Those of you here in the audience and people who are joining us virtually. With the election less than three weeks away, it is important to remember it is essential to preserving our democratic republic that we have secure elections in which every citizen who is eligible to vote is to cast a ballot. We want a process in which when it is over everyone agrees, even the candidates who lost and their supporters that we had a fair and honest election. How do we do that . That is the question today. It begs the question, are comprehensive election audits a way to achieve that goal . In depth audits of elections are almost nonexistent yet indepth financial and accounting audits are standard practice. Heritage has published a new study explaining this issue available online. It is called best practices and standards for election audits. I encourage you to read it or download it. Today we have three experts with us to discuss this very important question. The honorable senator paul that in court is a graduate of texas a m and the president and ceo of a Tax Consulting company. He has been in the texas senate since 2014 representing district seven which encompasses most of west Harris County and parts of montgomery county. He chairs the Senate Committee uncle government, serves on the criminal justice and state Affairs Committees and has won numerous rewards numerous awards for his work as a legislator including the legislative legacy award. Before he moved to texas to the texas legislature, senator betancourt was the tax assessor collector for Harris County. Im sure that was a popular position which includes most of houston for 10 years. In texas that is the county official responsible for Voter Registration and it was only popular because i was for a tax cut at the time. He was very busy cleaning up the Voter Registration of dead voters and felons ineligible to vote as well as finding aliens who were illegally registered to vote. Since he. Has not only run for election, he has administered elections which gives him a lot of insight and experience on how to improve the process. We welcome you to heritage. Apparently have a motto. It is what gets measured gets fixed. Absolutely. He was the primary author of the texas senate audit bill as one of the first audits of the texas reform bill titled sb one. Next to paul is chad. Chad is texas is one of the only states to have passed a law requiring audits of a set number of counties after every election. The bill senator betancourt offered in the senate. He is the director of the division run by john scott. He is in the midst of creating the standards and practices texas will follow in conducting the audits. He is a senior fellow for Election Integrity at the texas Public Policy foundation. He has been in private practice but also was a federal prosecutor in louisiana and an assistant attorney general in the office of the Texas Attorney general. He received his law degree with honors from the university of texas in engineering degree from the university of missouri. My colleague Hans Von Spakovsky works in the center for legal and judicial studies. He has three decades of experience and it elections both as a lawyer and elections official. He served on the election commission. For two years was the council for assistant attorney general and has served on county election boards in georgia and virginia responsible for administering elections in the two largest counties in both states. He is the author of numerous books, articles and studies on numerous issues and is a graduate of m. I. T. And the Vanderbilt School of law. The format for today is each of my colleagues will give a short opening statement, presentation. Well go left or right and we will have a moderated discussion. We will open up the floor to your questions. Over to you. My interest in audits started when i was a tax assessor collector and you wonder how we were involved. In the past we collected what was an abomination which was the poll tax. In texas the voter registrars and the county clerks were the folks in ministering the election. I got into office and followed a person that had an in office 51 years. He had gone to work for the tax office one roosevelt was in office. The office was very antiquated. We looked at the voter roll list. We found there were 50,000 deceased and fln registrations on a list of less than 2 million. What we did was by sending out confirmation nodes, we got back confirmations from family members the person had voted in the 1990s but had died in 1964. Somebody was incarcerated in huntsville which is our main state prison. I went to the da with his handlebar mustache and he said that man is not voting in houston. He was correct. It was somebody else voting for him. There were 500 of those. In the 2000 president ial election if you remember, what was the margin of victory in florida . 537 votes. You might have been there. Harris county by itself could have determined the fate of the National Election because we had let people the voter will go completely fellow. What gets measured gets fixed. Clean that up. That started my focus on voting oral integrity. If the voting role has integrity, the election outcome is less likely to be contested. I did presentations appear presentations up here. I thought that photo id was a way to solve a lot of problems if we could check a citizenship list because most people dont know we dont have one in the united states. It gets past a lot of arguments. When i get elected to the senate, this has always been an interest of mine to look at what is happening with the voter rules and we had a unique problem in Harris County that in october of 2020 the early vote totals did not match. As a former election administrator, you could see the numbers. It was off by over 10,000. I started asking questions. The secretary of state started asking questions. The newly appointed county clerk did not have to answer and did not. One night they changed the results. Still did not match. On the floor of the senate i used a complaint letter that is pretty factual. From a lawyer talking about how we knew there were 884 more votes on the county then the county voter roster. We had more votes than names. That was not just Harris County. He went around the state and there were 1300 extra votes that did not make the voter role in williamson county. In wichita county, there is a singlefamily residence that had 579 people registered and 179 voted. Im not sure where the other 400 were. It became apparent as part of sb one we needed to have citizenship checks and audit capability which is what has launched the Forensic Audit division. Im not talking just a limited purpose audit. You have to get into the details. Of the more humorous details in my bill was if there are more votes in precinct and there are registered voters you have a problem. We had more than a dozen of those precincts. What it all means is simply this. If you have an audit capability you can find out what went wrong. In the swirl of the froth of national politics, asking questions can get you labeled an election denier but you should be able to ask questions and get answers. When i was a were just dry had to ask every question that came to me. I would say why is this registration here . We need to get back to being able to do that. The beginning of the Forensic Audit division is just the start because i think we need to expand to not just random audits but when there are clear issues in the field, you should be able to ask and election administrator what is the truth, what are the facts, get an answer. If youre not satisfied, make sure you have not missed an obvious detail. Give it to the secretary of state or whatever the chief elections officer is in any state. The opportunity to say we are going to order an audit. You are right. In the Business Community audits are ubiquitous. You live off them. It is not just the fact they are accepted. It is an absolute must. I am absolutely committed and i know the texas senate is. It has passed an upgraded version of the audit bill choice. I cannot speak for all my colleagues but i believe the Lieutenant Governor also supports it. I think we will have a good chance to have even further work done in texas. It is simple. What gets measured gets fixed. When you find a problem, fix it or tell the public about it. Get caught up in election denier debate. Fix the problem. Move on. Tell the public the truth about their election process. Chad, you are in the catbird seat. You are the guy. Tell us about this experience. Be careful when you testify in front of senator bettencourt. He may create a job for you. It is a very interesting challenge to start Something Like this from scratch. The day i got there, there were not pens in my office. I did not have a piece of paper to write on. Not to mention a list of what im supposed to be doing. I think we spent two or three months getting our arms around senators told us to audit. What does that mean . What can we look at meaningfully where we can help the process and make sure the processes get better and problems are getting fixed . What is interesting about that this texas as you guys have heard a big state. We have 254 counties. We have 254 ways of doing things. I think that is a strength because loven county is not the same as Harris County with 2 million voters. Those are different. They have got to do things differently. What record is everyone going to have . It gets different between what Harris County has or what loven county has. We tried to get our arms around what are they required to keep and what are the folks doing also in the counties records wise that we can audit . Step one in any of these audits has to be, how many people showed up to vote and how many ballots do i have . Step one. It sounds really simple but it is not. We dont in the old days you walked in to the precinct. There was usually a book with names in it. There is hans. Here is your ballot. That was it. Now we have provisional voting. Countywide voting. We have early voting. Countywide voting in texas means i have no precinct. But i can vote anywhere. That valid is accredited back to my precinct so now i have got to chase this ballot around the county to figure out where it is supposed to be credited. It can be done but it is a challenge from a recordkeeping standpoint. One of the other things we got attuned to quickly is how do we look at machines and satisfy folks please machines are going to safeguard and procedures to ensure they are not hacked . If you have not heard, people think our machines are hacked. We are looking at machines, the sampling of machines used in the election and we are building out timelines for them. We bought the machine. We tested the machine. We took it to the warehouse. We programmed the machine. We senate to the location. It stayed in the location. Day one it had zero votes. So on and so forth. It gets down to at the end of the lection we have a great process in texas. A partial manual count where we test on the machines after the election. We say here are the ballots. Lets count a sample of them and make sure the numbers match. We are going to lay that stuff out so the public can no your is where it is. Can know here is where it is. In some cases they are missing a record in the middle. That is not good. What happened there . Our county gets better the more scrutiny we put on them. The fact we are saying you might get audited. That makes people keep the records a little better because they know someone is looking at their work. Lots of challenges. It is important work. I think it is hopefully driving some of the numbers we have seen. Where we dont have faith in our election my goal is to make it where we have more faith. Very interesting shared during the q a i want to pick up another aspect of your new job which is the legal requirements of the state and federal level. I think that would be important for people to think through. I wanted to thank my fellow panelists for coming all the way from texas. Heritage published a paper not too long ago on coming up with standards for auditing elections. What you will need to understand is cully mentioned is audits are ubiquitous in the business world. Because of that there are generally accepted auditing standards and generally accepted Accounting Practices that have been put together by all of the associations, individuals who engage in these kind of auditing. Those set out the standards auditors have to meet to make sure they are objective, experience, know what they are doing but then also the accounting principles are what they look at when they examine a company a charity and Business Activities and finances. There is nothing like that in the election area. Almost no one has been conducting election audits which is a real failure in the election area. Ever since the 2020 election there has been a lot of discussion about audits. They are referred to in all different ways. We use the term Forensic Audits but there does not seem to be any agreement on what exactly that means. Conducting a hand recount is not an audit. I have heard it referred to as that. What we are talking about is not the kind of limited audits that have been done. Audits where they look at the equipment used to make sure it was functioning properly. There are process audits where they look at procedures administrators use to make sure they were following procedures and handling voters. There are legal compliant audits where they are making sure Election Officials comply with all applicable state and federal laws. Those are all piecemeal audits. What needs to be done are comprehensive in depth audits that look at what was going on before the election, during the election and after the election. If you do a hand recount of a particular election, lets say the margin of victory was a thousand votes. Doing a hand recount, you may recount and a margin of victory was a thousand votes. The ballots were properly counted by the machines but simply doing a recount does not tell you whether the ballots cast in that election were valid. If as our Election Fraud database shows, there were 1001 people who voted in the election who dont actually live in the state of texas, they actually live in oklahoma but they got falsely registered to vote, youre not going to turn that up with a simple recount. What you should have done and need to do is a comprehensive audit of the Voter Registration list and whether Election Officials prior to the election were taking all the steps necessary to make sure it is an accurate list. They were verifying the person who registered legally resides in the jurisdiction where they are voting. Whether they are a citizen. Whether they are not a felon whose ability to vote has been taken away. It is a series of things like that. How often have they checked and did they do this before the election . Do they compare the promotion with the Social Security administrations master index to find individuals who have died before the election . Everyone thinks that is not a problem. We just added two Election Fraud cases to our database of individuals who cast ballots in the names of their deceased mothers. That is the kind of thing you have to look at. I have heard some Election Officials who think this is not a good idea and it should not happen and i think they are just wrong. Because what we are trying to do in this situation is make sure the entire system was working properly. As senator bettencourt says, find problems so we can fix them. What has got to happen is states have gone to start developing the standards and principles. If you look at our paper, we have 18 different areas we think audits ought to look at through the entire election process. I will give you a quick example of how i think this not only can fix problems but can inspire Greater Public confidence in the election and that is something we all want to achieve. In 2021 there was an audit done in New Hampshire. There were some claims the vote count had not been properly done. So they did an indepth audit. They had counted the ballot should they found there was a 499 vote discrepancy. Between the hand recount and the machine total. The audit uncovered this is a jurisdiction where you fill out paper ballots like so many folks do. They have a computer scanner to count it. What they discovered was Election Officials were using a folding machine. When someone requested an absentee ballot, they had a machine that for the ballot so i could go into an envelope and be mailed to the voter. The machine was folding the absentee ballot not in between peoples candidates names like it was supposed to but it was creating the fold in the middle of the candidates name so when the voter sent back the completed ballot the computer scanner was misreading the ballot. In instances where the fold line had gone through the candidates name, it would read it as a vote. That would often lead to over votes which would avoid the ballot. The 499 vote discrepancy did not change the outcome of that particular election but the point of that audit was they discovered the problem and could fix it and make sure it did not happen in future election where it might have made the difference in the election. The opposition ic from some folks is totally misguided. I will tell you if the shareholders of General Motors were told that General Motors and corporate officials think financial audits are not needed, everyone should just trust they never do anything wrong, they would be an uprising and that is the way i think the public should look at this issue. In addition to sec and other investigations. Before i pepper you guys with ques