Editorial: Audit that found few voting flaws in Tarrant, Texas is legacy of Trump’s election lies

It’s not lost on us that nearly one year to the day, Jan. 6, after a rogue mob of miscreants stormed the Capitol building protesting the presidential election results, initial findings from an audit of the 2020 election in four Texas counties found very little evidence of what former President Donald Trump presumed had to be “election fraud.”

In Republican-run Tarrant County, the results found just 12 instances in which a person also may have voted in another state and only one possible case of a vote being cast in the name of a deceased person. What’s more, there were zero discrepancies in Tarrant County’s manual recount of the ballots.

One benefit of the audit so far is that it found nearly 31,000 duplicate voter registrations. This is a problem, to be sure, but not one that is likely to drastically change the number of votes in any direction. Fraud through these registrations, while possible, would be difficult.

The rest of the counties in the audit fared similarly: Out of the more than 11.3 million ballots cast in Texas, the audit found only 509 possible cross-state duplicate votes, less than 0.005 percent of the total.

Despite a lack of evidence of widespread fraud — Trump won Texas, but by a lesser margin than in 2016 — the former president wrote to Gov. Greg Abbott pressuring him to support audit legislation, which his office did. Months after the election, Abbott signed a robust election integrity bill into law which his office said gave Texas the “tools necessary to conduct a full, comprehensive audit”— to the tune of a mind-boggling $4 million.

The secretary of state’s office revealed the first phase of its audit New Year’s Eve; the second phase will examine election records to see if procedures were followed correctly. Procedures as dictated in state law, or what? What’s the standard? This will include a review of voting machine accuracy tests, among other things.

After Joe Biden was declared the winner, Trump and some Republican senators, including Texan Ted Cruz, demanded emergency audits of election results in “disputed states,” including Texas. Cruz went so far as to say he would object to the certification of Biden’s victory, and his bogus claims of election fraud drove some media outlets to call him out or cut him off during interviews when he made such statements.

Even now, some Republicans aren’t giving up the myth. Republican gubernatorial candidate Don Huffines issued a statement noting the presence of dead voters and possibly some non-citizens on the voter rolls, saying “How are the people of Texas supposed to have faith in their government if they can’t even trust that foreigners don’t influence elections?”

That statement stretches the facts. The report did identify 11,737 possible non-U.S. citizen voter records statewide, but so far, only 2,327 voting records have recently been canceled and of those, only 278 registered voters turned out not to be U.S. citizens.

Republican Attorney General Ken Paxton boasts that Texas’ elections are pretty air tight but still claims that his robust voter fraud unit is a necessity. Sometimes, Paxton seems to work more on Trump’s behalf than Texas’: Remember when he asked the Supreme Court on behalf of Texas to try to overturn other states’ election results? We do.

The Legislature increased Paxton’s voter fraud budget, not because there were signs of it, but as an homage to Trump. Yet the unit closed just three cases of fraud. Even Paxton’s recent record bolsters the case that Texas is a model state of voter election integrity even without the new law.

Without much fraud to combat, the downsides of the law still may outweigh any benefits. For instance, election officials cannot promote applications for mail-in ballots, even as the latest pandemic raises new concerns for in-person voting for the vulnerable and elderly in the March 1 primaries.

Applications are not ballots; every application is vetted, even more strictly under the new rule. Not allowing election officials to promote applications does little to prevent fraud but can hinder voters.

The actions and attitude surrounding the events on Jan. 6 sparked an obsession with rooting out voter fraud that went too far for Texas. It spurred doubt where there was little, cost money that could have been spent elsewhere and added extra measures that might deter some voters. Of course we support election integrity and laws that facilitate it.

But it turns out we already had such laws.

There will always be some fraud, but it should be difficult to commit. So far, it looks like it is.

This story was originally published January 6, 2022 at 5:08 AM.