Texas 2024: Vote Counting and Election Certification Processes
Texas law contains several safeguards to ensure the integrity of its election processes, including the Secretary of State’s oversight power to ensure the uniformity of state election administration and the ability to pursue civil action in court to compel election officials to meet their statutorily required election duties.
See more about these safeguards here.
In contrast to the strong safeguards, the election denial movement in Texas is strong. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton helped further President Trump’s false "stolen election" claims, suing to overturn the election results in Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin—a case rejected by the Supreme Court.
And in 2021, Governor Greg Abbott made “election integrity” one of his emergency items for the state legislature to address, with a law described as “sweeping legislation that further tightens state election laws and constrains local control of elections.” Texas’ elections and election-denying officials will need to be closely watched to ensure that 2024’s elections are run freely and fairly, and decided by the voters.
Due to the strong current of election denialism in Texas and the nature of election administration in the state, there are potential vulnerabilities to the integrity of processes and officials responsible for administering the elections that must be watched. This includes:
Complexity and Scope of Texas Elections. Texas has more counties than any other state at 254. At the county level, there is significant variation in how counties administer elections and to whom they delegate key election responsibilities, causing confusion over duties.
Delay Tactics: Losing candidates have used the election code's permissive recount provisions and election contest rules in bad faith to drag out their challenges. Election denial activists made other challenges claiming counties’ voting equipment was not properly certified and officials face increased recount petitions, which can strain resources.
Politicization of Election Processes: Texas elections have become increasingly politicized by state lawmakers following the 2020 election. Election deniers in the state legislature have pushed sweeping voting bills to change election law, and some of these changes seem to be motivated by extreme partisanship.
Harris County, the largest county in the state that includes Houston, in particular has been a primary focus of these politically motivated efforts. In 2023, the State Legislature passed a bill that abolished the Harris County Elections Administrator and empowered the Secretary of State to initiate administrative oversight of any county with a population of more than four million if there is evidence that a "recurring pattern of problems with election administration or voter registration exists." Harris is currently the only county in the state that meets this criteria. In a sense, this creates a two-tiered election system. It is also the county with the single largest total of Democratic votes, indicating the clear partisan intent of this law.
You can read more about these potential vulnerabilities in our analysis here. See the full Texas Election Administration report here. And get a one-pager summary of the report here.