This is an excerpt from the Progress Texas Daily Dispatch, delivered every weekday by Progress Texas Communications Director Chris Mosser. Rapid response on the breaking news stories Texas progressives need to know—all in less than 10 minutes!
Click below to listen!
Fears about Republican monkey-wrenching of the election—now with two days of early voting to go and Election Day five days away—may be getting underway up in Amarillo, as the Potter County Republican Party is asking a notoriously conservative activist federal judge to preemptively block certification of the November 3 election results until every paper ballot in the state is counted by hand, arguing that voting machines could be vulnerable to hacking by foreign adversaries or sophisticated artificial intelligence programs.
Yunior Rivas at Democracy Docket notes that this lawsuit doesn’t allege that any Texas voting machine has actually changed votes or that any previous election results were incorrectly reported—this case uses purely hypothetical threats to justify a very real legal challenge. Texas already requires post-election hand-count audits of a portion of ballots, but the Potter County GOP is pushing the notion that only a complete, statewide hand count can guarantee accuracy. Their request would require officials to hand-count millions of ballots before certifying results—converting the state’s existing verification process into a much more extensive, time-consuming, and likely actually less accurate procedure that introduces the element of human error.
Colleen DeGuzman at the Texas Tribune says this case was filed in Amarillo and assigned to—you guessed it—U.S. District Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk, whose name hasn’t come up in a minute, but he’s long well-known to Texas progressives who are paying attention: Kacsmaryk is a Trump appointee whom Ken Paxton, as Attorney General, has leaned on in “judge-shopping” for years, and he has thus presided over a broad array of high-profile conservative legal challenges—including one in which he ruled in favor of anti-abortion groups challenging the FDA’s approval of the abortion medication mifepristone, threatening access to the drug nationwide.
The actual legal question before Kacsmaryk is whether speculative concerns about potential hacking are enough to justify such a sweeping change in state election procedure. The plaintiffs acknowledge they have no evidence of an actual miscount, which could complicate their ability to show they have the concrete injury required to bring a federal lawsuit. However, this judge has shown himself to be anything but unbiased—so, brace yourself for yet another sizable right-wing monkey wrench to come flying out of the Texas Panhandle over the next few days.
DONATE
Your donation supports our media and helps us keep it free of ads and paywalls.
