UMVA has learned that two determined Texans have filed a formal HAVA complaint with the state’s Secretary of State, demanding a decisive hearing on whether Texas truly complies with the federal Help America Vote Act.
Jeffrey Yuna, a former congressional hopeful from Harris County, and Debra Boehm, a voter from Collin County, have teamed up with evidence gathered by a watchdog group to challenge the state’s handling of federal election records.
Their grievance does not seek to overturn any past election; instead, it asks the courts to examine the very foundation of Texas’s voter registration system, its history logs, and the chain of custody for every vote counted in federal contests.
Under HAVA § 303, Texas is required to maintain a single, uniform, computerized statewide voter list that serves as the definitive source for all federal elections. The complaint alleges that the state has repeatedly failed this mandate, creating a cascade of conflicting numbers.
Four stark questions lie at the heart of the filing: Do the state’s four official tallies of voter participation line up? Are there documented records showing how any reconciliation occurs? Can officials point to the exact certified total and the system that produced it? And can they produce an unbroken chain of proof linking that certified number to the unified voter list?
Evidence compiled by the watchdog reveals glaring gaps. In the 2024 general election, the Secretary of State’s certified vote count stood at 11,388,674, while the voter‑history database listed 11,101,461, county‑aggregated rolls showed 11,319,614, and the federal report to the Election Assistance Commission recorded 11,488,820. The spread between the highest and lowest figures—478,359 votes—defies any reasonable explanation.
The same pattern emerged in 2022, with a discrepancy of nearly 67,000 votes among the four official tallies. Such mismatches suggest that the state’s “single, uniform” list is, in practice, a fragmented collection of competing records.
These inconsistencies are not merely academic; they could sway tightly contested races. The 2026 Republican Senate primary in Texas was decided by a margin of just 31,818 votes—over fifteen times smaller than the 2024 discrepancy.
Further analysis of early‑voting files from the 2026 primaries uncovered puzzling movements: records that vanished, reappeared, or were altered en masse, and even a sudden change in file formatting that scrambled county and precinct mappings.
If the state cannot reconcile its own data streams now, the same flaws are poised to haunt future federal elections, undermining confidence in every ballot cast.
Beyond federal statutes, the complaint leans on a suite of Texas administrative and election codes, warning that willful neglect of record‑keeping can trigger criminal penalties for officials who dilute or miscount votes.
UMVA can exclusively reveal that this filing marks a critical turning point, forcing Texas to confront the possibility that its voter database may not meet the legal standards set for a fair, transparent election.
