I don’t think I had seen this explained before.
Harris County residents likely will have a long night waiting for election returns Nov. 8, according to county Elections Administrator Clifford Tatum.
It takes around one minute for the county’s equipment to read a digital drive that contains a polling location’s vote count — and election workers will be receiving a drive from each of the county’s 782 polling locations.
The county’s equipment can read two of those drives at the same time, which would put the total counting time — assuming no problems arise — at more than six and a half hours.
“That sort of tells you how long it’s going to take to process all of the results that come in from Election Night,” Tatum said.
“The reality is that we will not have all of the final results tabulated before midnight,” Tatum added. “The math simply does not lend itself to allow us to do that.”
The county has not had complete results before midnight in decades, owing largely to the population and sprawling geography poll workers had to traverse to turn in ballot boxes and voting machines after the polls closed. In recent years, however, wait times for results have stretched further into the early-morning hours. This year’s March primaries took 30 hours to tally, prompting harsh criticism of Tatum’s predecessor, who later resigned over vote-counting issues. Harris County was the only one in the state to exceed the 24-hour limit.
Tatum said the elections office’s top priority is accuracy over speed.
“We just need our voters to know that simply because all the results aren’t in before midnight doesn’t mean that there’s something wrong,” Tatum said. “It’s just the process.”
Asked why the county does not have more equipment available to cut down the reporting time, Tatum said the challenge is balancing speed and accuracy.
“If you have multiple readers going, you want to be sure that the operators that are operating those readers are following the processes and procedures. So, if we have the opportunity to add in an additional reader, we’ll do that. But right now, our plan is to read two at a time. They are expensive equipment. It’s about control and accuracy in the process.”
Sounds reasonable. Usually, we get most of the votes tallied by around midnight – the May elections were both like that, thanks in part to the reduced turnout. The primary this year was an exception, and the blowback from it was exacerbated by a lack of communication from the Elections office. Here, Administrator Clifford Tatum lays out a schedule for when we can expect updates, and if we get that plus clear communications if and when something is causing a delay, I think we’ll be fine. Campos has more.
6.5 hours for computers – in one city. Imagine if the count by hand whackadoodles got their wish.
PS – Maybe buy more computers?
On forums, I’ve challenged the count by hand idiots to describe how Harris County, with 80+ races and 1.5 million+ voters could be counted by hand. The main response was “don’t allow voting anywhere but the precinct, and eliminate early and mail voting”.
One of the reasons why in recent years its taken longer for the results to come in is because we only have one drop-off location instead of the 4 that we used to have. Some judges have quite a distance to go to get to NRG and then there is a backup with everyone converging on one location. Many judges have quit because after spending a long day running an election, they don’t want to spend hours waiting in line to drop off their equipment/ballots. On a positive note, the election worker training this time was a huge improvement over recent years. I give it an A+.