The first round of the requested audit for the 2020 election has come to a close, and the results show a fraction of total votes were duplicates.
According to the Texas Secretary of State’s (SOS) report, only 509 of the statewide 11.3 million votes were revealed as being invalid. The SOS finished reviewing the four largest counties, which account for around 35% of Texas’s votes. The Secretary of State office will continue to check election integrity within the next stages of the audit.
Votes were counted manually in Texas’s largest counties, including Dallas, Harris, Tarrant, and Collin. In Collin County, seventeen discrepancies were found. In Dallas, only ten discrepancies were discovered.
Dallas election officials blamed a data entry error for their invalid votes. Collin County stated that some curbside electronic voting machines did not produce paper ballots, which would excuse the seventeen discrepancies. Out of the four counties, a total of sixty possible duplicate votes are being investigated. Seventeen additional deceased voters were also removed from the rolls in these counties.
The 509 duplicate votes found statewide account for .005% of all votes in Texas during the 2020 election. A duplicate refers to any voter that could have cast a ballot in more than one state, leaving such votes invalid. Texas has reportedly done its part in eliminating any deceased voters for the next round of elections. Around 224,585 deceased people have been taken off the rolls since November 2020.
Accounting for non-citizens on voting rolls will be the main focus of the second stage of the audit. However, 1,193 registrations have already been canceled in Dallas due to failure to provide proper citizenship records, the SOS report details.
Many Texas election officials find the data inconclusive of any certain issues. Remi Garza, the Texas Association of Election Administrators president, stated, “I hope nobody draws any strong conclusions one way or the other with respect to the information that’s been provided. I think it’s just very straightforward, very factual, and will ultimately play a part in the conclusions that are drawn once the second phase is completed.”
