Something bizarre happened to the election data coming out of Texas.
Multiple credible reports of data irregularities that are stumping election observers.
And now, in the aftermath of the November 3 midterm elections, Texans are wondering if the “blue wave” was a tsunami or a mirage.
Start with the governor’s race. According to Louis Montoya, Democrat Gina Hinojosa reportedly received approximately 5.23 million votes in her race against Republican Gov. Greg Abbott.
That would be an unbelievably high number.
For comparison, Abbott received approximately 4.66 million votes in 2018 and 4.44 million in 2022. His reported 2026 total was around 4.5 million.
His numbers barely moved. But the Democratic numbers apparently exploded.
This is reminiscent of the Biden election in 2020. Trump got 74 million votes but Biden got “82 million votes.”
While running a no-show campaign. Apparently, just because Orange Man Bad.
Well, the difference here is that Trump wasn’t on the ballot.
We can debate whether or not Paxton was the right choice, I feel like his deficits were overblown because he was running against a well-documented blasphemer with crazy radical views.
But when you see Paxton’s loss in the context of the overall Texas results, it doesn’t make a lot of sense.
Nonetheless, Talarico was only up a few points on Paxton heading into Election Day, but he will wind up beating him by… 10 points? And Hinojosa is apparently going to win by 7 points.
Let’s put this in context. In 2018, Democrat Lupe Valdez received approximately 3.55 million votes. In 2022, Beto O’Rourke received approximately 3.55 million.
Now Hinojosa is reportedly sitting at 5.23 million.
That’s an increase of roughly 1.68 million Democratic votes over the previous gubernatorial election.
And it gets even more interesting.
Democrat James Talarico reportedly received approximately 5.45 million votes in the U.S. Senate race, a figure approaching Donald Trump’s entire Texas presidential vote total in 2024.
The question is obvious: What explains that enormous increase?
A surge in Democratic turnout is certainly possible. But the scale of the reported change makes the underlying county-by-county numbers worth examining, particularly given the questions already surrounding Texas election reporting.
And those questions began before Election Day. On November 1, the independent research publication This Will Hold published an investigation titled “Texas Turnout Totals Are Moving Backwards. We Want To Know Why.”
Its researchers had been preserving successive snapshots of the Texas Secretary of State’s early-voting dashboard.
What they reported was remarkable.
A previously published October 19 early-voting total reportedly fell from 806,239 to 777,891 between snapshots captured on October 22 and October 23.
That’s a decrease of 28,348 in the published figure for the same voting date.
The investigation also documented a reported 1,224-ballot decline in a previously published mail-ballot total, early in-person votes attributed to dates before early voting officially began, and a 27,049-vote discrepancy between Harris County’s reported October 28 turnout and the corresponding state dashboard figure.
Collin County is my county. I recall seeing a page posted on the early voting and the Election Day voting tabulating how many voters had showed up to vote for various time periods in the day.
Election Day, for example, had at least 330 voters before 11:30 am. Their logs might be able to help ascertain the discrepancies.
Perhaps most strikingly, the researchers identified historical daily and cumulative turnout figures that could not be reconciled through straightforward arithmetic without accounting for intervening revisions.
One comparison produced a disparity exceeding 310,000.
These were discrepancies in published turnout reports, not established findings that ballots had “disappeared.: But they were substantial enough to demand an explanation.
This isn’t solely coming from a “blogger.”