Ahead of the 2024 election, the Texas Public Policy Foundation announced plans Monday to expand its focus on voter integrity by scrutinizing five battleground states.

The foundation’s Election Protection Project will continue to focus on voting issues in Texas as well as extend its attention to the battleground states of Georgia, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Nevada, and Arizona, said Josh Findlay, director of the project. Previously, Findlay was the first director of election integrity efforts at the Republican National Committee.

“We are looking at three things,” Findlay told reporters in a press call Monday. “Can the election integrity system accurately identify the people that are going to vote, can they confirm they are eligible to vote, and can we securely collect and accurately count the ballots that are going to be processed?”

Regarding Texas, Findlay—who took the job at the Texas Public Policy Foundation in July after his stint at the RNC—said the foundation would focus on problems that emerged from Harris County, which includes the Houston area. He referred to voting machines that didn’t work as well as precincts that ran out of ballots.

Meanwhile, the battleground states will face pressure from both parties in 2024, said Chuck DeVore, chief national initiatives officer for the Texas Public Policy Foundation and a former California state assemblyman.

“We are looking at states where there is a significant amount of bipartisan interest in the 2024 cycle election, and you have quite a few bit of resources in to nongovernmental organizations as well as partisan organizations [that are] investing a lot of effort into trying to win each state for their respective candidate,” DeVore said.

“As a result,” he said, “you end up with a lot of pressure on local election officials to try to potentially shift the administration of elections away from established processes and procedures, as well as in some cases shifting it away from black-and-white election law.”

As noted in my book “The Myth of Voter Suppression,” ballot harvesting and chain-of-custody issues for ballots prompted questions in past elections, including many outcomes that were overturned.  

DeVore stressed that the Texas Public Policy Foundation will work with local election offices to promote best practices and point to needed improvement as well as note what these election offices are doing things right.

“Because of the focus on these states, we believe that it is in the interest of the American representative democracy that people—both left and right, conservative and liberal, Republican and Democrat—end up with the understanding or the confidence that the elections are held in such a manner that they are both free and fair and that everybody can trust the results,” DeVore said.

“We’ve decided to really focus our efforts on these states to really help local election officials run supremely good elections that people can have confidence in.”

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