Complaints from voters and reports on the issue increase the focus on widespread problems at polling places in Harris County, Texas, on Election Day. Several reports said that in many polling places they did not have enough ballots and that in others the machines were not working.

While authorities struggle to defend the county election from a flood of criticism and future litigation, it is not yet known how widespread the problems were at their 782 polling places and whether any of them were serious enough to prevent people from voting.

According to Texas Tribune, https://www.texastribune.org/2022/11/18/harris-county-voting-problems/) “Harris is unusual among large Texas counties in not having an effective system for logging its polling place problems. Others have an easier, faster way to gather that data that doesn’t require calling hundreds of people individually and taking down notes. Instead, election software troubleshooting tools, used these days by many election directors across the nation, can help monitor and keep track of every issue reported at polling sites. These tools have features that alert officials of an issue in detail and provide status updates of the resolution in real time”.

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, a Republican, has called for a criminal investigation into problems in the largely Democratic county (https://gov.texas.gov/news/post/governor-abbott-calls-for-investigation-of-harris-county-elections), stating there has been “confusion and delays, missing keys, insufficient paper ballots at Republican precincts, staffing problems and more”. He said the problems could range from malfeasance to criminal conduct.

According to NBC News (https://www.nbcnews.com/news/latino/double-standard-texas-assigns-unusual-urgency-democratic-countys-elect-rcna57789), Civil rights groups have long complained about long lines, insufficient voting machines in predominantly Latino and Black areas, voter intimidation and other issues. Students at Prairie View A&M have repeatedly protested problems on election days, and in 2020 Black and Latino voters faced long wait times in Harris County. The state has been ranked near the bottom in making voting easier”.

In 2019, several civil rights and other groups sued Texas to stop the removal of 100,000 people from voter rolls after questioning their citizenship status based on flawed law enforcement data.

Andy Taylor, the attorney representing Harris County Republicans, disagrees that the mistakes in the county are isolated and innocent. He called them a total systemic failure.

Harris County Elections Administrator Clifford Tatum said in an email that his office is “fully committed to transparency” on Election Day processes and procedures, has been cooperating with the secretary of state’s auditing team and is tabulating votes of provisional ballots.

According to NBC News, “The investigation Abbott wants would be on top of an ongoing audit of the county’s election system, begun before Election Day. The audit, started after the 2020 election, includes two Republican counties and one Democratic County. Conservative groups began pushing for audits of election returns in various states in 2020 after former President Donald Trump falsely claimed that the election had been stolen from him. Those claims are considered to have played a part in the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol”.

“In 2021, Texas Republicans moved mountains to make it harder for Black and Brown residents of Harris County to vote. It appears that in 2022, after Democrats made significant holds and gains in Harris, Republicans are doubling down on their voter suppression efforts”, the Democrats said in a statement late Thursday, according to the same publication.

“James Slattery, senior supervising legislative attorney for the Texas Civil Rights Project, said his group documented late openings in other voting sites in Fort Bend, Hidalgo, Tarrant, Bell and Dallas counties. A state district court judge allowed Bell County to keep its polling locations open an hour later because of machine malfunctions. At least one other county had paper shortage issues, he said”.

“The state is always upset about how elections are run in Harris County, even when there are similar problems elsewhere”, Slattery said. “If the government actually cared about these issues, we would have a whole database of problems going back years”.