The office of the Texas Secretary of State (SOS) has released their findings from their audits of the 2021 and 2022 elections in Eastland, Guadalupe, Cameron, and Harris counties. These audits revealed not only the necessity for more oversight, but that legislation that has been implemented, increasing scrutiny on county election officials, is working.
First of all, the 254 Texas counties have been running elections that are mostly autonomous with very limited oversight. While the Election Code is very detailed on how elections are to be run, there are very few penalties for breaking or ignoring the code. There is also a lack of standardization of written policies and procedures, forms and reports, or requirements for chain of custody.
These four audits helped the SOS to see what activists and advocates have been seeing. Our election offices need improvements. Some need more than others, but all need better attention to detail. Where they fail, it is typically in missing or incomplete paperwork, a lack of training for election workers and officials, or mismanagement of equipment and resources, the problems were in the processes or lack thereof.
All four counties did show evidence of voter roll list maintenance activity. Deceased voters, convicted felons, voters who have moved, and other ineligible voters are being investigated and removed or suspended from the rolls in some capacity. This likely has quite a bit to do with the passage of SB1113 in 2021, giving the SOS the ability to withhold funds from counties not keeping accurate voter rolls. To be clear, much more work is needed in this area and the audits do note that these activities must be prioritized.
These audits themselves are the result of SB1, authored by Senator Bryan Hughes and passed in the Texas legislature in 2021. The counties are chosen at random but 2 must be small and 2 must be large with size defined by a population of above or below 300,000. The audits cover all elections conducted in a two year period.
Eastland County
Eastland County is in north central Texas, about 100 miles west of Fort Worth with the number of registered voters just over 12,000. A county election administrator along with two full-time staff members are in charge of ensuring a secure election.
While the county may have had election security and contingency plans, nothing was available in written form. It is incumbent on the county to have a written plan for all contingencies and to properly train staff to be prepared. Eastland also lacked clear, written training materials for election workers. This led to incomplete or missing records. Christina Adkins, Director of Elections for the SOS, testified in a House Elections Committee Interim Hearing that these records are crucial because they “tell the story of the election.” Without them, it is very difficult to fully audit the election.
Even when those records were completed, they were not stored properly. Access to election records was not restricted to employees of the elections office. Other county employees could not access ballots, but did have potential access to other election records. The records were also vulnerable to damage from leaks and other hazards.
Eastland was praised for developing and continuously improving their chain of custody procedures throughout the audit process, increasing auditability and trust in their elections.
Guadalupe County
Guadalupe County is directly northeast of Bexar County and San Antonio and has almost 120,000 voters. Nine full-time and 2 part-time employees under the direction of the county election administrator keep their elections running smoothly.
Their audit tells a different, more proactive story than Eastland. Guadalupe has an extensive policies and procedures manual. They routinely perform post-election assessments and are consistently seeking areas of improvement. During the audit period they experienced a ransomware attack and have used that experience to hone their skills to prevent anything similar in the future.
Guadalupe County has a robust and thorough training program for staff and election workers. They even have a training program for citizens who want to become more engaged in the election process. They call it their Citizens Election Academy and it is a great way for activists and advocates to learn exactly how elections in Guadalupe run, ask questions, and make suggestions.
Cameron County
Cameron County sits in the southernmost tip of Texas and has nearly 227,694 voters as of November of 2022. Their elections are run by a county election administrator and 13 full time staff members.
Notably, this county has an “in-depth election worker training program that provides both
legal and procedural training as well as hands-on training with all election equipment.” They really excel at preparing everyone for the election and for security and contingencies. Cameron County really raises the bar in these areas.
Where they needed improvement was in reporting ballot by mail activity. The data for voters who requested a mail-in ballot was not properly provided to the state. This meant that voters could not track their ballots through the process or correct them through the online system.
Harris County
Harris, the home of the city of Houston, is the largest county in Texas and the third largest in the United States. It has over 2.5 million registered voters served by, at the time of the audit, a county election administrator and 145 full-time election staff members. In 2023 SB1750 ordered that control of the county’s elections would return to the County Clerk’s office. Since then, according to Christina Adkins and others, elections in Harris County have greatly improved.
In May of 2021 Harris County transitioned from all-electronic voting machines to those with paper ballot backups. This was a great move for election integrity, but was very poorly executed. They did not require that poll workers complete hands-on training with the new equipment. This resulted in chaos with equipment issues. Those issues continued into the November election of that year and the March Primary Election in 2022.
March’s 2 page ballot further complicated the election process and resulted in 33 locations having gaps in voting of one hour or more, 19 of those being in the first hour. Fortunately, the newly required reconciliation forms uncovered that the county had failed to count 10,000 votes. The county did not have a system for ensuring that each thumb drive was counted, one containing mail-in votes had been missed.
The November 2022 election was also filled with a lack of training, equipment malfunctions, numerous spoiled ballots, and dozens of polling locations running out of paper. Not only did the county not follow state guidelines for paper distribution, they didn’t even follow their own. The person allegedly in charge of this process has now been charged with 6 felonies including allegedly falsifying time sheets because he was working another full time job. He was even at this other job on Election Day. The fact that this wasn’t caught at the time is astonishing.
Fortunately, Harris County is under new leadership. Tenisha Hudspeth, the County Clerk, has experience from working for former County Clerk Stan Stanart. Adkins testified that her office is in daily communication with Harris County now and that the county is actively improving their policies and procedures.
We must stop these catastrophic failures before they start by having more consistent standards. The legislation that has already been enacted is bearing fruit. We need to add more in this next legislative session.