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The Secretary of State’s office will again assign state inspectors to observe ballot handling and counting and monitor election records in Harris County, the state agency said in releasing a new audit report outlining problems with the county’s elections in 2021 and 2022.

The audit, released late Friday, shows that election officials in Harris County during those years failed to follow state-mandated rules for maintaining voter rolls, failed to adequately train poll workers, leading to problems at polling places, and broke the law when they failed to estimate and issue required ballots at some polling places.

Harris County failed to adequately train poll workers on how to properly set up and operate the voting system, the audit found, which “may have led to the high number of equipment malfunctions” in the November 2021 constitutional amendment election. The county then failed to adequately address those training issues before the March 2022 primary election, the state said.

Former Harris County Elections Supervisor Clifford Tatum did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the audit’s findings. Teneshia Hudspeth, who took over as elections director last September after state lawmakers passed a bill eliminating the election supervisor position in the state’s most populous county, said in a statement that her office “will continue to work to ensure that the concerns that plagued the now-defunct Office of the Election Supervisor are not revisited.”

In the audit report, the Secretary of State’s office stated that current Harris County election officials, who did not oversee the elections included in the audit, have worked to fix the problems and correct the county’s procedures.

Other counties audited for the 2021-22 election cycle were Cameron, Eastland and Guadalupe. According to the report, election officials in those counties have improved their record-keeping, chain of custody procedures and poll worker training.

The House Elections Committee will discuss the results of the audit and the management of voter registration data in the state on Monday.

Last fall, a preliminary report from an audit specifically looking at Harris County’s November 2022 election found that the county had a different number of registered voters than the state and also a different number of mail-in ballots, though it did not explain the reasons for the discrepancies or suggest that they affected the election outcome. The report also said the county did not adequately train poll workers and did not supply some polling places with enough ballots.

The final audit published on Friday confirmed the findings of the earlier report.

The tests began after the 2020 presidential election

The state began auditing counties after the 2020 presidential election in response to unsubstantiated claims of voter fraud. The goal of the audits is to examine counties’ election procedures and assess whether election laws are being properly followed.

Harris County is dominated by Democrats and is often the focus of election conspiracy theories. It has been audited twice so far. The first time was in 2021, when the Secretary of State’s office ordered a “full forensic audit” of the state’s two largest Democratic counties – Harris and Dallas – and the two largest Republican counties – Collin and Tarrant. That same year, lawmakers passed a major overhaul of election laws that included a provision requiring the Texas Secretary of State to conduct an audit of elections in four randomly selected counties.

In 2022, agency officials pulled four county names out of a bucket – and Harris appeared again.

Although the audit found no evidence of widespread voter fraud in any of the counties examined, auditors have twice flagged problems in Harris. The 2020 election audit report said there were improper evidence monitoring procedures at some of the county’s polling places and that there were discrepancies in data in the electronic voter roll.

Last week, Secretary of State Jane Nelson conducted the drawing of the four counties to be considered for the 2023-24 election cycle: Brazoria, Bell, Val Verde and Real, as part of an annual training for election officials from across the state.

No evidence of voter fraud, but other election problems emerge

As for Harris, the county has been a target of attacks for years due to its heavily Democratic voting practices. The problems in the 2022 election prompted Republican lawmakers in Texas to pass a law that eliminated the position of election supervisor in Harris County. The county challenged the law in court and lost. Last fall, election administration duties were transferred to the county clerk, and voter registration duties are now the responsibility of the tax office.

These problems also prompted 21 defeated Republican candidates to go to court and demand a rerun of the November election. One judge actually ordered a new election after challenging a single judge’s election, concluding that more than 1,000 votes in Harris should not have been counted because, in most cases, there were deficiencies in two types of forms that some voters must fill out at the polling place.

Three candidates withdrew their lawsuits and a judge dismissed the remaining lawsuits, saying that while the district had made mistakes, there was not enough evidence to order a new election.

Last week, Harris County District Attorney Kim Ogg said a Texas Rangers investigation found no evidence of fraud in the November 2022 election. A former county election department employee now faces charges of theft and tampering with government documents. Ogg said investigators found that the employee, whose job at the election department was to distribute materials, illegally held two full-time jobs during the election.

“Set up a process”

Hudspeth has presided over several statewide and local elections since taking office last September, including a primary and a runoff. Although a storm knocked out power to at least a dozen locations during the May runoff, there were no disruptions to voting.

Hudspeth said in a panel at the annual training for election officials hosted by the Secretary of State’s office in Austin earlier this month that her office has assembled a compliance team of about four people who are familiar with every step of the election process and are responsible for properly documenting it. After each election, that team also digitizes and labels ballot papers for use for audit purposes or in election challenges if needed.

“It makes it easier for us to see what we need to gather in the audit,” Hudspeth told hundreds of Texas election officials gathered at the event. “Not every audit is exactly the same. It doesn’t always look the same. It’s not always the exact same information, but what we’ve learned over time is to set up a process.”

Natalia Contreras covers election administration and voting access for Votebeat in partnership with The Texas Tribune. Contact Natalia at [email protected]

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