Two years after candidates launched legal challenges contesting election outcomes in Texas’s largest and smallest counties, courts in both regions have ruled in their favor, overturning the results and paving the way for more legislative and administrative oversight of local elections by state officials.
The last of three 2022 election contests was overturned last month in Loving County, the least populous county in the United States. In 2023, a judge ruled that the elections for County and District Clerk, separated by 12 votes, and Precinct 2 County Commissioner, separated by six votes, were invalid. This year, the result in the race for Justice of the Peace, originally decided by a two-vote margin, was also overturned, with the outcome hinging on the official residence of 26 of the 110 registered voters in the county. Texas’s Eighth District Court of Appeals agreed with a trial court that ten individuals had not made the county their official legal residence, so their votes should not have been counted, and that two voters who were legally able to vote had been prohibited from doing so, bringing the race into the margin of error. “Determining residency under the Election Code has long depended on several factors, including a person’s volition, intent, and action,” wrote Justice Lisa J. Soto.
Her statement could have applied as well to the overturning of an election in the state’s largest county, Harris. Out of more than 1 million votes cast in Harris County’s 2022 contest for judge of the 180th District Court, 449 votes separated Democratic incumbent DaSean Jones from challenger Tami Pierce. Pierce, along with 20 other candidates, filed suits challenging the outcomes of their respective elections. While visiting judge David Peeples upheld the result of 20 of the election contests, he determined that 1,430 illegal votes were cast in the 180th District Court race and that, of those, more than 900 voters either did not live in Harris County or had some other residency-related issue. He ordered a new election.
State Republicans have long called for county election officials, especially those in Texas’s large urban counties, to “clean” the voter rolls—that is, to remove voters who are inactive, dead, or have moved out of the area. In many cases, Democrats in these counties pushed back, framing these efforts as an attempt to “purge” the rolls of otherwise eligible voters. They have maintained this argument even after Secretary of State Jane Nelson’s recent audit brought renewed attention to the issue.
The audit was the result of Senate Bill 1, a landmark election reform bill signed into law by Governor Greg Abbott in 2021 that, in part, statutorily requires election officials to conduct voter-roll maintenance. Since the law took effect, more than 1 million people have been removed from voter rolls across the state, including more than 6,500 noncitizens (1,930 of whom had a voting history); 6,000 with felony convictions; 463,000 who have not returned their voter-renewal certificate or notice-of-address confirmation; 457,000 deceased people; and about 200,000 people who moved, failed to respond to an examination notice, or requested that their registration be canceled.
Democratic leaders from Houston and Harris County called Senate Bill 1 an attempt at “dissuading and concerning voters.” Governor Abbott, said state representative Gene Wu, had a “long track record of making sure people he doesn’t like can’t vote.” Wu was among a group of Texas lawmakers who fled to Washington, D.C. in 2021 to break quorum in an unsuccessful attempt to stop the passage of the election-reform legislation.
Secretary of State Nelson referred the records of the 1,930 noncitizens with voting histories to the Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton for investigation and prosecution. Paxton has also come under fire from Democrats for executing search warrants in August in three other Texas counties over what he says were “allegations of election fraud and vote harvesting” in the 2022 election. The state plans to assign election inspectors to monitor Harris County’s November 2024 election, saying that “the findings highlighted in this audit and the prior audit show that an enhanced presence by the Secretary’s office is necessary for the November 2024 election.” The inspectors will perform checks on election records, monitor chain of custody, and observe ballot handling and counting beginning in October for Early Voting and continuing through Election Day.
Despite resistance and sometimes outright refusal from many local officials, state officials are determined to provide management and oversight of November’s elections in the counties that have historically had election problems. They seem willing to use every tool at their disposal to do so.
Photo: Art Wager / iStock / Getty Images Plus