Texas Gov. Greg Abbott confirms ballot audit of four of state’s largest counties after narrowing Trump victory in 2020
10/16/2021 / By JD Heyes
Texas has long been a red state and our real president, Donald Trump, won the state again in 2020, but the problem is, GOP margins of victory, including Trump’s, have been shrinking over successive election cycles.
For example, in 2000, then-Texas Gov. George W. Bush won his state by nearly 22 points; however, last fall, Trump only won the state by about 5.5 points, and that’s after he won Texas in 2016 by 9 points over Hillary Clinton.
So clearly, the state of Texas is becoming less red, and that is a problem because if Texas ever turns blue, then between California, New York, and the Lone Star State, there will never be another conservative, constitutionalist president like Trump again for the foreseeable future. And the Democrats know that; they’ve been concentrating on turning Texas blue for a decade.
That process has been helped, in no small part, by Texas Republicans, including Gov. Greg Abbott: He has been advertising his state to residents of California and other blue enclaves as a free, liberty-minded alternative to the Nazi-like authoritarianism, high prices and high regulations.
Is Abbott importing blue voters from blue states? And is he inviting his own demise? He’s beginning a process to find out.
According to multiple reports, Abbott has ordered an audit of 2020 ballots in the state’s most populous (and blue, or trending blue) counties. CBS News provided some details:
The audited counties will include the major Democratic strongholds around Houston and Dallas, as well as Tarrant County, which for years has been the largest GOP-controlled county in Texas but went for President Biden last year.
“Under existing Texas laws, the Secretary of State has the authority to conduct a full and comprehensive forensic audit of any election and has already begun the process in Texas’ two largest Democrat counties and two largest Republican counties,” a statement from Keith Ingram, the office’s elections administrator, read.
On Sunday, Abbott defended his decision to conduct the audit in an interview with Fox News host Chris Matthews.
There are audits of every aspect of government,” Abbott said. “We have a state auditor, there’s a federal auditor for the way the government operations work. Businesses that are public companies are subject to an annual audit. Why do we audit everything in this world, but people raise their hands in concern when we audit elections, which are fundamental to our democracy?”
Interestingly, several Texas judges — who are supposed to be apolitical — voiced their opinions about Abbott’s audit.
“This is a weak Governor openly and shamelessly taking his orders from a disgraced former President,” said Judge Clay Jenkins, a Democrat from Dallas County. “Governor Abbott is wasting taxpayer funds to trample on Texans’ freedom to vote, all in order to appease his puppeteer.”
Judge Glen Whitley, a Republican from Tarrant County, chimed in: “The conspiracy theorists who want to come up with all these ways or reasons why this election wasn’t right— they might very well find something else [to doubt]. It’s time to move on.”
In fact, the reality is, there was so much fraud from the last election that red states hoping to remain red have to conduct these audits to find out the extent of the problem.
In Arizona, for instance, an audit that wrapped there last week was initially reported as finding more votes for Biden, but in reality, the audit uncovered systemic problems within the system that were either ignored by polling workers or exploited, according to The Federalist:
These statutory provisions and procedures prove significant because the audit revealed that 15,035 mail-in votes in Maricopa County were from voters who had moved prior to the registration deadline, another 6,591 mail-in-votes came from voters who had moved out of Arizona prior to the registration deadline, and 1,718 mail-in votes came from voters who moved within Arizona but out of Maricopa prior to the registration deadline.
In all, more than 23,000 votes should never have counted in Arizona; Biden won by less than 11,000.
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Tagged Under: 2020 election, ballot audit, blue state, democrats, Donald Trump, election integrity, george w bush, GOP, Greg Abbott, Red State, rigged, Texas, vote fraud
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