BOMBSHELL: Tarrant County Hart Intercivic Machines Flip Votes and Manipulate Ballot Images
- dkclements
- 4 days ago
- 4 min read
Guest post By Erin Clements
Last month news emerged that a Dominion/Liberty Vote tabulator had dropped a vote in a critical school board race in Chaves County, New Mexico which altered the outcome of that election. The faulty programming was only discovered because the race was so close that it required a recount.
An even more shocking story is now emerging out of Tarrant County, Texas, where a Hart Intercivic election system not only miscounted a vote, but it also manipulated the accompanying ballot image to match the wrongly counted vote. This incident indicates the system itself can be programmed to drop votes and cover it up by altering accompanying digital election records.
According to a sworn affidavit, the incident occurred during a logic and accuracy test that took place on December 10th and 11th, 2025 at the Tarrant County election facility in Forth Worth, Texas. The logic and accuracy test is intended to demonstrate that an election system is working properly before an upcoming special runoff election scheduled for January 31st, 2026. During the logic and accuracy test, Tarrant County elections official, Paul Benevides, ran 72 pre-filled test ballots with a known result through the tabulators that will be used during the real election.
The result should have shown 72 votes for a candidate named Taylor Rehmet and zero votes for his opponent, Leigh Wambsganss. However, the Hart system reported that there were 71 votes for Rehmet and one undervote – as if one test ballot had been left blank. Surprised by the wrong result, the attendees of the public logic and accuracy test investigated.
Like most voting systems, the Hart tabulators capture a scanned image of each ballot and use software to determine which squares the voters filled to apply the vote to the correct candidate. The image of the ballot that was counted as an undervote was easily located in the Hart system. Since ballots are serialized in Tarrant County, the digital image was then matched to the physical ballot it was supposed to represent. The physical ballot had the square indicating a vote for Rehmet completely filled in, yet the accompanying ballot image created by the Hart voting system showed a blank square next to Rehmet’s name.
The batch of 72 ballots was run again, and it produced the same manipulated result and the same manipulated ballot image for the same ballot.
It is impossible for a digital scanner to process 72 identical ballots and scan 71 of those ballots correctly yet manipulate one to remove a vote from the digital record without being specifically programmed to do so. The fact the system did the same manipulation on the same ballot twice in a row indicates that a manipulation, likely tied to the ballot serial numbers, was programmed into the Hart voting system.
Benevides shrugged off the manipulation as a “glitch” and nothing to worry about and moved on with the testing. In reality, not only was the logic and accuracy test a failure, but it proved that the machines in Tarrant County are programmed to manipulate elections.
Many jurisdictions across the country rely solely on the digital results and digital ballot images created by their voting systems to determine the outcome of their elections. Some jurisdictions only consult the digital ballot images even for recounts and post-election audits. Tarrant County proves that a voting system can be programmed to manipulate ballot images to match a false result, making it impossible for fraud to be uncovered.
Tarrant County was made famous in 2020 when it narrowly went to Joe Biden, after having never supported a Democrat for President since the 1960’s. A man named Heider Garcia had been made the Election Administrator for that county in 2018. He resigned in 2023 due to public pressure, but was soon hired by Dallas County, Texas to run their elections. In September 2025, Garcia left Dallas County to become Vice President of Customer Success at Hart Intercivic.
Heider Garcia, alleged architect of fraudulent Smartmatic election software and Vice President at Hart Intercivic
Heider Garcia was recently highlighted in the sworn testimony of a Smartmatic whistleblower who claimed that, “Heider Garcia is the person responsible for the deployment of the electoral system in Venezuela, one of the engineers that created it. One of the leaders and person responsible for the…implementation of Dominion in the Philippines.”
The Department of Justice charged Smartmatic late last year for bribery and money laundering associated with the same Philippine election system that Heider Garcia helped implement.
The Texas Secretary of State, Jane Nelson, is poised to “certify” the Hart Intercivic system for the state of Texas but is failing to make public an expert report written by one of her own expert examiners, Clay Parikh. Based on previous testimony from that expert examiner, his report is unlikely to be an endorsement of the Hart system. If Nelson proceeds to “certify” the Hart voting system, she will be sanctioning a system that has been shown to produce fraudulent results and is intimately associated with the worst of the worst of the election vendors.
Call (1-800-252-VOTE) or email (secretary@sos.texas.gov ) the Texas Secretary of State’s office and let her know what you think about her ignoring evidence that the Hart system is compromised.
Texas Secretary of State Jane Nelson
About the author:
Erin Clements is an election systems auditor, election data expert, and registered professional engineer with 21 years’ experience in infrastructure system analysis.