Texas’ push for election transparency met with unintended consequences

AUSTIN (Nexstar) — New Texas laws met to promote transparency in election results are having some unintended consequences, a top state election official told lawmakers Wednesday.

In 2023, Texas lawmakers passed House Bill 5180, which allows the public to access public election records 61 days after an election. Republicans said it was necessary to promote transparency in elections — which became increasingly important to GOP lawmakers nationwide after former President Donald Trump promoted theories about widespread voter fraud in the 2020 presidential election.

The Texas House Elections Committee held an interim meeting Wednesday to discuss concerns amid the state’s push for election data transparency and open records. It comes after an independent news site, Current Revolt, published an image of what it says is former Republican Party Chairman Matt Rinaldi’s ballot from May’s primary election. Nexstar did not confirm the ballot.  

During Wednesday’s hearing, Christina Adkins — the election division director at the Texas Secretary of State’s Office — reiterated her testimony from a meeting last month with the Senate Committee on State Affairs. Adkins said that the record and image of a ballot is publicly available but all “personally identifiable” information on the ballot that could be used to tie an individual back to their vote should be redacted.

“Revealing how somebody votes after an election, holding up their ballot and saying, ‘this is an individual’s vote selections,’ that act itself is not criminal,” she said. “It’s what you do with that information that could constitute criminal activity.”

Now, election officials are worried that as ballot transparency increases, information about a voter could be easier to discover by analyzing a combination of information available.

Joshua Blank — the research director of the Texas Politics Project at UT-Austin — says that voters can only be identified under specific circumstances, such as when they are voting in a sparsely populated district.

“Anything having to do with the secrecy of the ballot is likely to cause a lot of concern and consternation among voters and elected officials,” Blank said. “But so far, there’s no evidence that the ability to access how individuals voted in the state of Texas is widespread or seriously problematic yet at this point.”

In the case of Rinaldi, finding what is presumed to be his ballot was possible by identifying and cross-referencing several variables that are public information. There was no personally identifiable information on the ballot published by Current Revolt, and Rinaldi has not commented on whether it is his.

“Where ballots have been identified, they’ve been identified in precincts with very few voters,” Blank said. “And that’s what allows for the combination of this unique information to then be made into a positive identification of an individual voter.”

Adkins, along with others who testified at a Senate State Affairs Committee hearing in late May, also said they were concerned about their ability to identify fraud and fake votes if Texas were to revise its policy on transparency.

Currently, 83% of Texans use county-wide voting, a system in which voters can cast their ballot at any location in their county rather than the one assigned to them. Lawmakers are considering ending this system and returning to traditional pencil and paper voting to provide more protection against fraud and prevent people from voting twice.

At the end of the hearing, Adkins said that ballot secrecy issues could be solved by reconsidering precinct distribution and the way in which results are reported. When these two factors are combined in a district with a small enough population and voter turnout, it can be easy to identify who a ballot belongs to.

Any changes to the law would not likely happen before November’s presidential election, as state lawmakers do not meet for the next legislative session until January 2025.

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