Former Texas House District 108 candidate Barry Wernick is calling out the Texas Secretary of State’s Office for allegedly pushing to make election integrity worse in the Lone Star State.

The issue started when Christina Adkins, director of the agency’s elections division, made a recommendation to the Texas House Elections Committee to eliminate reporting of precinct results.

When a committee member asked Adkins what the consequences of such a move would be, she responded:

“The folks that would be the most upset about changing … are going to be the data analysts, a lot of the folks that work for campaigns, where they like to be able to identify patterns and see where voters are coming from. They may lose a level of granularity there, but they aren’t going to lose all granularity.”

She said there were ways to “still allow individuals to know and understand where their voters come from — but to do it in a way that is more protective of voter privacy.” However, she did not specify what those ways would be.

Wernick rejects the notion that decreasing transparency is the solution. He tweeted, “There is no discussion on the fact that: NO PRECINCT RESULTS = NO ABILITY TO AUDIT, and would therefore render the election illegal per federal and state laws. This is a foolish recommendation by the @TXsecofstate, who is required by law to enable and support auditability.”

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The Dallas Express sat down with Wernick and Shannon Barnett, an election reform activist, to ask what the solution could be.

Wernick thought the answer was simple.

“Return to what Shannon is fighting for: in-precinct voting,” he said.

A well-publicized loophole in Texas’ election laws allows people who vote outside of their precincts to have their ballots obtained and identified through a series of open records requests. This infamously led to the leak of former Texas Republican Party Chair Matt Rinaldi’s primary ballot.

There was also some indication that Senate candidate Rep. Collin Allred’s (D-TX) primary ballot might have been leaked. However, Wernick clarified to DX that this could have been Allred’s wife’s ballot mistaken for her husband’s. In any event, the violation of the sanctity of the secret ballot has created concern among the voting public, and the issue goes further than just Rinaldi and the Allreds.

Wernick first became interested in this issue after a series of irregularities in his extremely close primary race against Rep. Morgan Meyer (R-University Park), which was decided by around 500 votes. He claimed he noticed issues ranging from thousands of missing ballot seals to absent election judge signatures.

He said he then realized he could identify thousands of voters’ ballots, including high-profile figures such as Sen. Angela Paxton (R-McKinney) and Texas House Election Committee chair Rep. Reggie Smith (R-Sherman).

This legal loophole applies to anyone who votes outside their precinct. In counties like Tarrant, Harris, Dallas, Bexar, and Travis, where there is both county-wide voting and a large population, this creates a heightened degree of exposure for voters. However, if someone votes within their precinct, their ballot is secure.

Barnett has been zig-zagging across the state in recent months campaigning for “hand-marked, hand-counted paper ballots cast in-precinct,” DX previously reported.

She said she sees this as the only way to have secure elections with secret ballots that are also auditable. As her non-partisan petition for election reform, My Vote Counts In Texas, gains steam, laws cited by Wernick seem to overwhelmingly support her argument that Texas should return to the electoral system it previously had for decades.

There are a variety of federal laws, such as the Help America Vote Act, that guarantee a secret ballot and others, such as the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and 18 U.S.C. § 597, that seek to isolate the ballot as much as possible from coercion.

State law is even more explicit. Texas Election Code Section 62.0115 unequivocally guarantees that citizens should have the right to “vote in secret and free from intimidation.”

Regarding the elimination of precinct reporting, Wernick tweeted case law that supports maintaining precinct-level reports. “In Sewell v. Chambers, 209 S.W.2d 363 (Tex. App. 1948), the court is explicit that “…there are public interests which outweigh the individual’s right to have his ballot kept secret,” he wrote.

Then he followed up with how the appellate court reached that decision:

“For the basis of its reasoning, the court cites Gantt v. Brown et al., 238 Mo. 560, 142 S.W. 422, 425, ’The stability of our government is dependent upon the honesty and purity of the ballot the secrecy of the ballot had better be scattered to the four winds, rather than have such secrecy shield corruption in elections, * * * better a thousand times that the individual’s vote should be spread upon canvas under calcium light than that fraud should be locked up within the lids of official ballot boxes and poll books with no known legal method of exposing such fraud.’”

Other election integrity experts with no connection to Wernick or Barnett were likewise appalled at the idea of eliminating precinct reporting.

“How would that possibly be good? That’s how precinct chairs count weighted votes for the county convention,” Ian Camacho told DX, “And it’s also a way to determine trends on the smallest of electoral levels.”

“We shouldn’t be eliminating precinct results, we should be returning to precinct-only voting and get rid of countywide voting, which is how people are able to unmask people in the first place,” he added.

Camacho is a famed election integrity activist whose work has led to convictions for election fraud, and he has helped multiple jurisdictions identify violations of law. He once told DX, “Voter fraud isn’t rare. It’s just rarely prosecuted.”

Camacho documents his fights for election integrity in his Substack newsletter, which readers can subscribe to for free.