During a random drawing, Harris County was selected to receive a state audit of our election systems and operations after the upcoming 2026 midterms. This would be the second audit Harris County has received in the last four years.
The last audit followed the 2022 election, and according to State Senator Paul Bettencourt, it found multiple significant issues. He said: “You’d go to the polls, and there wasn’t any ballot paper! They had massive custody chain breaks, and procedures they weren’t following.”
Bettencourt went on to say that since that election and subsequent audit, there have been a number of major improvements made, but there are still some issues that he expects will come up in the audit. “One that’s already documented is they went and started registering people at private PO boxes, which is against the law,” he said.
While Harris County will likely perform better on this audit than the last one, Bettencourt believes there will always be issues that will come up and need to be addressed.