Texas Rangers find no evidence of efforts to influence 2022 election results in Harris County

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Investigators from the Texas Rangers and the Harris County District Attorney’s office have found no evidence of attempts to influence the county’s November 2022 election, officials said Tuesday.

Gov. Greg Abbott and other Republicans have sharply criticized Harris County officials for the way the state’s most populous county handled that election. Some polling stations experienced shortages of paper ballots and faulty voting equipment. Some locations opened later in the day, resulting in longer wait times for voters.

Those irregularities prompted more than 20 local Republican candidates to challenge the election results — and Republican lawmakers in the Texas Legislature to force the county to disband its election administration office.

A criminal investigation by Harris County District Attorney Kim Ogg into irregularities surrounding the 2022 election has found no evidence of a campaign to suppress voter turnout or influence the outcome of the election, officials said Tuesday.

The lack of paper ballots was not the result of deliberate attempts to unduly influence the election results, Ogg said.

Those shortages occurred, she said, because an election official tasked with making sure each polling place had enough paper ballots failed to do so because he was working two full-time jobs at the same time.

Darryl Blackburn, a former data analyst with the now-defunct Harris County Department of Elections, was charged with five counts of falsifying government documents, a state jail felony punishable by up to two years in prison and a fine of 10,000 dollars; and one count of theft, a third-degree felony that carries a possible prison term of two to 10 years and a fine of up to $10,000. Investigators said Tuesday they found no evidence Blackburn intended to influence the outcome of the November 2022 election.

Blackburn “not only stole thousands of dollars by lying on time sheets,” Ogg said Tuesday, “she stole the right of individuals to vote, a basic constitutional right in our democracy because people on both sides have delayed vote, stopped. in their vote, forwarded in their vote. … This is compounded by the loss of public confidence in our election system in Harris County. That is the real cost and it is priceless.”

Blackburn’s lawyer, Charles Flood, called the charges “an abuse of power” and accused Ogg of “cynically playing politics with people’s lives”.

“This case is not about elections, it’s about time sheets,” Flood said in an emailed statement.

About 22 defeated Republican candidates challenged the results of the 2022 election, most of which were either upheld by a judge or dropped.

Judge David Peeples ordered a new election in a close judicial race in which the Republican nominee lost by less than 500 votes. More than 1,000 votes cast in the race should not have been counted, Peeples said, because some voters had residency issues or did not present a valid form of photo identification, while some ballots correspondence was either incomplete or did not arrive before the deadline. Peeples’ decision was appealed.

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