The State of Texas released the audit for the 2020 general election. Looking at districts across North Texas, the state found no voter fraud, but did see cases of “phantom voters.”
A full forensic audit of the November 2020 General Election in Collin, Dallas, Harris and Tarrant counties found 3,885,875 votes were cast in the November 2020 election. In these four counties, approximately 35% of the 11.3 million votes are cast statewide. From these counties, the audit found no evidence of voter fraud, a massive conspiracy over the past two years.
"From the beginning of my time as Texas Secretary of State, I made clear that audit process was meant to provide factual, objective information on the 2020 General Election process in Texas, and that's exactly what we have released to the public today," Texas Secretary of State John Scott said in a statement.
Scott’s Forensic Audit Division conducted the audit and found that in Dallas county there was a phenomenon called “phantom voting,” in which a voter would check in at the polling station, but the electronic poll book would check in someone else. But that wasn’t the only problem the state faced during the election.
According to the Dallas Observer, the audit found that Dallas County misplaced 318 votes, which were found in February 2021. But only 63 of those votes would have been counted if processed correctly. Inconsistencies were also found in mail-in ballots and the audit showed that 21 votes were counted, yet the ballots were unopened. Harris County experienced the most issues, when mobile ballot boxes with 184,999 voting records did not have a proper chain of custody in at least 14 polling locations. Multiple poll book records for early voting locations and eight Election Day polling locations didn’t match the audit’s logs.
The audit said Collin County’s election “proved to be the model of how to run elections in Texas.” The only issue the county saw was 21 voters in the county received mail-in ballots, even though they were not permitted to vote by mail.
"Texas has some of the strongest and most effective transparency measures in the country when it comes to administering and auditing elections,” Scott said. “The Texas forensic election audit — which is, by far, the largest undertaken in the nation to date — demonstrates how these measures can and should be used to make sure Texas voters can have confidence in the outcome of any given election, as well as which areas counties need to address to restore confidence going forward."
