American Oversight Launches Investigation into Texas Election ‘Audit’
“As we’ve seen in Arizona, these phony audits have nothing to do with election security and are intended to perpetuate false claims of voter fraud to justify new restrictions on voting,” said American Oversight's executive director.
On Wednesday, American Oversight launched an open records investigation into Texas’s recently announced “forensic audit” of the 2020 election in Dallas, Harris, Tarrant, and Collin counties.
Our ongoing investigation into the “audit” in Arizona has already forced the public release of more than 80,000 pages of records, including emails revealing extensive partisan bias and the involvement of conspiracy theorists in the ballot review.
The Texas secretary of state’s office announced this audit just hours after former President Donald Trump publicly urged Gov. Greg Abbott to support legislation that would allow for a “forensic audit” of the state’s 2020 election results, as well as future presidential elections. In September, Abbott signed into law a slate of voting restrictions that makes Texas one of the most difficult states in the country in which to vote.
Ruth Hughs, who resigned as Texas secretary of state in late May (the position is currently vacant), had described the 2020 election as “smooth and secure.” Documents previously uncovered by American Oversight and cited by the Houston Chronicle have shown that the Texas attorney general’s office spent 22,000 staff hours in 2020 prosecuting just 16 cases of alleged “voter fraud.”
“As we’ve seen in Arizona, these phony audits have nothing to do with election security and are intended to perpetuate false claims of voter fraud to justify new restrictions on voting,” said Austin Evers, executive director of American Oversight. “This latest ‘forensic audit’ demanded by Donald Trump is more than a waste of taxpayer money; it’s a dangerous expansion of the assault on our democracy already underway in Arizona, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania.”
The 14 new records requests submitted to Texas ask for the release of audit-related communications from the offices of the governor, secretary of state, and attorney general as well as the elections departments and county commissioners courts in Dallas, Harris, Tarrant, and Collin counties.
Today’s requests are part of American Oversight’s broader investigation into threats to democracy in Texas and across the country. More information on our investigations in Texas is available here.