A week after the Secretary of State granted Dallas County permission to conduct countywide elections moving forward, Dallas County Commissioners announced they were going to up-end its established and tested election equipment.

Early this week, concerns about election security were cited in the media and used to abandon electronic poll book equipment used in November’s election. In its place Dallas County plans to substitute a competitor’s version, sparking speculation that the move was just another in a long line of vendor skirmishes in the election space.

There is no indication that the November election was misconducted or that the voting systems in place were compromised as suggested in the media.

On Friday, a Midland County judge ordered ballots found in a misplaced box be manually counted on January 17. Previously, an inventory of the found ballots was conducted to ascertain the number of ballots only.

The manual recount, of yeas and nyes on Friday, will not alter the election result but may bring a modicum of clarity to an election contest that has been marred by confusion and novel election administration issues.

Regardless the outcome, what will be most interesting to witness is the posture MISD officials and allies take after the ballots are counted. Currently, more than 800 Midlanders have been disenfranchised and the election inaccurately certified. This won’t be rectified by Friday’s count.

The recently concluded 2019 might best be known for the spread of misleading information.

Fake news has been around for years but there’s a new and growing sense of desperation about the direction of the country from those on the left that has fundamentally changed the degree and tone of their efforts.

In December, the League of Women Voters released a “scorecard” that suggested 80 percent of county election websites in the state are not secure. Reporting on this “shocking” statistic did a poor job of identifying what is being measured by the LWV and what are not affected, namely the security of our elections.

County websites lacking SSL certificates does not affect the security of elections. No information about voters or votes is transmitted across county websites in Texas.

Here’s a look at election integrity news from around Texas and the country.

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Voter ID Blocked in N.C

Last week, U.S. District Judge Loretta Biggs ruled North Carolina can not require voter ID in 2020.

Her ruling states the law is “procedurally unobjectional” [read legal] but that it passed too soon after another version was deemed unconstitutional. Biggs rested her ruling on the tried and true legal theory of “something being amiss.”

Recent polling in Texas on Voter ID suggests it’s only controversial when the media and liberals are interested in driving a narrative to stop the practice. As soon as the legal battle is lost, the public, including most Democrats support the common-sense practice.