Votebeat fills in some blanks.
Some Texas election officials are running out of time before the March 5 primary to find sufficient polling locations, equipment, and election workers mandated by a new Republican-backed election law, and may not be able to meet its requirements.
The new law requires certain counties currently using vote centers for countywide voting to drastically increase the number of polling locations. Election officials say the new mandate is costly, and presents a series of new challenges for the counties that must comply.
In some counties, election officials are concerned about whether they’ll have enough money to purchase more equipment and pay rental fees for additional locations. In others, it’s unclear whether they’ll find enough election workers to staff more voting sites.
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The new law, Senate Bill 924, took effect in September and prevents counties that use the countywide voting program from combining small voting precincts into larger ones. In other words, election officials in those counties — about 90 across the state, where voters can cast a ballot anywhere in their county on Election Day — were able to centralize voting across lots of precincts that due to redistricting have fewer than 500 voters. Some of those smaller precincts have only 10 voters and there are some with just one voter each. The flexibility of combining them saved counties money by using a single polling site to serve several voters in a high-traffic area or where it’s more convenient for them to cast a ballot.
Whether these counties will have to drastically increase their numbers of polling locations in November will depend on how many they already operate in general elections. Some already offer a large number of locations and would not need to add more to comply.
The bill wasn’t designed to have this effect.
Senate Bill 924, as originally written by a North Texas Republican, state Sen. Drew Springer, gave smaller counties that don’t use countywide voting the option to combine precincts. Lawmakers didn’t change that part. Those counties can now group precincts together, as long as such combinations don’t grow to more than 10,000 registered voters — double what was previously allowed.
But a last-minute amendment on the House floor in May introduced by state Rep. John Bucy, an Austin Democrat, changed how counties using the countywide voting program must calculate the number of voting sites they offer, forcing the minimum number of sites higher. The amended bill passed solely on Republican votes, with Bucy voting against it and without a public hearing.
Bucy told Votebeat in August that the purpose of his amendment was to protect voting access and prevent the loss of more voting locations.
Springer acknowledged the problems the new law had created. To fix the unintended problems, in the middle of last year’s third called special session, Springer filed more legislation, Senate Bill 76. The bill, which specifically strikes the amendment introduced by Bucy, did not get a hearing and died without a vote.
See here for the background. I skipped the recap of Harris County’s issues as that’s covered in my earlier post. The main thing of note there is that the Harris County GOP is going to ask for the law to be updated so we can have separate primaries again. Other counties are running into issues finding enough polling places, which is always a concern. You can read all that as you see fit.
I wanted to know more about why Rep. Bucy introduced that amendment, so I went and read that story from August, which I either didn’t see at the time or didn’t give much thought to.
As originally written, Springer’s bill gives smaller counties that aren’t in the countywide voting program the option to combine precincts. Lawmakers didn’t change that part. Those counties can now group precincts together, as long as such combinations don’t grow to more than 10,000 registered voters — double what was previously allowed.
In the bill’s House Election Committee report, Springer gave an example in Denton County — which does not use countywide voting — where a precinct comprising a pair of retirement communities had grown so large, it forced a split into two different precincts. One of those precincts, however, did not have an adequate facility for a polling location. Springer said those residents “would be better served if two voting precincts could be combined” so that one centralized facility could be used as a polling location.
Then, state Rep. John Bucy, an Austin Democrat, introduced a last-minute amendment on the House floor in May that changes the way counties using the countywide voting program must calculate the number of voting sites they offer, forcing the minimum number of sites higher.
Bucy told Votebeat the purpose of his amendment was to protect voting access and prevent the loss of more voting locations.
“In a state that’s already the hardest to vote, I didn’t want to see access to the ballot box shrink even more,” he said and acknowledged that some counties have a hard time finding adequate polling locations and the workers to run them. But he did not remember receiving any pushback on his amendment during the legislative session, he said.
“We’ll see how it goes,” Bucy said. “And we’ll continue to be open to adjusting [legislation] as we always need to be and as we see unintended consequences of legislation.”
The Legislature passed the bill solely on Republican votes in both chambers, with Bucy voting against the bill in the end. The law does not provide any type of additional funding for counties to pay additional election workers or to pay for expenses associated with finding new locations. If counties do not provide the additional locations or otherwise fail to comply with the new rules, they could be sued by candidates or advocacy groups.
The Bucy amendment itself doesn’t mention that formula, but I presume its existence has an effect on the original law that enabled the countywide voting program. I don’t have the energy to try to suss all that out, but the bottom line effect is what we have seen, that many counties had to increase the number of available polling places, which in turn led to the need for Harris County to do the joint primary. We’re using more locations for this election than we have done in the past, but we have used many more locations for general elections, so finding new places wasn’t our problem. We’ll see what the Lege does in 2025. I get what Rep. Bucy had in mind, I hope we don’t go too far in remediating it.