Texas activist Laura Pressley has been stirring the pot in the Lone Star State with a lawsuit that claims to uncover a "vulnerability" in the electronic voting system that could potentially reveal how each voter in Williamson County cast their ballot. Despite this alarming assertion, Pressley has steadfastly refused to disclose the details of her method, choosing rather to make her case in the courts, Votebeat reported. She attributes her discovery to a divine intervention, telling an audience at a Cause of America event that she asked God to present her evidence of flaws in the voting machines and received an answer in the form of an "algorithmic pattern," according to The Texas Tribune.
Interestingly, while Pressley is adamant about her findings, which she said in court filings can match over 60,000 in-person voters to their ballots, there is a cloud of skepticism around the issue with election officials and experts calling for caution and collaboration. Pressley, who is no stranger to legal battles, is proposing a return to preprinted, sequentially numbered ballots, a solution that experts believe could actually make it easier to potentially compromise ballot secrecy. In the words of Tammy Patrick, a former Arizona election administrator now the CEO for programs at the National Association of Election Officials, "In this moment where we're pushing for so much transparency, this is a reminder that we have to sometimes take a step back and make sure that there aren't unintended consequences in the transparency that we are creating."
Officials in Texas, one of the few states that still number ballots, are now grappling with Pressley's lawsuit, which challenges the state's ballot secrecy and its compliance with a 19th-century law related to how ballots should be numbered. Jennifer Morrell, a former election official and an expert on election audits, questioned this approach by suggesting that most states have done away with numbering due to the advent of secure election technology and best practices for voting integrity. "You don't have to have those numbers on the ballot to do that level of ballot accounting," Morrell said.
The standoff between Pressley and Texas officials could have implications for future elections, especially as counties may now be required to fully overhaul their procedures and switch to preprinted, sequentially numbered ballots. This potential change is not only seen as expensive and time-consuming by county election officials but also as a possible step backwards in maintaining voter anonymity at a time when technological advances have provided more secure and less intrusive methods of safeguarding elections. As per Christina Adkins, elections division director at the Texas Secretary of State’s Office, authorities are actively trying to comprehend Pressley's method to address any potential risks it may reveal. "Our attorneys are trying to get us access to that so we can, we can review it, because, sir, if this algorithm does what it purports to do, what these individuals say that it does ... we actually have authority when it comes to certification of any e-poll books. We could do something to address that," Adkins said during a Texas House Elections Committee hearing.
