The Texas secretary of state’s office on Tuesday warned Harris County officials it still is missing information about the chain of custody for certain election materials in its ongoing audit of the 2020 election.
In a letter delivered days before the start of early voting in the November midterm, Chad Ennis, director of the secretary of state’s Forensic Audit Division, urged Harris County Elections Administrator Clifford Tatum to continue cooperating with the audit, as the records provided by the county so far"still leave many questions unanswered.
The office also cited one polling location where it said 401 more ballots were tabulated than expected when compared to the poll book and the number of provisional ballots cast. The letter criticized the county's record keeping — describing over 500 boxes without inventory records — and said county officials have not been adequately responsive to the state's requests or able to produce the volume of paperwork they were expecting to receive. In particular, they pointed to technical difficulties with the drive-through voting locations the county used in 2020.
“For example, we will have staff from our office on hand in Gillespie County this year because we had to train employees from their county clerk’s office after the entire Election Administration office resigned in August,” Taylor said in an email. “Most of our agency’s inspectors are former county election officials themselves, so they have the ability to catch mistakes before they happen and make sure proper chain-of-custody protocols and Texas Election Code laws are followed.
It was not immediately clear if the task force was a first-time initiative for this year's midterm election. The Attorney General's Office did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Beeler questioned the attorney general office's decision to send a task force to Harris County, particularly in an election cycle when Attorney General Ken Paxton is running for reelection.
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