Fort Worth Residents Warned About Postcard Asking Them To Verify Votes
FORT WORTH (CBSDFW.COM) - Residents in Fort Worth were warned Friday about postcards being mailed to people who voted in local elections in May. It asks voters to go online and verify their votes.
The postcard comes from a group looking for election irregularities.
Voters had enough questions about the card and made enough phone calls skeptical of it that the county issued a statement, the district attorney's office sent out a warning and the Secretary of State's office recommended people just throw it away.
The card tells people "find out if your vote counted in Fort Worth" and directs them to a website where they are asked to put in a name, address and zip code. The suggestion is data might show you voted when you didn't; or that you voted but it showed you didn't; or maybe there are too many votes assigned to your address.
A Fort Worth man, Brian Childers, is part of the effort and asked the county last month for all the data on registered voters and their voting history. He asked for detailed data and images for mail-in ballots.
In a statement to CBS 11 News, Childers said:
"VerifyMyVoting.com is a non-partisan informational and research website initiated and supported by a fairly large cross-section of the community using public data to assist citizens of the City of Fort Worth in determining if their votes in the May 1, 2021 general election have been properly recorded. We encourage every citizen that voted in the City of Fort Worth General Election to use this website to see if their vote was properly recorded. Even if someone did not vote, then check to see if a vote was attributed to them. The site can also allow someone to check for others they may know. It is our desire and prayer that this website will help reveal that this Election was of the highest integrity."
It is public information that the card and website are asking for, but it was the uncertainty about how that information would be used that had District Attorney Sharen Wilson and the Secretary of State's office urging voters to be cautious.
The Secretary of State's office said, in part: "As Tarrant County has stated – they did not send this postcard, and it is not an official mailing. Texas has a secret ballot and anybody claiming to be able to tell a voter about their individual ballot is attempting to deceive voters. We encourage voters to be very cautious regarding such claims and that they guard their personal information from use by third parties making such claims."
The Tarrant County elections office said if voters ever personally want to verify their record, they can call the elections office directly and have the information sent to them.
