Texas Republican group seeks to block certification of state’s election

Days before the United States’ pivotal midterm elections, a Texas group affiliated with the Republican Party has asked a federal judge to stop certification of the state’s upcoming election results.

In a lawsuit filed on Tuesday, the Potter County Republican Party and its chairman, Daniel Rogers, claim potential election interference by artificial intelligence (AI) or “malicious actors” that could compromise the results of next Tuesday’s elections in Texas.

The plaintiffs, who are asking for a hand count of every ballot from every precinct in the state before election certification happens, allege voting machines have components inside made by China that would allow them to be manipulated.

“If a component is tampered with during manufacturing, it could serve as a point of entry for unlawful and malfeasance hackers, allowing for the possibility of synchronized attacks across multiple election machines and jurisdictions,” the lawsuit read.

The legal challenge comes as several polls show Democrat James Talarico narrowly leading his Republican challenger, Ken Paxton, in Texas’ all-important US Senate race that could ultimately decide which party controls the chamber after November 3.

The Talarico and Paxton campaigns and the Potter County Republican Party did not immediately return requests from Al Jazeera for comment.

The legal complaint does not specify if any voting machines in Potter County, or elsewhere in Texas, have been compromised. The plaintiffs acknowledged in their filing that no previous election in the county was “altered” by a third party, arguing that the possibility of vote manipulation by AI makes the state’s election safeguards easily compromised.

“The real likelihood of a clever and undetected hack by recently developed AI programs, which conceal their activity to avoid detection, reinforces the need for a full verification based on hand-counting of all paper records or ballots in all Texas precincts, prior to certification of the federal results,” they wrote.

State law in Texas already requires hand-count audits in elections where electronic tabulators are used. But the plaintiffs argue that does not go far enough.

“The paper record or ballot provides an independent verification mechanism only if election officials actually compare a complete hand count of all of the paper records or ballots,” the filing said.

The lawsuit also claims US “adversaries”, such as China, Iran and Russia, are capable of accessing election systems.

US President Donald Trump in July declassified documents that, he claimed, showed Chinese interference in the US 2020 presidential election, reviving his attacks on US elections despite no evidence that Beijing impacted the vote he lost that year.

Last week, the US Department of Justice also sought to block certification of an election, claiming, in Alaska, that an independent candidate with the same name as the state’s Republican Senator up for re-election is running in order to mislead voters.

Alicia Pierce, a spokeswoman for Texas’s Secretary of State, whose office administers elections in the state, said it “does not plan to comment on the lawsuit at this time”.