A group of volunteer computer wizards with the Open Records Project discovered in 2020 that the computer at Central Count had been hacked in Dallas County. In this interview with their spokesman, Russell Fish, he describes what they found, and how our government — the Texas Secretary of State and Attorney General’s offices — lacked the capacity to deal with the issue, relying on contractors for computer security, and how journalists failed to cover the evidence. In the next election, the government refused to hand over the list of registered voters, like they had in every election. The Open Records Project computers were constantly under attack as a result. Watch the interview here:

The solution? Watch to the end. If the Republicans win, there will be hearings on elections from the Oversight Committee in the House.

This is a must watch episode:

Some context for this story.

This past summer, President Trump gave a major address to the nation on election security.

The President raised the alarm about serious weaknesses in the American election system, and presented major pieces of evidence.

Newly declassified intelligence had showed that China and Chinese-linked actors had bought, stolen, or hacked voter-registration information involving as many as 220 million Americans, and had created a data-exploitation unit for the project.

That a rival country would try to interfere in our elections is not a shocking idea. That was the premise after all of the “Russiagate” story that consumed nearly three years of national attention, and turned out to be a hoax. This is something we do to other countries, apparently.

Trump referenced previously classified intelligence assessments, like a Chinese effort to manufacture illegal ballots for Biden or CIA reporting about Venezuela, saying the Maduro government had developed methods to digitally alter vote totals in its own elections in ways designed to evade detection even during an audit.

Subscribe now

At the same time some parts of the intelligence community was producing these assessments, other elements were covering it up. From evidence giving in Trump’s speech and subsequent revelations, it certainly seems like elements of our national intelligence community were in on it. Trump said dozens of CIA and NSA reports concerning Chinese election targeting were kept out of presidential briefings. A November 20, 2020 internal intelligence email states: “We have deliberately massaged our one pending PDB to avoid any direct links to the election.” An FBI Counterintelligence Division official, wrote: “I’m basically running a shadow government across the FBI at this point.”

Nothing in Trump’s speech was too shocking to anyone who has read this book by Ralph Pezzullo:

The book is based on the work of private investigators Gary Berntsen and Martin Rodil, funded by Patrick Byrne of overstock.com, who were investigating the Cartel del Sol in Venezuela and uncovered a system run from there which manipulates elections around the world.

The Cartel del Sol is an enormous Venezuelan-based criminal organization that is a combination of the Venezuelan army and a huge drug cartel, described as “Costco for drugs.” Pezzullo estimates that the cartel rakes in hundreds of billions of dollars annually from drug sales. That is a lot of money to bribe politicians and officials with.

The cartel is run by Diosdado Cabello, who was a close associate of Hugo Chavez and is the boss of the Venezuelan internal security services. While investigating it, Berntsen and Rodil repeatedly got information connecting Venezuelan officials with technology to alter elections. They spent two years traveling internationally, finding and recruiting engineers who had worked for Smartmatic and Dominion, companies whose real owner is Diosdado Cabello.

The story begins with Chavez.

Hugo Chavez was President of Venezuela from 1999 to 2013, when he died of cancer. Chavez, his associates, and his successor Nicolas Maduro looted oil-rich Venezuela and ran into the ground with hyperinflation and corruption resulting in shortages of basic necessities, an economic contraction of over 75%, and 8 million Venezuelans leaving the country.

Chavez was so unpopular that three years into his first term, the opposition got 20% of the entire registered voters to sign a petition for a recall election. Chavez was going to lose big, and after he told this to his patron Fidel Castro, Castro suggested that Chavez gain control of the voting machines used in the election. Chavez then tasked three Venezuelan-American technology specialists to develop software for manipulating election results. They did just that during Venezuela’s 2004 recall referendum, allowing Chavez to survive the recall. Chavez ultimately exported the election technology abroad, and manipulated elections around the world, including in the US.

How did Venezuela do that?

Through (a) massive funding, consisting of hundreds of billions of dollars in oil sales, hundreds of billions from drug trafficking, plus billions contributed by China, and through the assistance of (b) Frank Holder, a CIA asset and double agent working for Cuba, who helped the Cartel de Sol launder billions of dollars through a consulting company he purchased and corrupted, the Berkeley Research Group, which is responsible for security, financial, and intelligence due diligence work for top law firms, banks, and corporations in the US, and (c) Lord Mark Malloch-Brown, the President of George Soros’ Open Society Foundation and Chairman of Smartmatic from 2011-2020. (The book claims that cartel money also goes into the Open Society Foundation and then is used to fund the Democratic Party and allied groups — a claim which seems more plausible given the unfolding ActBlue scandal).

But how did it come about the tainted tech be used in US elections?

Through secrecy and deception. Chavez’s original company, Smartmatic, acquired Sequoia, an older election technology company, in 2005, and installed their source code on the Sequoia machines. Congress demanded that they disclose their company ownership, and after they refused, Smartmatic sold Sequoia, but not before installing their source code on those machines. This was discovered by the California Secretary of State in 2007, which produced a 300-page report that caused California to eliminate the use of Sequoia. That was under California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, however. When Jerry Brown took over, his administration quietly changed the rules so that companies no longer had to submit their source code for review. Dominion, the company that bought Sequoia and used the same source code, got over $280 million to install election infrastructure in LA County in time for the 2020 election. California also allowed Dominion to reinstall its software five days after the election, to erase any proof of tampering.

But how are the machines used to cheat?

There are many methods. The steal is well organized and planned a year in advance, but does not require more than a handful of people on the ground or even that many counties to steal a national election.

Before a batch of votes is permanently saved, an outside operator replaces the authentic batch image with another image containing altered votes. The substituted image then becomes the record examined during an electronic audit. This is especially effective where auditors are restricted from examining the original paper ballots.

The system is designed to beat an audit. Different techniques would be used in different counties so that investigators could not easily identify a statewide pattern. The vote switching is not dramatic; it could be shaving small percentages from Republican margins in heavily Republican counties, which does not attract attention. The voting system is also built in such a way that administrators can delete the logs. And the companies claim that their source code is proprietary, and so cannot be examined.

Was the 2020 election stolen?

Subscribe now

Yes, according to the authors.

Which is not impossible to believe:

What about the 2024 election?

From the book:

In the final weeks of the 2024 Presidential election, engineers recruited by the whistleblowers collected strong evidence that the criminal cartel led by Venezuela was about to steal the election for Democratic Party candidate Kamala Harris.

With the help of other cyber security experts, the engineers were able to stop the illegal altering of election results by shutting down the servers that the criminal cartel was using in Serbia and other countries, thus preserving the integrity of the 2024 US election.

There is a direct Venezuelan connection to elections in Dallas County in the person of our last elections administrator, Heider Garcia, a Venezuelan who graduated from Universidad Simón Bolívar and, according to the account of whistleblowers, was involved in creating the software for Smartmatic that has been used to steal elections around the world.

Previously, Garcia was Tarrant County elections administrator starting in February 2018. Donald Trump won Tarrant County in 2016, but Joe Biden managed somehow to narrowly win Tarrant in 2020.

Currently Garcia is vice president at Hart InterCivic. Texas uses Hart InterCivic voting equipment extensively.

When Heider Garcia became the elections administrator in Tarrant County, one of the first things he did was implement countywide voting, which has been a disaster for election security, making it unable to be audited, as we covered earlier this year.

Here is an account of Heider Garcia’s administration in Tarrant County by someone with first-hand experience:

There are a number of striking claims in this video, especially about the manipulation of the voter rolls and ballots being run through the voting machines multiple times that are very suspicious.

Heider Garcia has been described as a “snakey, slimey person” by those who have interacted him when he ran Dallas County elections. One example: during the 2024 election, there were 78 early voting locations, and the county elections department was unable to reconcile any of them (!). In the end, Garcia actually directed the Ballot Board to add the names of voters who checked in to the paper voter rosters. One Ballot Board member, the heroic Susan Cumby, documented this and filed a complaint about this request to falsify government records. Garcia called her out, she resigned, and the board did as Garcia directed.

Nothing happened as a result of her complaint.

And it is this lack of recourse that is the keystone to the whole system of election fraud, according to the researcher Andrew Paquette in this must-read article:

The Zark Files

Where did the ballots go?

For anyone who hasn’t been following the story on the Zark Files or elsewhere: something fishy happened in Bexar County, Texas during the Republican primaries last week. The short version is this: the record of checked-in voters for the second day of early voting, February 18th, was meaningfully altered by a purpose-built application…

Read more

8 months ago · 29 likes · 11 comments · Andrew Paquette, PhD

The point of the article is this: when there is evidence of fraud, what can you do about it? The answer is, nothing. As we have mentioned before, complaints to the Secretary of State’s office will not change election results, only refer potential criminal violations to the AG or DA’s office. Regarding any effect on the election itself, a remedy would involve spending $20,000 to $60,000 for lawyers to bring a case before a Dallas County district court judge. And judges refuse to touch this issue, as the Open Records Project can testify.

What can we do?

There are a number of things we can push for on a local level to better election security.

• Have voters sign the paper voter roster with a date and time, and have the election clerk sign the bottom of the roster. Provide access to the voter rosters in all recounts (these things are easy to do, and would provide excellent deterrence against fraud)

• Provide access in recounts to the critical piece of documentation to verify chain of custody and the total number of ballots cast — the Ballot and Seal Certificates — in all recounts (cf. this post).

• End countywide voting

The last one is a very important one.

Why don’t the results just get posted at each polling place immediately upon closing? New Hampshire does this. It is indeed the typical American model. For most of American history, elections were conducted through a highly decentralized, precinct-based system in which results were counted locally and publicly before being aggregated upward.

This is a highly transparent way of doing things. The centralization of elections by contrast is not transparent. You vote on a machine, it prints a ballot with a bar code you cannot read to verify accuracy, the bar code gets scanned by the tabulator and the results put in electronic form which nobody can see, and then are aggregated in a way that is never fully audited. (The state-mandated “partial manual count” after each election proves this point, as it is kind of a joke.)

The centralization of elections is not a given. It would be easy to move back to the traditional American model.

But with countywide voting, it is impossible to have a decentralized system. Anyone can vote anywhere, which ballots for races all over the county are mixed in with the local races. With this highly fractured situation, loading results onto USB drives and taking them to a central accumulator makes sense. But with this centralization compromises election security. With precinct voting, precincts could post their totals for anyone to see, and the precinct results totaled together to get the final result, all out in the open, without a long chain of custody and the black box of central count telling us the totals.

Countywide voting is not a state mandate. It would be possible to go back to precinct voting.

There is one last thing we can do: make sure the chain of custody for the USB drives is tracked.

An interesting tidbit we received from an election judge in Dallas County:

During Judges’ training, I noticed that everything digital has a cross-checking physical check -- logs, seal numbers, etc. The one thing that the Judge does not have a physical record of -- by the explicit direction of my trainers -- is the serial number of the flash drive from the tabulator. This lack strikes me as a very flawed since the judge will hand over a flash drive with his pouch, but someone thereafter could potentially substitute a different flash drive.

We reviewed the training material for judges, and it seems to justify this account:

If accurate, this is not an election security best practice (cf. US Election assistance Commission Best Practices, page 16). It also does not seem to align with Texas Election Code either, which requires tracking of the USB drives:

(b) The general custodian of election records shall develop a procedure for tracking the custody of each electronic information storage medium from its storage location, through election coding and the election process, to its final post-election disposition and return to storage. The chain of custody must require two or more individuals to perform a check and verification check whenever a transfer of custody occurs. (Texas Election Code §129.051)

Hope is not lost though and change is always possible. Heider Garcia is gone and there are heroic activists who keep pushing for reforms like precinct voting, which is really a return to a classic American tradition.

250 years after the American independence, the fight for self-rule continues.

Contact: TheIrvingHerald@gmail.com (corrections/comments/news tips welcome)

© 2026 Irving Herald LLC. All rights reserved.

Subscribe now

This makes difficult to give real problems our sustained focus. This has always been a problem for democratic governments, as Alexis de Tocqueville noted:

Our current state of distraction by electronic media does not help us focus on what really has long-term importance. As interesting as it is to catch up on the latest scandals or political murder mysteries, they are but distractions from the main issues that confront us:

1. The fiscal gap

2. Inflation

3. The collapse of birthrates

These are serious, even civilization-altering problems.

Our national debt is $40 trillion, caused by exploding federal deficits that went from $400 billion a year under Bush, to $1 trillion a year after the financial crisis to $2 trillion a year after Covid. We are spending recklessly, and that $40 trillion official figure does not account for the money that would be needed to shore up the major entitlement programs. Covering the fiscal gap, the present value difference between projected future outlays and receipts, would require an immediate, permanent 26% tax increase or a 24% reduction in spending, or some combination of the two. In five years Social Security and Medicare payments will need to drop substantially. In ten years, annual interest costs on the national debt will nearly equal the entire discretionary budget.

The federal government has no intention of reigning in spending though. Their plan is to continue deficits and addressing the consequences by printing money, which drops the debt in real terms. Since the 2008 financial crisis, the Federal Reserve has increased the monetary base sixfold. This erodes the purchasing power of the dollar: a dollar today buys only $0.77 of what $1.00 bought in 2020. Inflation is a hidden tax, caused by government devaluing the currency, the government has in essence stolen 23% of everyone’s money in the last six years, without Congress even having to pass an unpopular tax hike.

Inflation makes life unaffordable. Young people are unable settle down and have children. Homeownership for those under 35 is at a historic low. The share of adults living with their parents is at a historic high. “U.S. birth rates are dropping to levels of civilizational suicide, with women having on average 1.6 children,” writes a young columnist. In a clip that went viral last year, another commentator lamented: “I’m 30 years old. Not one of my friends has children. Zero. No one. No one’s having kids. Do you know how hard you need to abuse a mammal to make them not have children?” Debt loads burdens on future generations; what happens if future generations are not around to pay them, because birthrates have collapsed?

Subscribe now

This is the context for the current election, which features a 43% increase in our debt service tax rates for Irving ISD.

Also on the ballot is Proposition A in Dallas County, which is a permanent 22% property tax hike for a wasteful initiative; analysis of that is here.

What are we doing here folks? This is only exacerbating the problems we face. There are heroic members of our local governments opposing these reckless measures — neither the Irving ISD bond nor Prop A passed unanimously. But our local leaders are not facing up to the hard reality of inflation eroding the ability of working people, especially young people, to live.

And Irving ISD is not facing the reality of the tenuous situation of our debt crisis as a society. The cover from last week’s Economist:

The article’s argument is that heavy government borrowing, inflation fears, and competition for investment capital could push long-term interest rates higher. If we pass the bonds and then face higher borrowing rates when Irving ISD sells them, the proposed projects could cost us more to finance.

Rather than ballooning its debt, Irving ISD needs to live within its means. It already gobbles up an enormous amount of property taxes. Take a look at what the median homeowner pays between taxing entities:

The orange slice of our property tax pie is larger than any others. Irving ISD takes in a higher percentage of property taxes than the entire City of Irving.

What does it spend it on? Apparently not on basic needs, like keeping up on the repairs with the school buildings, because that is the justification for building brand new schools (which are not even that old).

Subscribe now

The district does spend a lot of our tax money on salaries. According to the most recent figures, Irving ISD’s Superintendent made $338,196 in base pay — over double the median in Texas. Total compensation is much higher, and included $1,000 a month for a car (!). This pay is higher than Coppell ISD ($281,324) and Fort Worth ISD ($276,000).

High salaries at the top are useful to everyone in an organization because justify higher salaries for those below.

James Quintero spoke about this in the clip below. It seems like Irving ISD spends their money on administrative bloat, while neglecting to keep up critical infrastructure:

Irving ISD really has no excuse not to keep up with the necessary maintenance on its buildings. School districts in the state can give up to an additional 20% homestead exemption, on top of the mandatory $140,000 exemption. A quarter of the ~1,000 school districts do give something extra. But not Irving ISD!

Irving ISD wants to spend a lot of money on salaries, deny us property tax relief we could have, fail to do the necessary upkeep on their buildings, and then come to us asking us to foot the bill for brand new buildings, all while their enrollment is declining and we just put over a billion dollars on the credit card three years ago with the last bond.

It is not just homeowners who will pay the bill, by the way. Those living in apartments do get a significant part of the property tax bill passed on to them, especially considering that the basic $140,000 school district homestead exemption does not apply to commercial apartment complexes.

Meanwhile the pro-bond propaganda funded by the real force behind them — the contractors who want to get the building projects — proudly trumpet the fact that it makes working people foot the entire bill, exempting seniors:

Seniors: is it really fair for you to vote on this, when the costs are entirely shifted from them to working people?

No. It’s shameful. Self-respecting seniors should be ashamed of themselves to support these bonds, when they will not bear the costs of them.

One comment I heard from a young person about the propaganda for these bonds:

It is abusive to the younger generations, and is radicalizing them politically, which is not a good thing at all.

Contact: TheIrvingHerald@gmail.com (corrections/comments/news tips welcome)

© 2026 Irving Herald LLC. All rights reserved.

We support it by paying property taxes that are around 70% higher than the property taxes for the entire city.

Subscribe now

Irving schools are not great. Enrollment is on a steady decline and schools are closing.

Irving ISD’s response? A push to improve the schools and raise the low ratings?

Nope. Rather, they put on the ballot a proposal for massive amount of new debt for construction projects. Bonds that would add $1.5 billion to the credit card, which would balloon their total debt to $2.6 billion. The taxes that would be locked in from this would contribute to making life unaffordable for working people (seniors are except from school property tax hikes) for years to come.

Notice that no one is promising it’ll improve educational outcomes. It’s not about education for our kids.

Really, the whole bond proposal makes no sense, until you realize it is actually a get rich quick scheme for contractors who know how to work the system.

Who are they?

It’s easy to find out. Just look at the filing for the Political Action Committee that is blanking our city with pro-bond ads, polls, signs, mailers, and propaganda, the “Vote for Irving Kids” Political Action Committee:

The PAC should be renamed, “Vote for Big Contractors to Get Rich PAC.”

Here’s the self-dealing cabal who wants to milk taxpayers for a generation to get rich now off of projects we don’t need (but will make them wealthy):

1. EMA Engineering — This company does mechanical, electrical, plumbing, technology design, and construction administration. Irving ISD lists EMA among recommended architectural and engineering firms.

2. Grace Design Studios — A contractor specializing in designing K–12 education buildings, who did work for Irving ISD last year.

3. PBK Architects — An architectural and engineering firm specializing in educational facilities. PBK is designing Irving ISD’s $123 million Career and Technical Education Center under the 2023 bond program.

4. WRA Architects — Designed Irving ISD’s Crockett Middle School, a $100 million project (which is ugly as sin), and the $13.7 million Magda A. Hernández Institute of Wellness and Professional Learning project. WRA also got a $93,000 contract to railroad through plan our bond approval and election communication.

5. Irving Countertop (Randy Randle) — Randle is the PAC Treasurer, and his company Irving Countertop does work for school buildings like Celina High School, a project they did with PBK Architects.

All these folks are self-interested: they are hoping to benefit from school capital spending.

THEY DO NOT CARE ABOUT IRVING KIDS.

THEY WANT A PAYDAY FROM OUR TAXES PAYING DOWN MASSIVE DEBT.

What they are not is actual members of the Irving ISD school community. The PAC does not have any real people behind it. There are no small donors. No concerned citizens. Just businesses who stand to profit from the big contracts that result.

That should tell you everything.

These bonds are not the community pressing for something that is needed. As we detailed in a previous post, the contractor cabal is driving the bus. WRA Architects were even given $93,000 to serve essentially as political consultants to make sure that a huge bond proposal got approval from the Facility Planning Committee and then to run the PR campaign to get the bond approved. It’s an incredible contract. Then they turned around did a terrible job communicating, unless you think hiding information from the public is the best way to communicate. It isn’t, however it is the best way to ram a corrupt bond through. Read about all that here.

Our tax dollars went to WRA Architects for bond planning … so they could use our own money against us to hike up our taxes to make themselves rich. Our tax dollars even go directly to fund signs that are technically allowed only because don’t say “vote for.”

They even sent out this mailer — paid for by your tax dollars — which is indistinguishable from a political mailer, just without the “vote for”:

These bonds are a massive scam. It is government of contractors, by contractors, and for contractors. They go around doing this all over Texas.

For example, WRA Architects just got done doing this in eastern Dallas County:

• In 2025 WRA gave $20,000 to the Vote Yes Mesquite ISD PAC, and then got to design a $58 million school.

• In 2024 in Sunnyvale, WRA gave $2,500 to a PAC, and then got to design a $48 million facility.

• In Garland in 2023, WRA gave $10,000 to a PAC, and then got to design a $72 million building and a $62 million building.

Good business if you can get it! Relatively small political contributions gets WRA Architects contracts worth millions.

It is also corrupt.

“Keep Irving Dirty” should be the slogan of these contractors who want to get paid by tricking us into going into massive debt:

More information on the bond election here:

Contact: TheIrvingHerald@gmail.com (corrections/comments/news tips welcome)

© 2026 Irving Herald LLC. All rights reserved.

What is the Irving ISD hiding? They are not giving voters the information they need on the upcoming bond election. We cover that and more in this podcast:

On the “required postings” page of the ISD website, www.irvingisd.net/about-us/required-postings, all the bond information is from the 2023 bond.

The postings are “required” yet not actually posted.

If you want the details of the 2023 bond, feel free to click the links!

Plenty of data from 2023:

More broken links: on irvingisdbond.com, the order of election says “Coming Soon” (!)

On the Irving Facility Planning page irvingisdfpc2026.com, all the links say “Coming Soon”: including “Facility Needs” and “Finances.”

On the Facilities Planning Committee page, they do not list the committee members: https://irvingisdfpc2026.com/committee.

This is a major transparency gap. With interest, this is a $1.5 billion decision. The Facilities Planning Committee was supposed to provide community input. What was that input and who gave it? As of yet there is no public document identifying who those people actually were.

But does it really matter who they were? They were most likely just props. Rubber stamps. Box checking for the real movers of the bond: WRA Architects.

These folks are not just architects but political consultants for bond elections. They brag about how good they are on their website:

And we actually paid them $93,000 for these services!

The contract pays them to push these bonds on us:

The consultant “will assist in the facilitation of facility committee to measure opinions and gather feedback to develop a recommendation for a bond election.” Shocking that the recommendation was for an enormous bond…

Yeah, the public input was worthless. The contractor’s opinion was all that matters — the same contractor that stands to benefit from the projects once they are approved.

It was WRA, after all, who got the contract to do the $102 million Crockett Middle School project — the eyesore off of 183 that looks like a data center.

It therefore is not surprising that the websites have no information, the links are broken, and we have no idea who was on the facilities planning committee: WRA is in the driver’s seat, and they have no incentive to share anything relevant with us.

They just want to get rich off our tax dollars.

Subscribe now

Good luck trying to request information either. Our public information request from August 11 for basic information about the bond election says “completed” and has the status of “full release”…

…yet no documents have been forthcoming.

A closer look at the email says you can log in to see the documents … “or view the full details of the request.”

No response documents at all. They label it “complete” and send the email for you to log in … so you can view your own request, without anything you requested. Gee, thanks.

Who needs transparency when deciding about going $1.5 billion in debt?

Watch this to get more information about this corrupt bond election.

Contact: TheIrvingHerald@gmail.com (corrections/comments/news tips welcome)

© 2026 Irving Herald LLC. All rights reserved.

We talk to Lana Hansen, the founder of Many Helping Hands in Irving, hear her amazing story and see her ministry to the homeless. For more information: www.manyhelpinghands.org

Subscribe now

Contact: TheIrvingHerald@gmail.com (corrections/comments/news tips welcome)
© 2026 Irving Herald LLC. All rights reserved.

It seemed like a survey sponsored by Sands Corporation.

Subscribe now

There was a follow up text with a link that did not work, perhaps because we had already taken the survey.

Clear Insights is the firm that Sands Corporation likely hired to help inform their political operation in 2025 in Irving, according to reports. A retrospective on what happened in 2025, the “No Casino!” election, is here.

If true, it is interesting coming on the heals of statements by Mayor Al Zapanta and a recent interview he did with CBS News.

In that interview, Mayor Zapanta said his top priority is developing the old Texas Stadium site. He mentioned the land owned by the Sands Corp., but said he isn’t interested in gambling “because it is illegal” (right before there was a hard cut away in the interview). He said he’d love the Mavericks on that site. The Sands Corp., however, said during the 2025 fight in Irving that they have no interest in a stadium for the Mavs without the option to build a casino, as Mayor Zapanta knows full well. They are currently planning on former Valley View Mall site in North Dallas for a new arena; however it came out last month that this is only “purely exploratory.”

In addition, the old Texas Stadium site on the verge of being designated an “Opportunity Zone,” which gives investors potentially valuable federal capital-gains tax benefits for putting their money into qualifying projects in the designated area, which makes it easier to get investors.

Right now, there are six votes against a casino on council. However, Mayor Zapanta’s stated goal is to target two councilmen in next year’s election: Luis Canosa and Fahad Ahmed. That could potentially swing the majority the other way.

Now to the survey.

The call came after a 30-minute household discussion about Irving politics — it almost seemed like our phone was spying on us when the polling call came through right afterwards.

The poll had lots of questions about positive or negative impression of certain statements.

First, came demographic questions. The year you were born, if you’re Latino or any other ethnicity. Then political affiliation: do you typically vote Republican, do you typically vote Democrat. Then it was how do you feel about Irving‘s direction? Positive or negative? Do you feel strongly about positive, or just somewhat positive? Then, what’s the most important issue for you? They were a number of options, growth of business, housing costs, growth of jobs, safety, homelessness.

Then there were lots of questions were then asked about what to do with the Texas Stadium land. Are you in favor of developing it? Respondents were also given a chance to say in their own words what they think should be done with that land to develop it. A casino was not mentioned at all. There were questions about other plots of land, including the Heritage District. The survey asked whether you in favor of developing these plots of land, what kind of developments: Upscale housing and restaurants? Entertainment district? A data center?

There were at least 10 to 15 questions asking for one’s impression of the statements about the Irving Chamber of Commerce. For example: “The Irving Chamber of Commerce supports small businesses” — do you have a positive impression of the statement or negative impression of that statement? Strongly or only somewhat? “The Irving Chamber of Commerce supports young, diverse businesses” (or something to that effect), do you have a negative impression of this statement or a positive impression of this statement? Strongly or only somewhat?

There was a question about whether or not you are in favor of tax relief for new businesses, to try to attract businesses to the area.

Other questions: Are you in favor of the fastest growth possible, or are you in favor of slow growth? Are you in favor of creating new jobs? Or are you in favor of having a cleaner environment? Where do you get your news from? The Dallas Morning News? Social Media? What type: Facebook, Twitter, YouTube? The Irving Rambler? How satisfied are you with how quickly road repairs are getting done? How satisfied are you with the Irving ISD? There were no questions about Parks and Recreation, or the Public Library.

More sensitive demographic questions were left to the end: household income, own or rent, and highest level of education.

At the end the lady said “thanks” three times and said God bless you.

Surveys like this cost around $40,000-$50,000 or more.

Contact: TheIrvingHerald@gmail.com (corrections/comments/news tips welcome)

© 2026 Irving Herald LLC. All rights reserved.

Contact: TheIrvingHerald@gmail.com (corrections/comments/news tips welcome)
© 2026 Irving Herald LLC. All rights reserved.

• Have voters sign the paper voter roster with a date and time, and have the election clerk sign the bottom of the roster (see our last post).

• Provide access in recounts to the critical piece of documentation to verify chain of custody and the total number of ballots cast — the Ballot and Seal Certificates — in all recounts (see our first post).

• Provide access to the voter rosters in all recounts (these were in the ballot boxes, but we were denied access to them in our recount).

There are many other important improvements that need to be made — ending countywide voting (which makes recounts impossible), as well as ditching the voting machines. The three suggestions above however are simple. They require no change in law or policy. They also help secure our elections without any additional time or expense.

Making available the critical documentation for recounts? Easy. Having voters sign the paper voter roster? Simple.

These cost-free measures would provide good checks for fraud. Observers in a recount could reconcile the numbers, and look to the voter roster to see if signatures were done in all the same handwriting. If they were, those voters could be found and asked whether they voted.

If implemented, they would be a good deterrent, and would raise trust in our elections, which have come under such fire this decade.

By contrast, the “recount” process we went through was expensive, time-consuming, and frankly idiotic as it provided no safeguards against fraud.

Why don’t we do these things already?

Actually, we did do them in the past. Dallas County did have voters sign a paper voter roster just two midterm elections ago. It was only in 2019 that Dallas County went to countywide voting on election day and changed to electronic pollbooks. The initial rollout was disastrous, as we spent $6 million on ePollbooks that were not secure, and had to be replaced.

Going back to voters signing a piece of paper would be a great upgrade. Signatures on a touchscreen are ridiculous scribbles that are impossible to verify. Why are they allowed? The change came in 2013 by HB 2373, carried by Rep. Stephanie Klick. Just weeks after that bill became law, the Secretary of State approved the equipment and software of a number of companies who were clearly waiting in the wings to get contracts.

Even more than electronic signatures, countywide voting makes voting much less secure. The argument for countywide voting is convenience for voters. But did it make any difference? The Secretary of State provides various reports to the state legislature on elections, which show that countywide voting in Dallas did not increase turnout. In fact, the change in turnout in Dallas County lagged behind the change in turnout statewide in 2019, compared to 2015 and 2017. In 2019 statewide turnout was up 6.6% from 2017, but only 3.2% in Dallas County. In 2015 statewide was up 1.0%, but Dallas County increased only 0.7%.

So the convenience argument does not pan out. And countywide voting is a disaster for election security, as it makes recounts impossible, as we found out first hand.

Here’s why. If a voter can vote anywhere in the county, a recount would require opening the ballot box of every early and election day voting location and go through every ballot to find ballots for that particular race. That is impossible, so instead we relied on the computer printout for how many ballots for the city council race was in each ballot box. Of course, this assumes that the tabulator and aggregator are infallible, the source of all truth. But if we know one thing, it’s that they are not: the phenomena in 2020 of “phantom voters” at Irving Arts Center, or the polling location in Oak Cliff where none of the votes were counted, showed the opposite.

Countywide voting means no election can ever be recounted. You just retabulate the votes until you get to the total the computer printout says, and then you stop.

Combine the lack of real signature verification with countywide voting, and you get a situation asking for cheating. As anyone who has studied US elections knows, there is a long and storied history of election fraud in the United States. The classic technique is to get “repeaters” to vote multiple times. (Edgar Allen Poe actually died after serving as a Whig repeater.) With countywide voting, you can get fraudulent IDs — or just use an easy-to-forge utility bill and declare you have an impediment — and go to different locations.

In the District 3 general election that there was a recount for, we cannot be sure that there were not repeaters. The good news is that it is unlikely that ballots were added after hours, at least to the location with the late night vote dump we were focusing on, as we tracked down the results tapes from the tabulator at that location. The tabulator is the machine at the location that voters put their ballot into, and which actually counts the votes. At the end of the night on election day the election judge prints the tapes from the tabulator. The version turned in to central count is seen below; and the version kept by the judge was the same, lacking only the signature of the clerk at the bottom.

This tape was not produced at the recount, but only in response to an information request, so we did not see the original but only an electronic version. It matched the physical version held by the election judge, which we did examine, with the only difference being the second signature was lacking in his copy.

These two copies verify the date and time that the 160 votes were tabulated at this location. This is a solid verification mechanism, though not completely foolproof, as someone with admin access could have added ballots in the ballot box and taken out an equivalent number for the opposing candidate; this would align with the voting tape and be untraceable in a recount, especially as we had no record of the ballot box seal.

But the printed tapes are a good validation measure. As with the Ballot and Seal Certificates and Voter Rosters, they should be available in every recount. Why wouldn’t they be? Recounts cost candidates thousands of dollars, who would seem to deserve automatic access to the critical election records. This transparency would be a deterrent against fraud. Without seeing the tapes, the voter rosters, and the Ballot and Seal Certificates, how can the total number of ballots cast at a location be verified? If recounts do not have easy access to these, then transparency the public must rely upon Public Information Requests, which can be costly and also can be denied without explanation. All that does is provide peace of mind to potential fraudsters.

Happily, a significant election transparency improvement was implemented during the recent runoff election: the successful printing of the results tapes from each DS200 precinct tabulator at central count before the unofficial Early Voting results were uploaded or transmitted. This allowed election officials, poll watchers, and authorized observers to verify the vote totals recorded by each precinct scanner prior to electronic reporting.

This improvement was at the request of Tami Brown-Rodriguez, the interim chair of the Dallas County Republican Party at the time, who has worked to promote election integrity for the past decade.

Mrs. Brown-Rodriguez recently lost a tightly contested election for GOP county chair to Mr. Monty Montanez. After being elected, Mr. Montanez met with Elections Administrator Paul Adams at central count, and said afterwards that he has “complete confidence in” Adams while adding, “Being there and walking through and asking all the questions and listening to everyone, I felt completely comfortable that our elections are secure.” This view is in step neither with the current Republican president nor with our experience doing a recount. We reached out for comment to Mr. Montanez, and got this response back:

Hopefully we will have him on our show in the coming months.

By contrast, multiple messages and emails to the head of communications at the Dallas County Elections Department over the past couple months have been ignored.

Contact: TheIrvingHerald@gmail.com (corrections/comments/news tips welcome)

© 2026 Irving Herald LLC. All rights reserved.

In the first post, we discovered a serious flaw in the recount procedure — the lack of access to a piece of absolutely critical documentation, the Ballot and Seal Certificates. Without access to these, neither the seals on the ballot boxes nor the total number of ballots can be verified, making fraud untraceable in a “recount” (making it a mere retabulation).

In a follow-up post, we found that concerns about election security are far from academic speculation. This was revealed by a statewide audit of the 2020 elections. That uncovered entire locations whose ballots were not counted, as well as the wild phenomenon of “Phantom Voters” in Irving: voters who “voted” without ever showing up (!) Unfortunately, while the “audit” by the state, which did not deserve that name, discovered this crazy factoid, it failed to get to the bottom of it. It left it documented but unexplained.

At least it was discovered, though, because the e-pollbooks printed out tapes of voters, and as a result the election workers thereby caught the “phantom voters.” Of course, for this past election cycle, Dallas County switched e-pollbook venders who provided pollbooks which do not print out voter tapes at all, so now something like “phantom voters” cannot be caught.

Not comforting!

In this post, we look at another aspect of Dallas County elections that could be greatly improved with a simple change, as we shall see and that, yet again is a critical piece of documentation that was not a part of the recount: the paper voter rosters.

The paper voter rosters are the sign-in sheet that the election clerks make of voters who come to check in to vote. Except, as we shall see, the voters do not actually sign in.

Voter rosters are in triplicate. The election judge puts one in the ballot box, one in the document bag that is turned in to Elections Department staff, and one, pink copy that goes home with the election judge, the paid volunteer who is in charge of a voting location. That pink copy must be held by the judge for 22 months.

For the critical BAPS location (where the late night vote drop happened in this race), we were able to example the pink copies.

Why did we have to track down the election judge for this though? The voter rosters were in the ballot boxes, after all. We saw them there. However, during the recount when we asked if we could look at one, the recount manager said, “No, that’s not part of the recount” and did not let us look at it.

But the paper voter rosters absolutely should be part of recounts. As we opened up the ballot boxes for each location, we were given a computer printout of the number of ballots for the District 3 race. That printout was treated as gospel truth. The counters would go through the box until they found that number of ballots … and then they would stop. But what if the computer print out was wrong, and there were more ballots in the box? The recount would never show it.

As a result, we were just retabulating votes. It was not a real recount.

The computer printout can treated as gospel truth only when access is denied to the records that would flag discrepancies.

In this case there were discrepancies. To wit: the number of voters in section 3a on the Ballot and Seal Certificate should have shown 162 voters, not 160.

What happened? Our detailed examination of the paper voter rosters for BAPS showed two voters with very similar names showed up a little after 1:00pm on election day according the paper voter roster, but only one of them was recorded as voting. The same thing happened again at a quarter to 4:00pm. In both of these cases, perhaps we were dealing with two people who were related, and one of the ballots was not recorded (which would be a problem), or perhaps it was just one person with a name that got entered twice — an error. Errors by election workers happen, which is why state law requires a retabulation only when there is discrepancy of 4.

There would surely be other discrepancies on other paper voter rosters as well. Without access to them, though, everything seems copesetic. Without a doubt, the elections department knows they are opening a can of worms if they let voter rosters be looked at in recounts. Their incentive is to get the recount over with as soon as possible with as few questions raised as possible. It’s the incentive of bureaucracies everywhere.

The recount process therefore revealed that the Dallas County Elections Department wants our elections to seem secure, without taking the obvious steps to actually make them secure. We spend tens of millions of dollars on elections in Dallas County a year … yet we do not take simple steps to actually secure our elections.

Here’s a simple change that could be made: rather than the election clerks writing down the name of the voter on the roster, (a) have the voter sign the roster, (b) put a line at the bottom for the clerk to sign and date, taking responsibility for it, and (c) make them available in recounts for inspection.

That would show fraud simply and easily. A candidate could see in a recount whenever voter signatures are in the same handwriting. As a matter of fact, that’s how Coke Stevenson’s team discovered that the ballots that put Lyndon Johnson over the top in the 1948 US Senatorial election in Texas were fraudulent. His team found the voter list where the final 200 names were names in alphabetical order, written in the same handwriting and same ink. They then went and asked those people if they had voted, and they said “no.”

We might even call them “Phantom Voters.”

Tens of millions of dollars to run our county elections and we cannot do the simplest thing that proved fraud last century.

Again, all the money and procedures seem designed to produce the illusion of secure elections, rather than taking the obvious steps necessary to actually secure them against fraud. Election workers must complete tons of steps and complicated forms to pull off an election; it’s no surprise election workers get confused. But can we not ask the voter to simply sign the paper voter roster? Also, the election clerk should have responsibility for this documentation, and sign the bottom of the form. All this would cost $0, take up zero additional time, and yet be a big boon to actual election security.

Such a change would also provide safeguards when it comes to signature verification. Currently signature verification is a joke. It is not even covered in the training of election workers. One would expect election worker training to include something along these lines: “After the voter signs, check the signature. If the signature does not match the ID, notify the judge, and here’s what you do…” But there was nothing of the sort. All signatures are to be considered valid, apparently.

Also, signatures on a screen are different from paper. People sign paper in their natural, habitual way, and there are forensic protocols to verify it. On a screen? We sign differently. A “signature” is just a ridiculous scribble.

If voters signed the paper voter roster, and that was available in the recount, signatures that looked the same should be able to be compared to their signatures on file. In this case there would be at least the threat of a more robust signature verification. This would be a deterrent for fraud.

The infuriating thing is this change would cost $0 and zero time. There is literally no reason not to do it, unless you do not want elections to be secure. We spend millions to make elections complicated and seem secure, when we could actually make them more secure with simple changes.

We need to demand those changes.

Contact: TheIrvingHerald@gmail.com (corrections/comments/news tips welcome)

© 2026 Irving Herald LLC. All rights reserved.

In the first post, we discussed how the crucial documentation for each ballot box — the Ballot and Seal Certificates — were not made available for the recount ballot boxes. That was striking, since these forms are essential for cross-checking the amount of votes in each ballot box and the seals securing them. The one we did ask for and receive, for a critical location, turned out to be grossly incomplete, with many fields missing, including total votes and the seals on the ballot box. Without this documentation, there would be no way to trace if the ballot box had been tampered with, with ballots added or subtracted.

Is this a far fetched notion though? Perhaps thinking this way is the result of an overheated imagination in the wake of learning certain things, like the fact that the McDonald’s Monopoly game of our youth was completely rigged, or that Jeffrey Epstein won the Oklahoma Lottery? Surely such things don’t happen here in Dallas, right?

Yet consider the audit done by the Texas Secretary of State of the 2020 General Election in Collin, Dallas, Harris, and Tarrant counties. It makes for interesting reading.

This audit showed a lot of wild things, including some things close to home. For instance, on Election Day 2020, at Thomas Haley Elementary School in Irving, there were 499 ballots cast but only 354 check ins (page 82). What the heck?

At least this was not as bad as an Oak Cliff polling location, where 233 people voted with only 156 check ins … but, even more concerning, none of those votes even got recorded. Why weren’t the ballots counted? The report leaves it an unexplained mystery (page 98-103).

So, votes can apparently just disappear, and even a state audit is unable to get to the bottom of it. Deleting a few voters here and there to get to a desired outcome could potentially pass unnoticed.

Unless you looked at the audit logs for the machines. The voting machines, tabulation machines, and pollbooks all generate detailed audit logs of all actions and events that have occurred on the unit, which show every action and event, including access attempts, access of system functions and errors, with their timestamps. The audit logs were not a part of our recount; but shouldn’t they be? When a candidate is spending thousands of dollars on a recount, it seems like there should be automatic access to things like the paper voter rosters, Ballot and Seal Certificates, and audit logs. Why wouldn’t there be?

In the state audit of the 2020 election in Dallas, though, the investigators did not look at the audit logs either, but just focused on election records and procedures, identifying discrepancies without reconstructing the system events with a forensic review.

The failure of the state audit was disappointing, but perhaps it was too big a task to do a full forensic audit of the four largest counties in Texas. The Secretary of State’s Office had their hands full just getting Harris County to fork over their records.

Not that Dallas did such a great job locating and turning over records either. The audit report has this to say about early voting at the Irving Arts Center:

The data for Irving Arts Center regarding check-ins contained significant discrepancies, largely due to the absence of records. For example, while the Daily Report Form and Handwritten Daily Voter Roster reflected approximately 11,500 voters checked in during Early Voting, the available pollbook tape records only showed 11,119 voters. FAD [the Forensic Audit Division of the Texas Secretary of State] is unable to account for the additional voters was due to tapes missing from the records. (Page 94)

Now for something really wild…

From the report:

In reviewing the records associated with Irving Arts Center, FAD observed a log that appeared on October 16, 2020 entitled the “Phantom Voter List.”

The list was tracking a strange phenomenon: voters were voting who did not show up to the polls.

The log reflects that there were names printed on the electronic pollbook tape that did not appear on the handwritten daily roster. An inspection of the tapes and handwritten rosters confirmed this was occurring. (Page 95)

Crazy! It was not just a glitch here or there, but so pervasive that someone created a form to track it. It was entitled: “Phantom Voter List.”

What in the world?? Who even created this form? Nobody seems to know:

Dallas County located some emails between members of their staff and ES&S [Election Systems & Software, which runs the pollbooks, voting machines, and tabulators] reporting the problem. Dallas County believed the problem had been fixed at some point but could not remember when or how. Dallas County also believed this form was used to keep track of what was occurring so that the proper voters were getting recorded as having vote history, instead of the “phantom voters” being printed on the tapes. FAD interviewed ES&S about the issue. ES&S understood the issue to be related to a non-unique identifier having been used when the list of registered voters was uploaded to the pollbook. ES&S also expressed they believed the problem had been resolved at some point, but was unsure how or when. FAD also interviewed VOTEC, Dallas County’s VEMACS voter registration system vendor. VOTEC explained that in preparing for an election, Dallas County uses the information from its voter registration system to export a list of registered voters for upload to the electronic pollbook. Periodically, the county will query the voter registration system to see if any changes or updates have been made that need to be made for the pollbook. VOTEC explained that after the export occurs, they have no insight into how the data is imported into the electronic pollbook. Voter records that are exported only contain two numerical unique identifiers: the driver’s license number and the voter’s VUID. VOTEC said they had heard of this occurring in other circumstances but were unsure of how or why. VOTEC said they reviewed their communications with Dallas County and there was no record of this issue that they were able to locate. (Pages 96-97, emphasis added.)

Goodness.

Nobody really knows anything apparently, and the Forensic Audit Division’s report just documented the problem without any attempt to get to the bottom of it:

The electronic pollbooks were producing unreliable records and for some days the handwritten rosters were missing entirely. It was not possible to fully reconcile the check-ins versus ballots cast at this location due to missing, incomplete, inconsistent, or unreliable records. (Page 97)

At least the issue got flagged so we know about it. But of course the reason it got flagged was because the pollbooks printed out tapes. Dallas County was praised in the report for this:

Dallas County’s practice of printing daily pollbook tapes – showing the names of voters – combined with their handwritten check-in log made the “phantom voter” issue easier to track. (Page 12)

But now, after switching pollbook vendors for this year’s election, we no longer have daily printed pollbook tapes. So what was used to flag “phantom voters” no longer exists. Problem solved!

In the next post, we will talk about another critical piece of documentation that was not available for us to review during the recount, but that we managed to track down, examine, and which revealed further discrepancies: the paper voter rosters.

Stay tuned.

Contact: TheIrvingHerald@gmail.com (corrections/comments/news tips welcome)

© 2026 Irving Herald LLC. All rights reserved.

In these detailed follow-up posts we’ll get in the weeds, in order to share some takeaways and analysis, and hopefully inform any candidates in the future considering or undertaking a recount.

This race was Abdul Khabeer, Kejal Patel, and Tammam Alwan, none of whom got an outright majority in the general election. We covered this thrilling race here.

The race went to a runoff between Khabeer and Patel, however ultimately only five votes separated Patel and Alwan, the latter calling for a recount.

The recount occurred over two days — Tuesday, May 12 and Friday May 15, at Central Count — at the Dallas County Elections Department at 1520 Round Table Dr., in Dallas.

The procedures to request a recount are here, the Secretary of State’s Recount Guide is here, and the law governing recounts is here.

The first day was Early Voting and Mail In Ballots; the second day involved counting Election Day ballots and reconciling them.

Each ballot box is opened and the ballots sorted to find the particular race of interest. There is a computer printout — reports from the Central Accumulator, the main tabulation computer — that states the number of ballots cast for that race at that location. Once the counters get to that number, they stop, and that is why this process should not be called a “recount” but rather a “retabulation.”

To see what the process looked like, here’s video of the livestream:

An erstwhile District 6 City Council candidate has a cameo
serving as a watcher for the Kejal Patel campaign

You’ll see the watchers observing the counters. For candidates doing future recounts, the best practice for watchers is to record results with tally marks as they are called out in a table with candidates forming the columns and ballot styles the rows.

The video stream has no sound, does not really show what is happening, and is not archived online. Cell phones are not allowed in the room. It is unclear why that should be the rule except to make it difficult to document what occurred.

Importantly, we were not given the Ballot and Seal Certificates for each ballot box. We asked for one and it was provided, however, all of them should have been available and ready as each ballot box was examined. That way, we could cross-check the seal numbers on the boxes as they were being broken into with what the seal numbers said on the form. When asked, the Deputy Elections Administrator Malissa Kouba said they weren’t done being processed yet; she did not explain exactly what processing still hadn’t happened ten days after the election.

Here is the one we asked for and received, for the BAPS voting location:

You can see there are problems with the way the judge filled it out. Sections are blank that should be “0” or “N/A” (sections 2a, 2c, 3b, 3c, 3e). More importantly: (a) the signature of the presiding judge omitted the date and time, (b) the clerk did not sign it at all, (c) section 3a, “Number of voters recorded on the Voter Roster” was left blank, and (d) section 2b, “Public Count number from the tabulator screen” was also blank.

Those last two are key numbers, showing the number of ballots counted by the tabulator at closing, and the number of voters as recorded in the paper voter roster.

Why was this form accepted by Elections Department staff when it was dropped off?

Not only did they accept it, they failed to record the seal number for the ballot box. So in our recount, even after requesting and getting this form, it was not possible to verify that the seal on the ballot box was indeed the seal that was put on the box by the election judge. Likewise, there was no seal number for the pouch that contains the USB drive.

This is unnerving. In this circumstance, anyone with an admin password and access to an ePollbook and tabulator at central count could vote as many ballots as they wanted, add them to the ballot box, and this fraud would be untraceable in any recount.

Also, if the vote totals are not recorded, there’s no way to follow state law that mandates retabulating ballots in case of discrepancies.

As we heard on our podcast on this topic, the response the candidate requesting the recount gave when he was told of this law was, “How is it OK to have a three vote discrepancy, when making the runoff was decided by only five votes!?”

He has a point. There were 34 voting locations on Election Day. If each of them is off by 3, that is a total of 112 votes, and in low-turnout municipal district election, that can be a massive number. Anyone with access to the system could delete the votes of three voters for a candidate in each location, controlling any tight race in a way unable to be traced, since a recount — really just a retabulation of the computer’s result, in the absence of access to see the Ballot and Seal Certificates, the paper Voter Rosters, and the audit logs — would not be capable of revealing any discrepancy. Recall that the “recount” just relies upon what the computer says; as soon as the counters get the result the computer printout says is true, they stop. If there is no ability to cross-check the computer numbers, there would be no way to detect this type of fraud.

Contact: TheIrvingHerald@gmail.com (corrections/comments/news tips welcome)

© 2026 Irving Herald LLC. All rights reserved.

Would you vote for that candidate?

No. Rather you would think, "What’s going on here?”

Artificial Intelligence is a brand new technology but Americans are already sick of the cheating and the fakery.

A mayoral candidate in Wyoming suggested turning local government over to an AI chatbot … and got only 2% of the vote. Politicians are using ChatGPT to write their speeches, with absurd results (including British MPs all sounding like Americans).

The idea of an “AI Candidate” does not yet have a face to go with it in popular consciousness.

Vivek Ramaswamy was mocked online as the AI candidate in 2024; however, it was because his answers were too scripted and fluid.

A candidate who was the opposite, who literally has nothing to say apart from ChatGPT would be a new one. To actually elect a candidate like this would be to invite mockery, and to deserve it.

Well, guess what? Irving is on the verge of doing just that:

This was the very first question in the April candidate forum. The question was, “introduce yourself and tell why you’re running.” Irving City Council District 3 candidate Kejal Patel could not answer it.

She is a deer in headlights. She does not seem to be having a good time campaigning. She would likely not enjoy serving on our city council.

And how could she even serve, without the language skills to understand what is going on, or the ability to effectively express herself?

The times when she is not reading answers, she says things like

“My story is rotating hard work and deeply commitment”

or

“We need safety neighborhoods with the childrens and the seniors always.”

However, when looking down and reading, Patel’s answers are in flawless English.

The safe bet is that the answers she’s giving in these cases are written by AI.

No mention here that her daughter goes to Coppell ISD,
even though she pays Irving ISD property taxes

Was she being fed AI answers at the candidate forum?

Yes, she was. After a question would be asked, a person in the audience would prompt an AI tool and copy-and-paste the answer into a note shared with her phone.

She would then read it into the mic.

Take the answer she gave above, for instance:

Don’t believe the AI checkers with their false positives; read her answer yourself. Is this her voice, or is it AI:

Whether or not it’s AI-generated, it certainly differs from the one sentence of Patel’s when she broke off reading, looked up, and spoke straight to the audience:

“I think the stronger schools bring the most stronger communities.”

When Patel is looking up, she talks very differently from when she is reading.

For example, when asked for her biggest priority, she is looking up:

However, when she just looks down and reads, she sounds like AI.

This is even to the point where, in a direct question about conservation, she pronounced that word in her answer as “conversation”:

One more example:

Kejal Patel was the only city council candidate to not do an interview with us. It is obvious why she didn’t. She has no answers of her own.

After the Dallas Morning News met with her, they wrote a whole article praising the incumbent and the other challenger in the race, but had only one sentence to say about her at the end:

Obviously, this whole matter is painful.

Unqualified candidates run for office all the time, though, and even get elected. That’s our republican system of government. We survive.

However such events are normally upsets and should be wacky upsets. This is different. This is the rallying of the whole Irving establishment behind the candidacy of someone who could turn us into a laughingstock as electing the first ChatGPT public official in the country. This is not funny.

We are the 12th biggest city in Texas and a top-100 city in the United States of America. We deserve better than what our establishment is giving us.

At least the Dallas establishment did not back Amber Givens.

What is going on here?

Contact: TheIrvingHerald@gmail.com (corrections/comments/news tips welcome)

© 2026 Irving Herald LLC. All rights reserved.

Subscribe now

It was an exciting night of watching returns last night. Congrats to all the candidates — y’all ran great races. We need good people to run.

Mayor

Not because of the mayor’s race though, which Al Zapanta won as expected. Zhanae Jackson was a surprise vote getter, netting 18% citywide and coming in second place.

In last year’s citywide race 11,054 ballots were cast, so this is a drop of 19%.

Congrats to our mayor elect, Al Zapanta!

District 5

This one was also not surprising, as councilman Mark Cronenwett was unopposed.

District 6 Special Election

The special election in District 6 to fill the last year of Al Zapanta’s term was tight, with Dana Collins giving Fahad Ahmed a run for his money.

If Ahmed had lost just 18 votes, this would have gone to a runoff.

We might see a rematch of this race in a year.

District 3

This one was thrilling. Tammam Alwan had the lead after early voting:

But then when election day results came in, incumbent councilman Abdul Khabeer passed him to take first place

As the night went on, it Kejal Patel was fading and it looked like she was not going to advance to the runoff:

…until the midnight drop, when she gained 104 votes and Alwan gained only 8:

Check out this Joe Biden-level late-night comeback:

No word year on whether Alwan will be requesting a recount. The deadline for that is 2:00pm Tuesday.

As the second-place finisher, Patel will now get the chance to unseat the incumbent Khabeer in the runoff election.

The runoff is Saturday, June 13 — early voting will run Monday, June 1 - Tuesday, June 9.

Subscribe now

Irving ISD School Board District 1

This district covers the area around University Park and Irving Heights:

Irving ISD School Board District 2

This district covers the area around Northgate and north of N. O’Connor:

DART Withdrawal Elections

Of the three referendums to leave DART only Highland Park voted to leave:

Subscribe now

Contact: TheIrvingHerald@gmail.com (corrections/comments/news tips welcome)

© 2026 Irving Herald LLC. All rights reserved.

We have recommendations here and below are all the interviews we did with the candidates.

Mayor’s Race

Al Zapanta

Zhanae Jackson

Olivia Novelo Abreu

Subscribe now

District 3

Tammam Alwan

Abdul Khabeer

Kejal Patel

The only candidate who declined to be interviewed. This video about her candidacy is going viral.

Subscribe now

District 6 (Special Election)

Dana Collins

Fahad Ahmed

Subscribe now

Our overview of the election:

Note on this episode: District 6 candidate Dana Collins messaged us and clarified his views on an important issue, so we issued this clarification here.

Contact: TheIrvingHerald@gmail.com (corrections/comments/news tips welcome)

© 2026 Irving Herald LLC. All rights reserved.

Subscribe now

Contact: TheIrvingHerald@gmail.com (corrections/comments/news tips welcome)
© 2026 Irving Herald LLC. All rights reserved.

Subscribe now

Contact: TheIrvingHerald@gmail.com (corrections/comments/news tips welcome)
© 2026 Irving Herald LLC. All rights reserved.

Subscribe now

Contact: TheIrvingHerald@gmail.com (corrections/comments/news tips welcome)
© 2026 Irving Herald LLC. All rights reserved.

Subscribe now

Contact: TheIrvingHerald@gmail.com (corrections/comments/news tips welcome)
© 2026 Irving Herald LLC. All rights reserved.

Subscribe now

Contact: TheIrvingHerald@gmail.com (corrections/comments/news tips welcome)
© 2026 Irving Herald LLC. All rights reserved.

Contact: TheIrvingHerald@gmail.com (corrections/comments/news tips welcome)
© 2026 Irving Herald LLC. All rights reserved.