New SOS Finds Insignificant Sum
of Fraud in Abbott Election Audit
Capitol Inside
December 31, 2021
Texas Secretary of State John Scott announced on Friday that his office is investigating 576 cases of potential voter fraud in the 2020 general election in connection with a "full forensic audit" that Governor Greg Abbott initiated last fall in four of the state's six largest counties.
Scott capped his first two months on the job as the state's top elections official with the unveiling of a progress report on the initial phase of the election audit that Abbott hatched in late September as cover from Donald Trump. The first set of results were predictable - with only 84 possible violations in Harris, Dallas, Tarrant and Collin counties of laws that prohibit duplicate voting and the casting of ballots under names of people who are dead.
The SOS said it's reviewing 17 cases of votes being recorded in the four selective counties for people who appear to have been deceased before the election. That accounts for 25.4 percent of 67 voters across the state suspected of being dead when ballots were apparently cast for them.
Of 509 possible examples of people from Texas voting in multiple states or jurisdictions, the Secretary of State's office narrowed 60 of those down to the four major counties that the Abbott audit has targeted. Scott said the four counties accounted for 35 percent of more than 11 million votes that were cast statewide in Texas in 2020.
The bottom line of the SOS report between the lines and the data seems to be that the election in Texas was as clean as anyone could expect such a process to be in the nation's second largest state. The numbers of possible offenses are insignificant in a state as large as Texas.
Abbott pulled the audit from his sleeve when Trump had been attempting to badger him into adding an election audit bill that the ex-president favored to the call of a special session on redistricting. Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick, who's served as Trump's campaign chairman in Texas, had been the legislation's most vocal supporter outside of Mar-a-Lago.
Trump falsely claimed at the time that Texas voters knew that the system here was fraught with fraud. But GOP Speaker Dade Phelan refused to have the Texas House consider the Senate measure that would have authorized an audit for the 2020 vote and future elections as well. The Senate proposal would have given local party officials the ability to request election audits at the county level.
Trump threatened to field a primary opponent for Phelan in 2022 if he failed to remove the roadblock on election audits. But Trump failed to back up his words when no one filed to challenge Phelan in round one in his home base of House District 21.
The SOS said it's currently investigating cases where ballots may have been cast in the name of dead people with nine in Dallas, four in Harris, three in Collin and one in Tarrant County. The number of possible cross-state voters who are under review features 27 in Harris County, 12 apeice in Dallas and Tarrant and nine in Collin County.
more to come ... |
