Texas activist frustrates election officials with lawsuit about threat to ballot secrecy

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Laura Pressley claims to hold the key to what should be a closely guarded secret: how every voter in Williamson County has voted.

Her story about how she got hold of this information goes something like this: She had gathered clues through scores of public-records requests she had made over the years to the Williamson County elections department, looking for a breakthrough in her quest to find flaws with the electronic voting machines that Texans use to cast their ballots.

One day, she fell to her knees, weeping, and asked God to reveal to her the vulnerabilities she was certain existed, she told attendees at an April social media event on ballot secrecy issues organized by the right-wing organization Cause of America, according to an audio recording reviewed by Votebeat. “I said, ‘Dear Lord, show me the pattern, because I know it's here.’”

Around 20 minutes later, by her account, “the Lord showed me the pattern, and I found it. I was literally in shock — emotional shock — to actually have the knowledge of how every voter in Williamson County votes.”

State and county election officials are anxious to know whether, in fact, Pressley has figured out how everyone in the county, north of Austin, voted — and, more broadly, whether she has uncovered a major vulnerability that could threaten ballot secrecy for voters statewide.

But she’s refusing to share details with them. Instead, she’s suing the state, and proposing a purported solution involving ballot numbering that election technology experts and election administrators say would return Texas to an obsolete system that further undermines ballot secrecy.

Protecting ballot secrecy has become a more urgent concern after Texas made it easier in recent years for the public to access vast collections of election records and datasets in the name of transparency. Votebeat and the Texas Tribune have reported that the wider availability of the data and records has made it possible, in limited instances, to determine the ballot choices of individual voters and violate their fundamental right to a secret ballot.

In response, the Texas Secretary of State’s Office in June told local election officials to redact enough information from public records to make such connections impossible.

The question now is whether Pressley has found a separate vulnerability, or is engaged in a similar cross-referencing of public information, as election experts suspect is more likely. Either way, election officials must find a way to understand what she’s doing well enough to protect the secret ballot.

Pressley, who is intimately familiar with election procedures, has said in court filings she wants to reveal how her method works only to a federal judge, preferably in the courtroom, though she said she would also be willing to share it — if required to — with a single lawyer for the state Attorney General’s Office. In court filings, she said she wants to exclude state and county election officials from seeing it “so that no more harm is done.” Her method relies on public records, she said in the filings, and if she explains it publicly, anyone could use it.

Amid the push for greater transparency, some election administration experts say, voters need to understand that there are some elements of the process, especially related to security, that election officials simply cannot disclose.

“In this moment where we're pushing for so much transparency, this is a reminder that we have to sometimes take a step back and make sure that there aren't unintended consequences in the transparency that we are creating,” said Tammy Patrick, CEO for programs at the National Association of Election Officials and a former Arizona election administrator. “Whether it's ballot secrecy or a vulnerability of the system, that's where I think election officials are still struggling to find that balance.”

Texas is among just a few states that still number ballots

Texas is one of a small number of states whose laws require numbering ballots at all, but the way counties handle the numbering can differ somewhat from the letter of the law — a difference that Pressley has seized on in her lawsuit.

Years ago, Pressley told listeners on the April meeting, “the Lord said, ‘focus on the ballot numbering.’” And for the better part of a decade, that’s what Pressley has done.

In her latest lawsuit, she’s accusing the state of undermining ballot secrecy and failing to comply with a state law dictating how numbers on the ballots should work.

She’s alleged the same thing in previous lawsuits, and those never got a hearing. But in the latest case, Pressley is specifically targeting the way some Texas ballots are printed out with a randomly generated number that’s used for auditing purposes and to prevent double voting. She asserts that her method of tying voters to their ballot choices is connected to that randomly generated number.

In a phone call, Pressley declined to answer specific questions, citing the litigation, but referred Votebeat to her court filings and her lawyers. In an email, lawyer Frank ​​Dobrovolny, who represents the plaintiffs, asserted that election officials bypassed and violated election laws and as a result, “the ballot secrecy of over 60,000 in-person voters in Williamson County has been breached,” prompting the lawsuit asking the court to intervene.

In court filings, Pressley refers to her method as an “algorithmic pattern,” and alleges that a failure by state and local election officials to comply with a ballot-numbering law has allowed her to match over 60,000 in-person voters to their ballots across multiple Williamson County elections, including those of local elected officials.

She said in court filings that a computer science expert, Walter Daugherity, verified her work. Daugherity, a senior lecturer emeritus in computer science at Texas A&M University, was an expert witness for the lawsuit filed by former Arizona GOP gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake. Trial and appellate courts in Arizona have dismissed Lake’s claims of election malfeasance.

Election officials deny violating election laws.

Experts question Pressley’s ballot-numbering solution

The solution Pressley calls for in her lawsuit is a strict interpretation of a 19th-century Texas law requiring sequential numbering of ballots. She is asking the court to make counties use preprinted, sequentially numbered ballots, starting with 1.

Such a method would require additional time and resources from county election officials to redact those numbers if requested by the public for inspection. It’s also more expensive for taxpayers, since that type of preprinted ballot stock cannot be reused in future elections.

Experts have repeatedly said sequential numbering this way could make it easier to breach ballot secrecy, not harder. It’s reasonable to assume that any numbering of ballots raises the risk of them being tied later to a specific voter. That’s why many states don’t require, or even allow, ballots to be numbered.

Texas stands out as one of a few states that have continued doing so, based on a law passed in the 1800s that was meant to prevent double voting. Others include North Carolina, which numbers its early-voting, absentee and provisional ballots, and Michigan, which prints the ballot number on a detachable stub.

Experts say advances in election technology and best practices for security, auditing, and ballot secrecy have led most states to move away from the practice. Most states have more modern chain-of-custody requirements for post-election reconciliation, said Jennifer Morrell, a former election official and an expert on election audits. “You don't have to have those numbers on the ballot to do that level of ballot accounting,” she said.

The Texas law says ballots should be sequentially numbered, starting with 1, and distributed to polling places in batches so that “a specific range can be linked to a specific polling place.” They’re supposed to be “distributed to voters non-sequentially in order to preserve ballot secrecy,” the law says.

But counties’ voting systems and practices differ, and the type of voting equipment they use also affects how they comply with this particular law. For example, some counties purchase blank ballot paper that voters themselves insert into a touch-screen voting machine, known as a ballot marking device, at the polling place. Once the voter finalizes their candidate selections, the device prints the voter’s ballot and adds a randomized number to preserve ballot secrecy. In other counties, including Williamson County, a randomized serial number is printed on the ballot paper before the voter makes their candidate choices.

The Texas Secretary of State’s Office and the Texas attorney general have both issued guidance saying that randomized numbering complies with the law. But Pressley doesn’t agree, and has repeatedly argued that the practice is illegal and less protective of voters.

In June, the Texas Secretary of State’s Office released an advisory that prohibits counties from using electronic poll books — the equipment used to check in voters at polling sites — to generate and print numbers on ballot paper. That stems from concern that such numbers, which link the ballots to the device used to check in the voter, could later be cross-referenced with other information to pierce ballot secrecy. As a result, some counties will have to buy new ballot stock with preprinted sequential numbers, starting with 1, that will have to be redacted when they’re opened up for public inspection. Citing the ongoing litigation, the Texas Secretary of State’s Office declined to comment.

With her lawsuit, Pressley is now also claiming state and local officials who have allowed the use of randomized numbers generated by the electronic voting systems and printed on paper ballot stock have caused the “direct breach of voter ballot secrecy.”

She’s so sure of that, she said in court documents, that during the May 2024 local election in Williamson County, Pressley spoiled her own ballot. She said that after seeing that her blank ballot had a “computerized unique identifier,” she decided against casting it “because my right to freely cast a secret ballot has been repeatedly violated for many elections and now in this one,” she said in the court filings, adding: “This was a very grievous decision which caused severe emotional stress.”

How Laura Pressley became a force in Texas elections

Pressley, 62, has a doctorate in physical chemistry, but is best known across the state for her activism on elections.

For years, she has gone to great lengths in counties across the state to obtain access to records and a close-up view of election procedures. And her crusade to influence how elections in Texas are conducted, especially when it comes to ballot numbering, has made her a well-known figure among state and local election officials.

A petite woman with blond hair, Pressley has testified in front of Texas lawmakers that she believes election administrators are committing “criminal acts,” based on her own interpretation of election law. Her comments have been influential with some GOP state lawmakers — including Sens. Bob Hall and Bryan Hughes and Rep. Valoree Swanson — in discussions about new legislation.

During the social media meeting in April, she said her involvement in elections began in 2010, soon after she became an empty nester. “I said, ‘Lord, give me something hard.’ And basically, he put it on my heart.” Pressley recalled.

She ran unsuccessfully for a seat on the Austin City Council in 2014 and lost more bids for local office after that. She alleges that there are issues with how at least some of those elections were run, though most of her challenges have not changed the results.

Pressley’s résumé describes her as an elections and poll-watching expert. She has trained hundreds of people across the state, creating a network of allies and supporters. Some of those allies, including the other plaintiffs in the case, have filed election-related records requests on her behalf. Many of her supporters now advocate on elections in their counties, including Tarrant and Hood counties in North Texas and Gillespie in the Hill Country.

Candidates and poll watchers have access to certain parts of elections that other people don’t. Candidates can request recounts, as Pressley has, and have long been entitled to copies of voted ballots and other records that, before Texas changed the law last year, weren’t publicly available until nearly two years after the election.

Poll watchers, especially following the passage of Senate Bill 1 in 2021, have extensive access to every part of the election process, from the time the polls open to the counting of the final ballot.

During a constitutional amendment election in 2023, Pressley, serving as a poll watcher, stood side by side with election workers inside the ballot tabulation room. In a state-mandated video livestream, Pressley was visible for hours, talking to election workers, pointing at the computer screens, and taking notes.

In some cases, candidates for local offices have selected Pressley as a poll watcher for their recounts. According to her resume, she’s participated in at least 13 of those, including one she requested herself as a candidate. Earlier this year, she made attendees at one of her poll watching trainings in Tarrant County sign nondisclosure agreements.

She and election officials have had conflicts. Pressley and poll watchers she had trained in Gillespie County clashed with election officials during a recount of a city proposition in 2019. Last fall, Williamson County Judge Bill Gravell accused Pressley of causing a poll worker’s heart attack, though he later retracted the allegation after Pressley objected, characterizing it as defamatory. Through her lawyer, Pressley said she wasn’t responsible for the worker’s medical emergency, had actually been talking to someone else at the time of the incident, and helped make sure the worker received help. Pressley did not respond to a request for comment for this story on these instances.

Pressley is currently locked in a legal dispute with one client, David Puryear, a Republican who lost his 2022 bid for Hays County criminal district attorney. Puryear sued her last year, alleging Pressley refused to turn over notes submitted by his volunteer poll watchers. According to the lawsuit, Pressley argues the poll watcher notes belong to her because they are on her company’s “copyrighted” forms.

Puryear’s lawsuit also says that Pressley directed recount volunteers to disregard the rules set by Hays County Judge Ruben Becerra, who then threatened to kick them out. Pressley’s conduct “created great difficulties in dealing with county officials throughout the recount,” the lawsuit says.

In court filings responding to Puryear’s lawsuit, Pressley denies all allegations against her and says Puryear has “mischaracterized the facts.” She also says that she made it clear to Puryear that the poll watcher forms Pressley designed are her intellectual property, and releasing those to him was not part of their agreement.

A judge denied Puryear’s request to obtain the documents and ordered both parties to come to an “amicable solution,” according to Dobrovolny, who is representing Pressley and her consulting firm in the case. Dobrovolny told Votebeat in an email that a proposal to settle the dispute was sent to Puryear more than a year ago, but he has not received a response. Pressley and Puryear have yet to come to an agreement.

Some election officials say they’re not sure what Pressley’s intentions are. Jennifer Doinoff, the Hays County elections administrator and president of the Texas Association of County Election Officials, said Pressley asserts that she’s an elections expert but doesn’t try to collaborate with county election officials or the state officials in charge of interpreting and implementing election laws.

“If she wants to help elections, she needs to work within the system and not against it,” Doinoff said.

Public information about elections created new vulnerabilities

In addition to her efforts to observe elections as closely as possible, Pressley and her associates in various counties for years have flooded election departments with public information requests seeking election records and data. In Williamson County, where she lives, Pressley has obtained records from elections since at least 2019, public records obtained by Votebeat show. Her requests have yielded reports with very detailed data about when and where individual voters cast ballots.

“We didn’t know there were certain records that could make it easier to tie a ballot to a voter, but obviously now we know that there are, and yeah, all of that was being requested and released,” said former Williamson County election administrator Chris Davis, who is now the voter registration director in Travis County.

Under the guidance issued by state election officials last month, at least some of the information released to Pressley in the past would almost certainly now be redacted.

Twice before Pressley has filed ballot-numbering related lawsuits against state election officials, but those cases went nowhere . The fate of her current one isn’t yet clear.

But her lawsuit got more attention after a right-wing news site published what it said was the ballot of a former Texas GOP chair cast in this year’s Republican primary, though apparently without knowledge of Pressley’s method. Having acknowledged real vulnerabilities in ballot secrecy, Texas officials say that they’re taking Pressley’s allegations seriously — but that she isn’t responding to their attempts to determine what she may have found.

“I have not seen this algorithm. Nobody has presented it to our office, so we don't know what they're talking about there,” Christina Adkins, the elections division director at the Texas Secretary of State’s Office said during a Texas House Elections Committee hearing last month. State Rep. Dustin Burrows, R-Lubbock, pressed Adkins on whether the office had tried every possible measure to obtain it.

“Our attorneys are trying to get us access to that so we can, we can review it, because, sir, if this algorithm does what it purports to do, what these individuals say that it does … we actually have authority when it comes to certification of any e-poll books. We could do something to address that,” Adkins said.

Pressley and her fellow plaintiffs — residents of Williamson and Llano counties, whose officials are also named in the suit — “are deliberately obstructing the SOS Defendants from determining whether their allegations regarding an ‘algorithm’” have any merit by refusing to provide such information,” the Texas Secretary of State’s Office said in a July legal filing responding to Pressley’s lawsuit.

How Pressley’s claims are affecting some Texas counties

In her lawsuit, Pressley alleges that her method is enabled by the electronic pollbooks used in conjunction with equipment from a state-certified election machine vendor, Election Systems & Software. In her lawsuit Pressley says she believes it’s possible to also match a voter to their ballot with the other state-certified vendor Hart Intercivic.

Katina Granger, an ES&S spokesperson, told Votebeat that when the state certified its machines, officials did not raise any concerns about ballot secrecy.

Both companies said their ballot-numbering methods — which mainly differ in terms of how and when their systems number ballots — are secure, and cannot be used to link a voter to their ballot.

Election officials familiar with the system say the number, by itself, can’t link the voter to the ballot. “There isn’t one single file or report that anyone can obtain that shows you the name of the voter and their selections. It’s multiple pieces of information put together and in limited circumstances,” said Davis, the former Williamson County elections administrator.

Last month’s advisory from the Texas Secretary of State’s Office ordering election officials to make changes applies only to an ES&S system — specifically, the one used in Williamson County. Now, counties that use ES&S voting systems — at least half the counties in the state, including Collin and Travis — must overhaul their procedures and buy preprinted and prenumbered ballot stock.

Election officials in those counties told Votebeat they are still figuring out the costs associated with the changes. Bruce Sherbet, the Collin County elections administrator said he estimates the preprinted ballot stock will cost about $160,000 for each general election. More training will be required, since poll workers will need to shuffle the ballots before handing them to voters, as required by law. “The additional handling of ballots could slow down the check-in process for voters, but we won’t know until we implement it,” Sherbet said.

Sherbet and other election officials are not sure how long the new rules on how to number their ballots will remain. Sherbet expects to hear more at a statewide training hosted by the Secretary of State’s Office later this summer.

It’s a lot of effort to comply with a requirement that most states have determined they don’t need, said Patrick. Arizona, for example, does not number its ballots.

That’s because “policies, practices and protocols are in place to ensure that you don't have to have something that jeopardizes voter privacy,” she said.

Natalia Contreras covers election administration and voting access for Votebeat in partnership with the Texas Tribune. Contact Natalia at ncontreras@votebeat.org.

Disclosure: Texas A&M University and Texas Secretary of State have been financial supporters of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in the Tribune's journalism. Find a complete list of them here.

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