Editor’s note: The author of the following message – Brett Rogers – has worked thirty years in the IT business and over twenty years with enterprise database tools – for Fortune 100 companies and dozens of small and mid-size clients. He can be reached here: brett@rightrally.com.
One Citizen, One Vote –
Our Reasonable Expectation
By Brett Rogers, Data Analyst
Marketing and IT tool development services
Texans deserve a fair and accurate election system. One citizen, one vote.
As I wrote recently, “If ours is truly a government of ‘We the People,’ then transparency is prerequisite. Transparency safeguards citizens.”
In the past week, Grassroots America – We the People worked behind the scenes to connect with various elected officials to understand the anomalies that we found in the Election Information and Turnout Data made available at the Secretary of State website. We’re thrilled at the transparency of this data. We applaud the Secretary of State for making it available to us.
I didn’t download this data to cause trouble, or even to pursue issues of election integrity. I did it to assist “get out the vote” efforts across the state of Texas. But the data guy in me always checks the data with which I work, so I did some basic integrity checks. One of those checks is a duplication check. Minutes later, I discovered duplicates in the data.
I reached out to JoAnn with my discovery, and she encouraged me to keep an eye on it and keep her informed. As I found that this was a consistent discovery in each day’s data download, she began using her contacts to reach out to people. She reached out to Sen. Bob Hall and Sen. Tan Parker, both of whom care about this issue very much. JoAnn also reached out to AG Paxton, who instructed one of his Deputy AGs call her. They are watching our reports.
I reached out to a well-known data analyst here in Texas. I didn’t hear from him, but I did later through Twitter, after the information had gone public. I’ll discuss that more in a moment.
Sen. Hall contacted me and said that this was likely a poll book issue, but had no concrete explanation. I appreciated his time.
As we progressed toward the end of early voting, JoAnn made the decision to elevate it in an email that was sent out on Wednesday evening, February 28th.
The next morning, Thursday, we noticed that the duplications we’d found were cleaned up and no longer in the data. Shortly thereafter, I heard from Sen. Tan Parker. We discussed the issue. I told him of the new duplicates of the day. He later returned in a phone call with Christina Adkins of the Secretary of State’s office. We had a good conversation for 15 minutes.
They expressed their thanks, they agreed with our concerns, and we discussed the issues with the “unofficial” 2024 data and with the “official” 2022 data. They agreed that more should come of this. Sen. Parker asked his aide on the call to begin to work on legislation for the next session to help safeguard election integrity.
That evening, at the request of an SREC, I met online with RPT Vice-Chair Dana Myers and 18 SREC representatives for close to an hour. I showed them how I discovered the issue, some of the concerns I had, and took their questions. It was a productive conversation. In my mind, we’d done what we could to ensure integrity in this period of early voting in the primary.
On Friday, a few people went on Twitter to deride our efforts. I find that unfortunate, as one of them was the very person to whom I reached out earlier in the week who chose not to have a conversation with me.
Social media feels safe for its distance, and insults can be fun, but an earnest effort to secure our election data with simple checks, such as for duplicates, is entirely reasonable. I’ve invited this individual via a response to his Twitter attack to have an actual conversation. Perhaps one day we will. I enjoy his emails about the election as it progresses.
I believe strongly in a limited government, where consent of the governed matters to those elected. When there is a lack transparency, when we discover issues, and when we have concerns, we have the right to address those matters with the folks in government.
I want to thank Christina Adkins for her welcome candor and willingness to listen. I want to thank Sen. Tan Parker for his initiative to do the right thing in securing elections. I thank Sen. Bob Hall for his persistent efforts to ensure that our elections are not a black box where there is no transparency. Grassroots America Board member Tom Fabry is due a salute as well since he checked and double-checked my findings. Tom is quite the analyst himself having led the design, construction, and operation of a global network of six engineering and research & development labs across four continents for Hewlitt-Packard (HP) and their global clients, a position he held until retiring.
Most of all, I want to thank JoAnn Fleming. Fighting for the common-sense Republican priorities will bring its detractors. JoAnn doesn’t care about the naysayers. She will do what she has to do to fight for the priorities of commonsense Texans who know that election integrity matters.
One citizen, one vote – in a system that is so transparent that that no Texan can question it – that’s the goal. We’re not there yet, but we can get there.
God bless Texas,
Brett