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Investigators with the Texas Rangers and the Harris County District Attorney’s office found no evidence of attempts to sway the county’s November 2022 election, officials said Tuesday.
Gov. Greg Abbott and other Republicans have heavily criticized Harris County officials for how the state’s most populous county ran that election. Some polling locations saw shortages of paper ballots and malfunctioning voting equipment. Some locations opened later in the day, resulting in longer wait times for voters.
Those irregularities drove more than 20 local Republican candidates to contest the election results — and Republican lawmakers in the Texas Legislature to force the county to dissolve its elections administration office.
A criminal probe initiated by Harris County District Attorney Kim Ogg into irregularities around the 2022 election found no evidence of a campaign to suppress voter turnout or influence the election’s outcome, officials said Tuesday.
Paper ballot shortages weren’t the result of deliberate attempts to unduly sway the election results, Ogg said.
Those shortages came about, she said, because an election official in charge of 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 at the now-shuttered Harris County Elections Department, has been charged with five counts of tampering with government documents, a state jail felony punishable by up to two years in jail and a $10,000 fine; and one count of theft, a third-degree felony that carries a potential prison sentence between two and 10 years and a fine of up to $10,000. Investigators said Tuesday they found no evidence that Blackburn intended to influence the outcome of the November 2022 elections.
Blackburn “not only stole thousands of dollars in the sense that he lied on timesheets,” Ogg said Tuesday, “he stole individuals' rights to vote, a basic constitutional right in our democracy because people on both sides were delayed in their voting, halted in their voting, rerouted in their voting. … It’s compounded by the loss of public trust in our election system in Harris County. That is the real cost and it is priceless.”
Blackburn’s attorney Charles Flood called the charges “an abuse of power” and accused Ogg of “cynically playing politics with people’s lives.”
“This case isn’t about the election — it’s about timesheets,” Flood said in an emailed statement.
Some 22 losing Republican candidates challenged the results of the 2022 election, most of which were either upheld by a judge or dropped.
Judge David Peeples in May ordered a new election in a close judicial race in which the Republican candidate lost by less than 500 votes. More than 1,000 votes cast in the race should not have counted, Peeples said, because some voters had residency-related issues or did not show a valid form of photo identification while some mail ballots were either incomplete or did not arrive before the deadline. Peeples’ decision has been appealed.
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