Harris County will be one of four Texas counties to undergo an audit of its upcoming November election results by the Texas secretary of state’s office.
It will be the second election audit in two years for Harris County, though the first to be conducted under election law the state legislature passed in 2021.
Eastland, Cameron and Guadalupe counties were selected for the audit process, as well.
By state law, four counties are to be audited at random every two years, two with a population greater than 300,000 and two counties with smaller populations. There are 18 Texas counties with populations greater than 300,000, meaning the state’s large urban counties will face the most audits. Texas has 254 counties.
The audits are to be conducted after November elections in all even-numbered years, and they will look at elections in the four selected counties from the preceding two years. The counties selected will not have to pay for the audits.
On Twitter, Harris County Attorney Christian Menefee questioned the randomness of the selection process. In response, the secretary of state’s office tweeted a link to a video on Facebook that showed the process — the names of large counties and smaller counties are printed on individual labels, and then the four counties are drawn from a bucket. When an employee drops the labels of the large counties into the bucket, it does not happen on camera.
Menefee’s office put out a statement in which the county attorney called the latest audit a ‘waste of time.”
“Harris County will comply, as we’ve always done,’ Menefee said. “But this is a waste of time. Last year the state coincidentally launched an audit of the county’s 2020 election just hours after former President Trump called on the governor to do so. That audit has been consuming the resources of our Elections Administrator’s office at a time where they’ve had to hold a record number of elections. By the way, that audit has still not been completed.
“Now, the state has ‘randomly’ selected Harris County to be audited for the 2022 election,” the statement continues. “Voters should be asking themselves what purpose these audits serve beyond wasting taxpayer money. As has been shown time and again, our elections are secure. The entire premise of these audits—that there is widespread fraud in our elections—is false.”
[…]
In September 2021, the secretary of state’s office announced it had begun a “full and comprehensive forensic audit” of the 2020 election in four Texas counties, including Dallas, Harris and Tarrant — the state’s three largest counties, all of which voted for President Joe Biden. The audit also encompassed Collin County, the largest in Texas carried by former President Donald Trump.
State law establishing the new audit process specifies: “a county selected in the most recent audit cycle may not be selected in the current audit cycle.” Though Harris County’s 2020 election results currently are being examined under a “forensic audit” by the state, the county still is eligible for a new audit in the current cycle because they are separate audit processes, according to Texas Secretary of State spokesperson Sam Taylor. He confirmed Harris County will not be eligible for an audit in the following election cycle.
See here for all my previous blogging on this topic. The video in question can be found here; it was posted by someone at the SOS office in response to a snarky tweet by Christian Menefee. There was a preliminary result from that first “audit” posted in January of 2021 – I can say I’m not aware of any followup stories about that. This is a bullshit law passed to satisfy the Big Lie, and it’s on the list of laws that have got to go when Dems get a turn.
(There’s also an unofficial “audit” of 2020 primary ballots going on in Tarrant County. I can’t even read that story, I start seeing red two sentences in.)
It’s very frustrating that Texas cannot get the shit stench of the Big Lie and Greg Abbott out of its nose.
We’re like OJ, still on the hunt for the real killer.
Many businesses, non-profits, etc., go through audits. Seems like something as important as elections should also be audited from time to time. It’s not like the Harris County Elections Administrator ran a perfect election, ever.
Karen – Sure, but Harris County was already audited, also by the SOS, right after the election. What is the SOS going to do this time that they didn’t do the last time? And there were already audits that happened after each election anyway. This is a new law that just piles onto that.
Wasn’t it that same new law which required an accounting for ballots, and led to the discovery that the appointed Election Administrator, age 34 and paid $200,000, had failed to include 10,000 ballots in the count for the recent primary election?
Pingback: Who audits the auditors? – Off the Kuff