Selections, Not Elections: Daniel Miller Breaks Down What Happened on March 1

Daniel Miller came back to Late Night Coffee Talk after a week away, having spent Texas Independence Day at the TNM tent at the Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo and the following days speaking at the Liberty Forum in New Hampshire. But the only thing on anyone’s mind, in Texas and in New Hampshire alike, was the March 1 Republican primary. So he dedicated the entire night to it. Not to his own race for lieutenant governor, he was clear about that, but to the election as a whole and the questions every Texan should be asking about it.

The numbers, he argued, simply do not jive with the reality on the ground. He walked through precincts in Harris County reporting turnout above 100 percent, some past 9,000 and even 24,000 percent. He showed candidates losing votes after the count had already started, including his own totals vanishing off the Secretary of State’s website and the now-infamous Senate District 11 swing where Bianca Gracia led Mayes Middleton going into election day and finished dead last. He laid out turnout that dropped 49 to 57 percent from 2018 in some counties even as we were told early voting was at a historic low, and a campaign analysis showing election-day totals landing at almost exactly double the early vote across forty candidates and nine races, a consistency he says does not occur naturally.

From there it got worse. Counties that could not produce electronic voting machine audit logs. A broken chain of custody in Tarrant County where the drives disappeared for hours. Counties skipping the consecutive ballot-numbering the Texas Election Code says they “shall” do, getting away with it on waivers handed out by an unelected, governor-appointed Secretary of State. His own ballot position swapping mid-early-voting in Wise County. And the tell that set him off: why would Dan Patrick, supposedly sitting at 75 percent, commission a January poll and then drop two and a half million dollars on a statewide TV buy?

His verdict was blunt. One problem is an anomaly. All of these together is the collapse of a constitutional republic. If our elections are not elections but selections, there is no constitutional republic to speak of, and that makes election integrity inseparable from the fight to give Texans a vote on independence. He closed by pointing people to paper ballots, to reporting irregularities, to running for office, and to the coming TEXIT resolution floor fight at the Republican state convention.

Questions answered in this episode

• How does a precinct report more than 100 percent voter turnout?
• How does a candidate lose votes after the counting has already started?
• Why did this election defy nearly every statistical trend, from collapsing turnout to election-day totals that came out almost exactly double the early vote?
• What is going on with the missing audit logs from the electronic voting machines, and the broken chain of custody in Tarrant County?
• How did counties get away with violating the Texas Election Code’s consecutive ballot-numbering requirement, and who is handing out the waivers?
• If Dan Patrick was really at 75 percent, why did he spend two and a half million dollars on a TV buy, and what did Abbott’s and Patrick’s internal polling actually show?
• Was Daniel Miller’s result a referendum on TEXIT, or did pro-Texas First candidates like Sid Miller and James White prove otherwise?
• What do we do now, as individuals and as a movement, to fight this and demand paper ballots?