Judge dismisses Texas lawsuit over ballot numbering, threat to secrecy
A federal judge Tuesday dismissed a lawsuit filed by conservative activists who challenged the use of electronic voting equipment to randomly number ballots in Texas on the grounds that the practice compromised ballot secrecy.
Judge David Alan Ezra of U.S. District Court in Austin ruled that the case, filed in 2024 by longtime Texas election activist Laura Pressley and voters from three counties, was moot, because the Texas Secretary of State’s Office has since prohibited counties from using electronic pollbooks to generate and print numbers on ballot paper.
He also wrote that two of the counties named in the suit, Williamson and Bell, had taken steps to eliminate the use of pollbooks to number ballot paper, and that the third, Llano County, doesn’t use them for that purpose.
In court filings, Pressley had said she used public records to find what she described as an “algorithmic pattern” that could link more than 60,000 voters in Williamson County, north of Austin, to their ballots and expose how they voted, though she did not reveal her exact method.
https://www.votebeat.org/texas/2026/01/22/judge-dismisses-laura-pressley-lawsuit-ballot-numbering-secrecy/