The Secretary of State’s Office will again assign state inspectors to observe the handling and counting of ballots and monitor election records in Harris County, the state agency said while releasing a new audit outlining problems with the county’s elections in 2021 and 2022.
The audit, released late Friday, found that in those years, Harris County election officials did not follow state-mandated rules related to voter registration list maintenance; failed to adequately train election workers, which led to problems at the polls; and violated the law when it failed to estimate and issue the required ballot paper at some polling locations.
Harris County failed to adequately train election workers on how to properly set up and operate the voting system, the audit found, which “may have impacted the high percentage of equipment malfunctions” in the November 2021 constitutional amendment election. The county then did not adequately address these training issues prior to the March 2022 primary, the state said.
Former Harris County Elections Administrator Clifford Tatum did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the audit’s findings. Harris County Clerk Teneshia Hudspeth, who took over running elections last September after state lawmakers passed a law eliminating the election administrator position in the state’s most populous county, said in a statement that her office “will continue to ensure that the concerns that plagued the now-defunct Elections Administrator’s Office are not revisited.”
In the audit report, the Secretary of State’s Office said current Harris County election officials, who didn’t oversee the elections included in the audit, have worked to address the problems and correct the county’s procedures.
[…]
Hudspeth has presided over multiple county-wide and municipal elections, including a primary and a runoff election, since taking over last September. Although a storm left at least a dozen locations without power during the primary runoff election in May, voting wasn’t disrupted.
Speaking on a panel at the annual training for election officials hosted by the Secretary of State’s Office in Austin earlier this month, Hudspeth said her office has created a compliance team made up of roughly four people familiar with every step of the election process and responsible for properly documenting it. After each election, that team also digitizes election records and labels them to be used for auditing purposes or during election challenges, if necessary.
“It makes it easier for us to identify when the audit comes, what we need to pull together,” Hudspeth told hundreds of Texas election officials who gathered at the event. “Not every audit is exactly the same. It doesn’t always look the same. It isn’t always the same exact information, but what we have learned over time, is to put a process in place.”
Emphasis mine. The fact that the audit was released on Friday afternoon tells you all you need to know about what it did (and more importantly, didn’t) say. Harris County has had some issues conducting elections in past years, but it was all human error and the response from the state has been wildly out of proportion. We all know where that comes from. The burden of that once again falls on County Clerk Teneshia Hudspeth, and as much as she doesn’t deserve that, we’re lucky to have her. I very much hope this will be the end of it.