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Texas Republican gives away the game with 'forensic audit' gambit

The Texas Republican championing a "forensic audit" of the 2020 election said the quiet part loud.

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There's no shortage of problems surrounding Arizona Republicans' utterly ridiculous "audit" of the 2020 presidential election, but among them is the realization that Trumpified Republicans would inevitably want to export this absurd scheme elsewhere.

As Charlie Sykes put it last month, "We can roll our eyes and treat the Arizona audit as a joke, but a clown with a flamethrower still has a flamethrower, and the danger of this is spreading from state to state."

It's against this backdrop that a Republican state legislator in Texas introduced a measure this week to approve a "forensic audit" of the Lone Star State's 2020 election results. The plan, however, comes with a twist. NBC News reported:

The Texas Voter Confidence Act, filed by GOP Rep. Steve Toth, would authorize the governor, the lieutenant governor and the speaker of the House — all of whom are Republicans — to select an independent third party to conduct the election audit. The review would focus on the votes cast in Texas' 13 counties with populations over 415,000.

That second sentence stood out as especially notable. Texas Republicans had a perfectly fine election cycle in 2020 -- Donald Trump carried the state, for example, and Sen. John Cornyn (R) won re-election with relative ease -- but President Biden did quite well in the Lone Star State's biggest cities, winning in areas such as Houston, Austin, and San Antonio.

Under Steve Toth's proposal, there would be increased scrutiny of the results, but only in areas where Republicans didn't like the results. (Why stop at the top 13 counties? Perhaps because Texas' 14th, 15th, 16th, 17th, 18th, 19th, and 20th largest counties voted for Donald Trump.)

Defending his plan, the GOP legislator wrote this week, "We need a forensic audit to uncover all the voter fraud." Of course, in reality, neither Toth nor his allies have uncovered any meaningful evidence of voter fraud that would justify the need for a "forensic audit." He, among too many other Republicans, simply believes in starting with the answer and working backwards from there.

Toth told the Washington Post this week that he'd support a statewide effort, he also argued the undertaking would be too expensive and time-consuming. Asked if he would consider including some smaller counties in the election review, Toth replied, "What's the point? I mean, all the small counties are red."

I believe that's known as saying the quiet part loud.

The proposed exercise isn't about "election integrity." It's about the Republican effort to characterize election results in "red" areas as inherently valid and election results in "blue" areas as inherently suspect.

Why? Because folks like state Rep. Steve Toth say so.