 mail-in ballots and 674 of those had been received back, according to Tarrant County’s website.
We asked the elections offices from Dallas, Denton and Collin counties how many ballots they had sent out so far, and believe it or not, it was also nowhere near the 7 million Logan claims one county or another has mailed.
“We have received and processed 13,174 requests for ballots by mail thus far for the November 5, 2024 election,” Kaleb Breaux, Collin County deputy elections administrator, wrote in an email on Oct. 4. “There have been 109 mail ballots returned to our office as of this morning.”
A Denton County election staff member told us on Wednesday that 12,951 mail-in ballots have been sent out and 1,152 of the ballots that were returned have been processed.
When reached for their numbers, the folks at the Dallas County elections office told us that as of Oct. 5, a total of 23,882 mail-in ballots had been sent out, and 500 of those have already been submitted.
