North Texas conservatives police high turnout and close races as “anomalies” suggesting fraud

As his surname might suggest, Fort Worth attorney Bill Fearer played an alarmist emcee for the late January gathering of election deniers hosted by the conservative group Tarrant County Citizens for Election Integrity. Before introducing a parade of speakers spreading baseless conspiracies about fraud in elections ranging from Donald Trump’s 2020 loss to local races, Fearer had some startling figures of his own that he wanted to show the crowd—“anomalies,” he said, “that certainly don’t prove anything, but they raised our concerns.” On the list of bullet points Fearer splashed on a big screen behind him was the name of Tarrant County Sheriff Bill Waybourn, a tough-talking cop who first won in 2016 with an overwhelming 81 percent of the vote but only narrowly prevailed when he went up for re-election in 2020. To Fearer, that slide is enough to suggest fraud. “There was no glaring issue with the job that he (Waybourn) had done that we could perceive, yet in 2020 the margin was only 5 percent,” Fearer said.

That remark would shock Waybourn’s local critics, who have organized against the scandal-plagued sheriff and his policies for years. They have protested the dehumanizing and dangerous conditions that pervade inside the jail he oversees, which has seen a spike in deaths since he took office. While Waybourn has become a fixture of right-wing media and a reliable dial-a-quote for comments demonizing migrants, protesters, and leftists, his rhetoric and numerous alarming incidents on his watch—including a pregnant woman with mental illness giving birth alone while locked inside her cell in 2020—have galvanized a coalition of local activists who have demanded his resignation and supported his Democratic opponent in 2020. The group has continued to organize against the sheriff and his policies under the name “New Sheriff Now Tarrant County,” testifying in front of the county commission to demand justice for people harmed in Waybourn’s jail, including a woman with mental disabilities who recently left the lockup bruised and in a coma. But Fearer’s slideshow to the Tarrant County group drew on rhetoric that has spread among conservatives, pointing to bare election results they dislike as reason enough for suspicion.