On Sept. 23, 2021, the Texas secretary of state’s office announced that it “had already begun the process” of investigating 2020 election results in four of the state’s largest counties. The statement came just hours after former president Donald Trump publicly urged Gov. Greg Abbott to back legislation that would create a review similar to the sham process undertaken by the Arizona Senate.
The Texas effort follows similar democracy-undermining investigations in Arizona, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, and represents another attempt to sow doubt about the election’s outcome and give fuel to the Big Lie. Less than a day after the Texas secretary of state’s announcement, the Arizona Senate’s partisan “audit” presented its findings, which reached the same conclusion that had already been confirmed by actual independent audits — that Joe Biden received more votes than Trump in Maricopa County.
Trump’s demand for the investigation in Texas came nearly a year after he won the state by a 5.6 percent margin. The “audit” will focus on results in Dallas, Harris, Tarrant, and Collin counties, all of which except Collin were won by Joe Biden. After the announcement by the secretary of state’s office that the process had “already begun,” county officials told news outlets that they had received no requests from the office for election materials.
The office followed up five days later with more information, saying that the investigation’s first phase — which includes a voting machine and cybersecurity test that state law already requires in all counties — was underway. The second portion of the investigation is set to take place in the spring of 2022, with the office conducting “a comprehensive election records examination over the next several months to ensure election administration procedures were properly followed.” A document released by the office did not contain information on how the “comprehensive review” would be conducted, but it did state that “irregularities” found in the state’s election procedures “could trigger a full manual recount of ballots.”
The results of the 2020 presidential election are not in doubt and there have been no credible allegations of fraud or misconduct that could have affected the outcome in Texas or any state. There has been no evidence of widespread voter fraud in Texas, and the state’s secretary of state’s office had previously called the 2020 election “smooth and secure.” Dozens of other lawsuits filed by Trump and his supporters failed to show evidence of widespread fraud and have been rejected by judges across the country.
The fallout from these baseless investigations is a deepening sense of democratic distrust and the undermining of the U.S.’s electoral system. American Oversight has launched an investigation into the Texas “audit,” submitting more than a dozen open records requests for related communications from the secretary of state’s, governor’s, and attorney general’s offices as well as the elections departments and county commissioners courts in Dallas, Harris, Tarrant, and Collin counties. We will update this page with new findings.
