The Chron provides a coda to that accursed election and all of the bullshit that followed.
When Harris County District Attorney Kim Ogg announced in August that she had found no evidence of election rigging during the 2022 midterm elections, it capped nearly two tumultuous years of speculation and finger-pointing from state and local Republican leaders.
For 21 months, Ogg’s office had been investigating claims that local election workers intentionally withheld ballot paper from Republican voters during the November 2022 midterm elections. As the probe continued, a string of lawsuits and state legislation filed over the matter continued to sow doubts about election integrity in the nation’s third-largest county.
But according to interviews with election workers and documents related to the investigation, Ogg’s office and the Texas Rangers – who assisted in the probe – had likely known there was no election tampering for at least a year before Ogg informed the public.
Court records show that by the fall of 2023, the Ranger who led the election-rigging investigation had no suspect and no evidence of such crimes after interviewing more than a dozen witnesses. Meanwhile, legal bills for the election workers under investigation had added up to more than $700,000, all of which the county will pay with taxpayer funds.
Harris County prosecutors presented information related to the matter to a grand jury on Feb. 1 of this year, but they also did not name a suspect or an alleged offense, according to court records. The grand jury’s term ended that day, and six additional months passed before Ogg told the public the investigation was over.
A spokesperson for Ogg, a Democrat who lost her primary election and has only a few weeks left in office, did not respond to multiple requests from the Chronicle to interview her. In the past, Ogg has said that she was simply following state law, but her critics claimed she was instead continuing a pattern of targeting fellow Democrats with whom she disagrees.
Voting rights advocates also said that the drawn-out nature of the investigation ended up bolstering Republicans’ continued efforts to make Texas voting laws among the most restrictive in the nation in the name of election security — and to target Harris County.
“When ballots are being counted, you want it to be swift and accurate,” said Emily Eby French, policy director for the nonprofit Common Cause Texas. “And we should expect the same of investigations into elections. And it is frustrating when that doubt is left open.”
The impact of the lingering doubts in Harris County was profound.
As Ogg’s probe began, nearly two dozen Republican candidates who had lost their local races quickly filed lawsuits contesting the election results, prompting lengthy court battles. State lawmakers also abolished the office in charge of administering local elections, leaving the task to two different locally elected officials rather than a sole appointed one. Election duties are now in the hands of the county clerk’s office, while voter registration is the job of the county tax-assessor collector.
Meanwhile, Republicans criticized Harris County elections administrator Cliff Tatum and his staff for staying largely silent on the problems at the polls in 2022 and declining to testify about them before the Legislature — even though those same workers were under criminal investigation the entire time and were advised by their attorneys to remain silent, according to their legal bills.
Tatum declined to be interviewed for this article, as did numerous other former county election workers.
Ogg’s spokesperson, Joe Stinebaker, would not address why she waited so long to inform the public of her findings. In a statement to the Chronicle, he said that she opened the investigation “to comply with state law.” He also claimed that the probe did in fact confirm “intentional fraud” by one former county election worker, Darryl Blackburn.
However, Stinebaker was actually talking about unrelated misconduct that the Texas Rangers dug up about Blackburn. The Rangers say he lied on his timesheets and stole money from the county while holding a second job in the private sector during his time at the elections office.
Blackburn’s lawyer has called the accusations an “abuse of power” by Ogg’s office and said he is innocent.
Blackburn has been charged with tampering with government documents and theft, which are felonies. He’s not accused of trying to suppress anyone’s vote.
While it remains unclear why Ogg waited so long to announce the outcome of the investigation, a strikingly similar situation that occurred 1,600 miles away in Luzerne County, Pennsylvania, offers a contrast to her approach.
On the same day as Harris County’s ballot paper shortage, more than a dozen of the 143 polling stations in Luzerne County also ran out of paper. Republican activists there also claimed that stations in right-leaning areas were disproportionately impacted. And the local district attorney, Republican Sam Sanguedolce, agreed to investigate.
Seven months later, Sanguedolce announced the findings in a lengthy report. The shortages were solely the result of high staff turnover and inexperienced election workers, the report said. In addition – just as the data showed in Harris County – there was no basis for complaints that the paper shortages had been concentrated in Republican neighborhoods.
“This would be about the stupidest way to try to criminally influence an election,” Sanguedolce told a Pennsylvania news outlet.
Ogg would not announce her findings for 14 more months.
See here, here, and here for some background. This is a long quote but there’s a lot more, so go read the rest, if only to infuriate yourself again about how stupid and dishonest this whole experience was. The paper shortage was a screwup, no question. But that’s all that it was, and in the end the effect was minimal. We deserved better.