AUSTIN, Texas — Former Dallas Congressman Pete Sessions pressured the Texas secretary of state and attorney general’s offices to investigate Dallas County over the 2020 election, according to documents obtained by The Dallas Morning News.
Letters and emails show the Waco Republican, who now represents the 17th District, engaged in an extensive back and forth with Secretary of State John Scott’s office for several months this year, seeking to elevate the concerns of a Dallas open records advocacy group and form an organized investigation involving the three offices.
The Open Records Project obtained data it said indicated thousands of voters were removed from the rolls during early voting in 2020. Dallas County Elections Administrator Michael Scarpello said he could not explain the removals, and the secretary of state’s office characterized them as regular maintenance.
Sessions has repeatedly questioned Dallas County elections results, particularly races he lost in 1994 and to Dallas Congressman Colin Allred four years ago. He said he remains committed to an investigation of the county separate from the ongoing audit Gov. Greg Abbott ordered last year, illustrating the fervor of some Republicans to root out voter fraud in the wake of the 2020 election.
“We will stay after this,” Sessions said in a telephone interview last week. “It is important for the American people to know that this is a circumstance that can diminish both law and democracy.”
Sessions’ effort stems from the work of the Open Records Project, a volunteer group of advocates led by Russell Fish, a self-described libertarian and computer architect who says he has never voted for Sessions.
Fish said he and his team of “volunteer geeks” found that during each day of early voting during the 2020 election in Dallas County, it appeared that some voters’ names disappeared and then reappeared at a later date.
In total, according to Fish, 56,974 voters were removed without explanation and 50,529 were added. Of the voters removed, 90% mailed their ballots and 92% were seniors. Of those, 88% were added back to the rolls, according to his findings.
“Voters had votes that were either created by a computer or were removed in the computer after they had voted,” Fish said.
Sessions and Fish said they have repeatedly contacted the Dallas County elections office, with no response, and Fish made presentations to Dallas County Commissioners about the anomalies in 2021.
Scarpello, the elections administrator, said in an interview he did recall Sessions reaching out to his office, but never responded. Sessions reached out to Dallas County Judge Clay Jenkins in official letters on several occasions, but Jenkins said he didn’t respond either.
Sessions held a May 23 news conference in Dallas to draw attention to “abnormalities, inconsistencies and irregularities” with the county’s 2020 election, adding that he had reached out to numerous agencies, including the FBI and the Texas attorney general’s office.
Jenkins and Scarpello said they expect the secretary of state’s office to address any abnormalities in an audit of the 2020 election in Dallas County, as well as Collin, Tarrant and Harris counties, that’s expected to be completed later this year. Trump requested that Abbott order the investigation, which started nearly a year ago.
“I believe that during the Secretary of State’s Forensic Audit, the Audit Division has investigated these discrepancies and are in a much better position to explain them than I am as I was not the Elections Administrator in the 2020 Presidential Election,” Scarpello said in an email.
Dallas County hired Scarpello in December 2020. Former Dallas County elections administrator Toni Pippins-Poole, who oversaw the 2020 election, did not return a message seeking comment.
Scarpello is being scrutinized over his handling of elections that have seen long lines and late openings of polling places. He is being closely watched by county and city officials, some of whom have called for him to be fired, but none of the concerns have been related to data anomalies.
Fish presented the data his group found during an April 2021 meeting of the House Elections Committee. The head of the secretary of state’s elections division, Keith Ingram, then testified that any discrepancies did not affect the tabulation of votes cast in the election.
“It has nothing to do with votes cast,” he said, attributing them to human errors that never affected the vote count but might have incorrectly indicated who had voted.
But 10 months later, Sessions resurrected Fish’s suspicions in a Feb. 1 phone call with the newly appointed secretary of state, Scott, who was associated with a Trump-led attempt to challenge election results in Pennsylvania.
Over the next four months, Sessions and legislative assistant Garrett Cocetti repeatedly contacted officials in the secretary of state and attorney general’s offices, according to documents.
In a March 30 letter to Scott and First Assistant Attorney General Brent Webster, Sessions described his office and theirs as teams working together to develop a “short-term plan” to investigate the 2020 election.
Attorney General Ken Paxton’s office, as well as Scott; his office’s general counsel, Adam Bitter; and the head of the Forensic Audit Division, Chad Ennis; did not respond to phone calls and emails requesting interviews, but spokesman Sam Taylor issued a written statement.
“Our Forensic Audit Division welcomes evidence and information that may be useful in determining the reasons for any irregularities observed in the elections being audited, including the November 2020 General Election in Dallas County,” he said in an email.
The communications from Sessions’ office also showed that the congressman’s suspicions with the Dallas County elections office extend beyond the 2020 election.
In a March 31 email to Ennis, Cocetti sent presentation slides indicating Sessions asked the attorney general’s office in 2019 to investigate Dallas County’s 2018 election, when he lost the seat he had held for 22 years by 6 percentage points to Allred.
The presentation included information credited to Austin-area conspiracy theorist Laura Pressley, who has been tied to a recent rash of resignations at an elections office in Gillespie County, according to reporting from Votebeat.
Sessions also continues to believe the Dallas County Elections Department may have robbed him of victory in a 1994 congressional race. In 2012, the congressman said an elections office received 7,000 potentially improper ballots, but officials had no recollection of the incident, and Democrats said he was making it up.
On Jan. 6, Sessions voted against certifying presidential election results in Pennsylvania and Arizona. When asked if he believed Trump won the 2020 election, he called the question “unfair.”
“We need to first clear abnormalities, inconsistencies and irregularities because they are not being addressed at places all around the country, notwithstanding Dallas County,” Sessions said in an interview. “It’s not about Trump. It’s about a whole bunch of other people that were on the ballot. I think that it’s unfair for reporters to go to that issue.”
SMU political scientist Cal Jillson said that while Sessions came into politics as a pro-business Republican of the George W. Bush era in Texas, his focus on so-called election irregularities was “not surprising” given the Republican party’s lingering suspicions of the 2020 election. But Sessions is no die-hard MAGA Republican, Jillson said.
The last communication released to The News between Sessions’ office and the secretary of state’s office indicates that the relationship began to cool. After Ennis’ assistant told Sessions’ staff that the so-called irregularities the Open Records Project flagged appeared to be regular maintenance of voter rolls, Cocetti emailed Ennis on May 11, asking that the division chief be his sole contact.
“I would like to work with you directly on this, your schedule permitting of course,” he wrote. “In April Secretary Scott said to me that you were the person to talk about this issue.”
Both Sessions and Fish appear to realize their efforts haven’t been well received in Austin. Fish complained about a lack of experts who could understand the data he has collected, while Sessions said he became “disillusioned” with how his complaints were handled.
“We’re waiting for the midterms,” Fish said. “If the House changes, it means people can subpoena stuff. … There will be significant change and Rep. Sessions will probably be a part of that.”
(Staff writer Hojun Choi contributed to this report.)
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