The Texas Secretary of State's Office has told the state’s most populous county that it will send inspectors there to observe vote counting during the November election.
In a letter Tuesday, the director of the secretary of state’s forensic audit division, Chad Ennis, told the elections administrator in Harris County, Clifford Tatum, that an audit of the county had found “serious breaches of proper elections records management” in the handling of mobile ballot boxes in the 2020 general election.
Harris County is home to Houston and leans Democratic. The letter came less than a week before the start of early voting in the state.
Ennis said preliminary findings in the secretary of state’s audit include “at least 14 locations where chain-of-custody documentation is lacking at best and missing at worst.”
Get top local stories in DFW delivered to you every morning. >Sign up for NBC DFW's News Headlines newsletter.
In light of those findings, Ennis wrote that the secretary of state’s office will provide “a contingent of inspectors” to the county to “perform randomized checks on election records” and “observe the handling and counting of ballots and electronic media.”
