AUSTIN, Texas (AP) — A group of Texas Republicans wants to audit the 2020 election results in just the large, mostly Democratic counties across the state. If they get their way, they’ll miss many of the real — but minor — errors in the state’s vote count.
The research adds to a pile of evidence that contradicts the belief, widespread among Republicans, that elections in Democratic areas are rife with errors, irregularities and mismanagement. While errors in the tally do occur, research shows they tend to be random and small scale and do not benefit one party or the other.
In Texas, the mistakes, detected by election researchers from the University of Florida, were scattered across 37 of Texas’ 254 counties. They added or subtracted a handful of votes from various candidates with no skew toward one party or the other. Trump apparently received 223 more votes than the 5,890,347 that the Texas secretary of state lists as the Republican’s total. Democrat Joe Biden appears to have received 155 more votes than his listed 5,259,126, according to the research.
But they take on greater significance at a time when Trump supporters are calling for increased scrutiny of Democratic election offices, such as in Texas, where Attorney General Ken Paxton is among the Republicans supporting legislation that would audit the state’s largest counties — most of which were carried by Biden last year.
“If Texas is going to focus on the blue counties, that’s probably the wrong thing to do,” said Michael McDonald, the political scientist who led the team that found the Texas discrepancies. He also operates the U.S. Elections Project, which has tallies of all national elections since the nation’s founding. “They should look at all the counties because there’s something broken with this system.”
Texas’ elections director, Keith Ingram, said the state is working to upgrade its computer system to one that will automatically transmit counties’ final tally to the state, eliminating the need for local election directors to type it in. But that may not be ready for testing until next year’s primary.
“It’s not a huge number,” Ingram said of the discrepancies, which he had not heard of until contacted by The Associated Press. “Obviously, we want everything to be precisely spot on, and we’re going to give counties the ability to do that.”
Election experts say the Texas example shows the need for regular oversight of the system — as opposed to the so-called forensic audits that Trump supporters have backed that don’t follow established procedures and chase wild theories of voting fraud. An audit authorized by the Republican-controlled state Senate in Arizona‘s largest county, for example, conducted a search for bamboo fibers on the ballots after a conspiracy theory circulated that fraudulent ballots for Biden were shipped in from Asia.
(Copyright 2021 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.)
