Texas activist frustrates election officers with lawsuit about menace to poll secrecy

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Laura Pressley claims to carry the important thing to what must be a carefully guarded secret: how each voter in Williamson County has voted.

Her story about how she obtained maintain of this data goes one thing like this: She had gathered clues via scores of public-records requests she had made over time to the Williamson County elections division, in search of a breakthrough in her quest to search out flaws with the digital voting machines that Texans use to solid their ballots.

Someday, she fell to her knees, weeping, and requested God to disclose to her the vulnerabilities she was sure existed, she advised attendees at an April social media occasion on poll secrecy points organized by the right-wing group Explanation for America, in line with an audio recording reviewed by Votebeat. “I said, ‘Dear Lord, show me the pattern, because I know it’s here.’”

Round 20 minutes later, by her account, “the Lord showed me the pattern, and I found it. I was literally in shock — emotional shock — to actually have the knowledge of how every voter in Williamson County votes.”

State and county election officers are anxious to know whether or not, in reality, Pressley has found out how everybody within the county, north of Austin, voted — and, extra broadly, whether or not she has uncovered a significant vulnerability that would threaten poll secrecy for voters statewide.

However she’s refusing to share particulars with them. As an alternative, she’s suing the state, and proposing a purported answer involving poll numbering that election know-how consultants and election directors say would return Texas to an out of date system that additional undermines poll secrecy.

Defending poll secrecy has develop into a extra pressing concern after Texas made it simpler lately for the general public to entry huge collections of election data and datasets within the identify of transparency. Votebeat and the Texas Tribune have reported that the broader availability of the info and data has made it doable, in restricted cases, to find out the poll selections of particular person voters and violate their basic proper to a secret poll.

In response, the Texas Secretary of State’s Workplace in June advised native election officers to redact sufficient data from public data to make such connections unattainable.

The query now’s whether or not Pressley has discovered a separate vulnerability, or is engaged in the same cross-referencing of public data, as election consultants suspect is extra seemingly. Both method, election officers should discover a option to perceive what she’s doing effectively sufficient to guard the key poll.

Pressley, who’s intimately aware of election procedures, has mentioned in court docket filings she needs to disclose how her methodology works solely to a federal decide, ideally within the courtroom, although she mentioned she would even be prepared to share it — if required to — with a single lawyer for the state Lawyer Normal’s Workplace. In court docket filings, she mentioned she needs to exclude state and county election officers from seeing it “so that no more harm is done.” Her methodology depends on public data, she mentioned within the filings, and if she explains it publicly, anybody may use it.

Amid the push for larger transparency, some election administration consultants say, voters want to know that there are some parts of the method, particularly associated to safety, that election officers merely can’t disclose.

“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,” mentioned Tammy Patrick, CEO for applications on the Nationwide Affiliation of Election Officers and a former Arizona election administrator. “Whether it’s ballot secrecy or a vulnerability of the system, that’s where I think election officials are still struggling to find that balance.”

Texas is amongst just some states that also quantity ballots

Texas is one among a small variety of states whose legal guidelines require numbering ballots in any respect, however the way in which counties deal with the numbering can differ considerably from the letter of the regulation — a distinction that Pressley has seized on in her lawsuit.

Years in the past, Pressley advised listeners on the April assembly, “the Lord said, ‘focus on the ballot numbering.’” And for the higher a part of a decade, that’s what Pressley has executed.

In her newest lawsuit, she’s accusing the state of undermining poll secrecy and failing to adjust to a state regulation dictating how numbers on the ballots ought to work.

She’s alleged the identical factor in earlier lawsuits, and people by no means obtained a listening to. However within the newest case, Pressley is particularly concentrating on the way in which some Texas ballots are printed out with a randomly generated quantity that’s used for auditing functions and to forestall double voting. She asserts that her methodology of tying voters to their poll selections is linked to that randomly generated quantity.

In a telephone name, Pressley declined to reply particular questions, citing the litigation, however referred Votebeat to her court docket filings and her legal professionals. In an electronic mail, lawyer Frank ​​Dobrovolny, who represents the plaintiffs, asserted that election officers bypassed and violated election legal guidelines and consequently, “the ballot secrecy of over 60,000 in-person voters in Williamson County has been breached,” prompting the lawsuit asking the court docket to intervene.

In court docket filings, Pressley refers to her methodology as an “algorithmic pattern,” and alleges {that a} failure by state and native election officers to adjust to a ballot-numbering regulation has allowed her to match over 60,000 in-person voters to their ballots throughout a number of Williamson County elections, together with these of native elected officers.

She mentioned in court docket filings that a pc science professional, Walter Daugherity, verified her work. Daugherity, a senior lecturer emeritus in laptop science at Texas A&M College, was an professional witness for the lawsuit filed by former Arizona GOP gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake. Trial and appellate courts in Arizona have dismissed Lake’s claims of election malfeasance.

Election officers deny violating election legal guidelines.

Consultants query Pressley’s ballot-numbering answer

The answer Pressley requires in her lawsuit is a strict interpretation of a Nineteenth-century Texas regulation requiring sequential numbering of ballots. She is asking the court docket to make counties use preprinted, sequentially numbered ballots, beginning with 1.

Such a way would require extra time and assets from county election officers to redact these numbers if requested by the general public for inspection. It’s additionally dearer for taxpayers, since that sort of preprinted poll inventory can’t be reused in future elections.

Consultants have repeatedly mentioned sequential numbering this fashion may make it simpler to breach poll secrecy, not tougher. It’s cheap to imagine that any numbering of ballots raises the danger of them being tied later to a particular voter. That’s why many states don’t require, and even enable, ballots to be numbered.

Texas stands out as one of some states which have continued doing so, based mostly on a regulation handed within the 1800s that was meant to forestall double voting. Others embrace North Carolina, which numbers its early-voting, absentee and provisional ballots, and Michigan, which prints the poll quantity on a removable stub.

Consultants say advances in election know-how and finest practices for safety, auditing, and poll secrecy have led most states to maneuver away from the observe. Most states have extra trendy chain-of-custody necessities for post-election reconciliation, mentioned Jennifer Morrell, a former election official and an professional on election audits. “You don’t have to have those numbers on the ballot to do that level of ballot accounting,” she mentioned.

The Texas regulation says ballots must be sequentially numbered, beginning with 1, and distributed to polling locations in batches in order that “a specific range can be linked to a specific polling place.” They’re imagined to be “distributed to voters non-sequentially in order to preserve ballot secrecy,” the regulation says.

However counties’ voting methods and practices differ, and the kind of voting gear they use additionally impacts how they adjust to this specific regulation. For instance, some counties buy clean poll paper that voters themselves insert right into a touch-screen voting machine, generally known as a poll marking system, on the polling place. As soon as the voter finalizes their candidate picks, the system prints the voter’s poll and provides a randomized quantity to protect poll secrecy. In different counties, together with Williamson County, a randomized serial quantity is printed on the poll paper earlier than the voter makes their candidate selections.

The Texas Secretary of State’s Workplace and the Texas legal professional normal have each issued steering saying that randomized numbering complies with the regulation. However Pressley doesn’t agree, and has repeatedly argued that the observe is unlawful and fewer protecting of voters.

In June, the Texas Secretary of State’s Workplace launched an advisory that prohibits counties from utilizing digital ballot books — the gear used to test in voters at polling websites — to generate and print numbers on poll paper. That stems from concern that such numbers, which hyperlink the ballots to the system used to test within the voter, may later be cross-referenced with different data to pierce poll secrecy. Because of this, some counties should purchase new poll inventory with preprinted sequential numbers, beginning with 1, that should be redacted after they’re opened up for public inspection. Citing the continued litigation, the Texas Secretary of State’s Workplace declined to remark.

Together with her lawsuit, Pressley is now additionally claiming state and native officers who’ve allowed the usage of randomized numbers generated by the digital voting methods and printed on paper poll inventory have triggered the “direct breach of voter ballot secrecy.”

She’s so positive of that, she mentioned in court docket paperwork, that in the course of the Might 2024 native election in Williamson County, Pressley spoiled her personal poll. She mentioned that after seeing that her clean poll had a “computerized unique identifier,” she determined in opposition to casting it “because my right to freely cast a secret ballot has been repeatedly violated for many elections and now in this one,” she mentioned within the court docket filings, including: “This was a very grievous decision which caused severe emotional stress.”

How Laura Pressley grew to become a pressure in Texas elections

Pressley, 61, has a doctorate in bodily chemistry, however is finest identified throughout the state for her activism on elections.

For years, she has gone to nice lengths in counties throughout the state to acquire entry to data and a close-up view of election procedures. And her campaign to affect how elections in Texas are carried out, particularly in the case of poll numbering, has made her a well known determine amongst state and native election officers.

A petite girl with blond hair, Pressley has testified in entrance of Texas lawmakers that she believes election directors are committing “criminal acts,” based mostly on her personal interpretation of election regulation. Her feedback have been influential with some GOP state lawmakers — together with Sens. Bob Corridor and Bryan Hughes and Rep. Valoree Swanson — in discussions about new laws.

Throughout the social media assembly in April, she mentioned her involvement in elections started in 2010, quickly after she grew to become an empty nester. “I said, ‘Lord, give me something hard.’ And basically, he put it on my heart.” Pressley recalled.

She ran unsuccessfully for a seat on the Austin Metropolis Council in 2014 and misplaced extra bids for native workplace after that. She alleges that there are points with how not less than a few of these elections had been run, although most of her challenges haven’t modified the outcomes.

Pressley’s résumé describes her as an elections and poll-watching professional. She has skilled lots of of individuals throughout the state, making a community of allies and supporters. A few of these allies, together with the opposite plaintiffs within the case, have filed election-related data requests on her behalf. Lots of her supporters now advocate on elections of their counties, together with Tarrant and Hood counties in North Texas and Gillespie within the Hill Nation.

Candidates and ballot watchers have entry to sure components of elections that different folks don’t. Candidates can request recounts, as Pressley has, and have lengthy been entitled to copies of voted ballots and different data that, earlier than Texas modified the regulation final yr, weren’t publicly accessible till almost two years after the election.

Ballot watchers, particularly following the passage of Senate Invoice 1 in 2021, have intensive entry to each a part of the election course of, from the time the polls open to the counting of the ultimate poll.

Throughout a constitutional modification election in 2023, Pressley, serving as a ballot watcher, stood aspect by aspect with election employees contained in the poll tabulation room. In a state-mandated video livestream, Pressley was seen for hours, speaking to election employees, pointing on the laptop screens, and taking notes.

In some circumstances, candidates for native places of work have chosen Pressley as a ballot watcher for his or her recounts. In response to her resume, she’s participated in not less than 13 of these, together with one she requested herself as a candidate. Earlier this yr, she made attendees at one among her ballot watching trainings in Tarrant County signal nondisclosure agreements.

She and election officers have had conflicts. Pressley and ballot watchers she had skilled in Gillespie County clashed with election officers throughout a recount of a metropolis proposition in 2019. Final fall, Williamson County Decide Invoice Gravell accused Pressley of inflicting a ballot employee’s coronary heart assault, although he later retracted the allegation after Pressley objected, characterizing it as defamatory. By way of her lawyer, Pressley mentioned she wasn’t chargeable for the employee’s medical emergency, had truly been speaking to another person on the time of the incident, and helped be certain that the employee obtained assist. Pressley didn’t reply to a request for remark for this story on these cases.

Pressley is presently locked in a authorized dispute with one consumer, David Puryear, a Republican who misplaced his 2022 bid for Hays County prison district legal professional. Puryear sued her final yr, alleging Pressley refused to show over notes submitted by his volunteer ballot watchers. In response to the lawsuit, Pressley argues the ballot watcher notes belong to her as a result of they’re on her firm’s “copyrighted” types.

Puryear’s lawsuit additionally says that Pressley directed recount volunteers to ignore the foundations set by Hays County Decide Ruben Becerra, who then threatened to kick them out. Pressley’s conduct “created great difficulties in dealing with county officials throughout the recount,” the lawsuit says.

In court docket filings responding to Puryear’s lawsuit, Pressley denies all allegations in opposition to her and says Puryear has “mischaracterized the facts.” She additionally says that she made it clear to Puryear that the ballot watcher types Pressley designed are her mental property, and releasing these to him was not a part of their settlement.

A decide denied Puryear’s request to acquire the paperwork and ordered each events to come back to an “amicable solution,” in line with Dobrovolny, who’s representing Pressley and her consulting agency within the case. Dobrovolny advised Votebeat in an electronic mail that a proposal to settle the dispute was despatched to Puryear greater than a yr in the past, however he has not obtained a response. Pressley and Puryear have but to come back to an settlement.

Some election officers say they’re unsure what Pressley’s intentions are. Jennifer Doinoff, the Hays County elections administrator and president of the Texas Affiliation of County Election Officers, mentioned Pressley asserts that she’s an elections professional however doesn’t attempt to collaborate with county election officers or the state officers accountable for decoding and implementing election legal guidelines.

“If she wants to help elections, she needs to work within the system and not against it,” Doinoff mentioned.

Public details about elections created new vulnerabilities

Along with her efforts to watch elections as carefully as doable, Pressley and her associates in numerous counties for years have flooded election departments with public data requests in search of election data and information. In Williamson County, the place she lives, Pressley has obtained data from elections since not less than 2019, public data obtained by Votebeat present. Her requests have yielded stories with very detailed information about when and the place particular person voters solid ballots.

“We didn’t know there were certain records that could make it easier to tie a ballot to a voter, but obviously now we know that there are, and yeah, all of that was being requested and released,” mentioned former Williamson County election administrator Chris Davis, who’s now the voter registration director in Travis County.

Underneath the steering issued by state election officers final month, not less than a number of the data launched to Pressley up to now would nearly definitely now be redacted.

Twice earlier than Pressley has filed ballot-numbering associated lawsuits in opposition to state election officers, however these circumstances went nowhere . The destiny of her present one isn’t but clear.

However her lawsuit obtained extra consideration after a right-wing information web site printed what it mentioned was the poll of a former Texas GOP chair solid on this yr’s Republican main, although apparently with out information of Pressley’s methodology. Having acknowledged actual vulnerabilities in poll secrecy, Texas officers say that they’re taking Pressley’s allegations severely — however that she isn’t responding to their makes an attempt to find out what she might have discovered.

“I have not seen this algorithm. Nobody has presented it to our office, so we don’t know what they’re talking about there,” Christina Adkins, the elections division director on the Texas Secretary of State’s Workplace mentioned throughout a Texas Home Elections Committee listening to final month. State Rep. Dustin Burrows, R-Lubbock, pressed Adkins on whether or not the workplace had tried each doable measure to acquire it.

“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 mentioned.

Pressley and her fellow plaintiffs — residents of Williamson and Llano counties, whose officers are additionally named within the swimsuit — “are deliberately obstructing the SOS Defendants from determining whether their allegations regarding an ‘algorithm’” have any benefit by refusing to supply such data,” the Texas Secretary of State’s Workplace mentioned in a July authorized submitting responding to Pressley’s lawsuit.

How Pressley’s claims are affecting some Texas counties

In her lawsuit, Pressley alleges that her methodology is enabled by the digital pollbooks used along side gear from a state-certified election machine vendor, Election Techniques & Software program. In her lawsuit Pressley says she believes it’s doable to additionally match a voter to their poll with the opposite state-certified vendor Hart Intercivic.

Katina Granger, an ES&S spokesperson, advised Votebeat that when the state licensed its machines, officers didn’t elevate any issues about poll secrecy.

Each firms mentioned their ballot-numbering strategies — which primarily differ when it comes to how and when their methods quantity ballots — are safe, and can’t be used to hyperlink a voter to their poll.

Election officers aware of the system say the quantity, by itself, can’t hyperlink the voter to the poll. “There isn’t one single file or report that anyone can obtain that shows you the name of the voter and their selections. It’s multiple pieces of information put together and in limited circumstances,” mentioned Davis, the previous Williamson County elections administrator.

Final month’s advisory from the Texas Secretary of State’s Workplace ordering election officers to make modifications applies solely to an ES&S system — particularly, the one utilized in Williamson County. Now, counties that use ES&S voting methods — not less than half the counties within the state, together with Collin and Travis — should overhaul their procedures and purchase preprinted and prenumbered poll inventory.

Election officers in these counties advised Votebeat they’re nonetheless determining the prices related to the modifications. Bruce Sherbet, the Collin County elections administrator mentioned he estimates the preprinted poll inventory will value about $160,000 for every normal election. Extra coaching will probably be required, since ballot employees might want to shuffle the ballots earlier than handing them to voters, as required by regulation. “The additional handling of ballots could slow down the check-in process for voters, but we won’t know until we implement it,” Sherbet mentioned.

Sherbet and different election officers usually are not positive how lengthy the brand new guidelines on methods to quantity their ballots will stay. Sherbet expects to listen to extra at a statewide coaching hosted by the Secretary of State’s Workplace later this summer time.

It’s plenty of effort to adjust to a requirement that almost all states have decided they don’t want, mentioned Patrick. Arizona, for instance, doesn’t quantity its ballots.

That’s as a result of “policies, practices and protocols are in place to ensure that you don’t have to have something that jeopardizes voter privacy,” she mentioned.

Natalia Contreras covers election administration and voting entry for Votebeat in partnership with the Texas Tribune. Contact Natalia at ncontreras@votebeat.org.

Disclosure: Texas A&M College and Texas Secretary of State have been monetary supporters of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan information group that’s funded partly by donations from members, foundations and company sponsors. Monetary supporters play no function within the Tribune’s journalism. Discover a full checklist of them right here.

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