The Census Bureau says there are something like 24 million people living in the state of Texas. Thirteen-point-five million of them are registered to vote, and the state said it expected about 68 percent of those registered to cast ballots in Tuesday's election.

That's a lot of people.

So, now that Election Day is over, by what margin will the Republican Party retain control of the state House?

Twenty-five votes.

Aside from being a good reminder that every vote really does count, that fact is also a good postscript to our recent stories on whether dead voters are on the rolls in Dallas and Harris counties.

As reporter Rudolph Bush wrote in this morning's Dallas Morning News, our stories didn't intend to say -- and I don't think they said -- that there was a widespread conspiracy to rig elections using the IDs of dead voters, only that there could be the potential to do so with so many of them on the rolls.

Our stories said there were about 4,000 or so people on the Harris County rolls and more than 6,000 in Dallas County whose personal information matched that found in a database of federal death records -- and given that all you need in Texas to legally vote is a utility bill and not even a photo ID, that sets up the potential for nefarious deeds to occur.

I tried to consider how hard it would be to find 4,000 of my closest friends to rig an election. But then a friend of mine suggested using a smaller pool of friends, and having them vote fraudulently for multiple dead people, at different polling places. (Reminder to self: Next time that friend is at my house, watch them carefully and see whether any valuables disappear.)

But that 25-vote margin in the race that is deciding control of our state House reiterates a point we made in our original stories: I wouldn't need to find 4,000 friends to throw an election. In the Harper-Brown/Ramano race, where control of the entire state House hangs in the balance, and with it every piece of legislation that will be introduced in our General Assembly and the fate of the entire state of Texas for the next two years, I might only need a few friends and a good printer to fake a few light bills.

That sounds much more doable to me.

(Picture by flickr user Tom Prete, used via the Creative Commons license.)

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