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Not a politician. An engineer with a mission.

Dave Muehlhaeusler
for Dallas County District Clerk

2026 Mid-Term General Election
Early Voting: October 19–30, 2026
Election Day: November 3, 2026

Dallas County needs a Quantum Leap in court records.

The Dallas County District Clerk's office manages the legal records of 2.6 million people. Criminal dispositions. Civil filings. Family court documents. Protection orders. Warrants. Every Dallas County District Court action costs every county resident — in their pockets through the cost of maintaining the courts. Everyone's future is affected by the records this office is responsible for keeping accurate.

For more than a decade the current administration is still practicing daily scanning of handwritten forms for resetting criminal court hearings as a "Pass Slip" case event, producing English-only county forms and documents, and using other generic catch-all codes that hide what actually happened in court [see Misc. Events below]. When the current administration began overseeing a technology rollout using their own data three years ago it resulted in 26,000 errors due to poor practices. Many of these practices are still not resolved today. This is an ongoing liability.

This campaign's goal: Quantum-Records:

True digital records — not scanned images of handwritten documents.

Bilingual access — forms and information available in English and Spanish, broadly serving the residents of Dallas County.

Case Events Coded specificity — every court event accurately recorded with a specific, searchable code — not an overused generic label that hides the truth.

Dallas County deserves a court records system that serves everyone. Quantum-Records is how we get there.

The numbers that demand change

26,000 → 13,300 criminal record errors acknowledged by the current office — Reported before the Dallas County Commissioners Court December 5, 2025. After essentially three years of remediation, $290,000+ in public funds spent for clerk staff to make corrections, far less than the actual cost to litigants.

Court Order 2024-1335 — November 2024 — 12 exempt employees, 3 months, Estimated Total Cost of $90,101.

Court Order 2025-0943 — September 2025 — 8 exempt employees, 9 months, Estimated Total Cost of $120,000.

Court Order 2026-0282 — March 3, 2026 — 8 exempt employees, 6 additional months, Estimated Total Cost of $80,000.

But critical questions remain unanswered. How do you resolve this many errors in closed cases? Were the individuals affected by these errors ever notified? What were the real consequences — to their records, their lives, their futures — caused by these errors while they went uncorrected unknowingly?

28,569 open arrests in the Texas DPS system from 2021 to 2025 — cases whose outcomes were never correctly reported to the Texas Department of Public Safety. Many of these cases are the responsibility of the Dallas County District Clerk. Open arrests affect employment, housing, professional licensing, and immigration proceedings for thousands of Dallas County residents today. Reported before the Dallas County Commissioners Court September 1, 2026.

70 people overdetained in Dallas County jail in just the first six months of 2026 — held past their legal release date while two systems that should communicate with each other did not. Reported in public testimony before the Dallas County Commissioners Court August 11, 2026.

95.5% of all statewide Miscellaneous Event court filings are massively overused and concentrated right here in Dallas County District Court — 4,200 out of 4,400 statewide — a generic catch-all code that hides what actually happened in thousands of cases. The difference of just 200 filings representing the entire rest of the state of Texas combined.

99.9% of all statewide misspelled "Miscellanous Event" filings — a locally configured error repeated tens of thousands of times, actually 77,000 times — are in Dallas County District Court.

See Coding Failures

The Quantum-Records Platform — Day One

Six reforms within existing statutory authority. No new legislation required. No new budget approval needed. Initializing on Day One.

Mandate structured e-filing fields — eliminate handwritten scanned forms that hide what actually happened in court.

Launch automated exception reporting dashboards — make the backlog visible and accountable in real-time.

Working as an alliance rather than competing departments with the Sheriff's office and the District Attorney's office — build a pre-trial jail dashboard connecting the systems of the court docket to Lew Sterrett so no one is held past their legal release date undetected.

Enforce form rejection for non-compliance — stop bad data at the door before it corrupts the record.

Transition to event-driven automated notifications — cases move toward resolution between court dates instead of simply being rescheduled.

See Platform Roadmap

About Dave

Dave Muehlhaeusler is a retired mechanical engineer with 27 years of experience in product development, problem solving, quality control, and data management. He became a Dallas County court litigant in 2020 and discovered firsthand what happens when a records system operates without engineering discipline — errors dismissed as clerical mistakes, patterns ignored, accountability absent — leaving litigants victimized by the very record system meant to serve them.

He has attended Dallas County Commissioners Court meetings, testified publicly, filed public records requests, and built a documented evidence record that connects the criminal records crisis directly to real human consequences for Dallas County residents.

He is running because the District Clerk does not create laws — the District Clerk follows the law, the Texas Constitution. It is a records management operation. And it needs someone who has spent 27 years making records management a non-negotiable standard — not an aspirational goal.