As their counterparts in Iowa reel from a disastrously slow election returns process, Texas Democrats raised the prospect Wednesday that a change in the way Texas reports election results could delay the final tally of delegates won by presidential hopefuls in the upcoming March 3 primary past election night.
Officials with the Texas Democratic Party said they were recently told by the Texas Secretary of State’s office that it will not be able to provide on election night the numbers needed to allocate a majority of the 228 delegates up for grabs in the state on Super Tuesday. In a Jan. 23 meeting, the Democrats said, top state election officials cited limitations to their revamped reporting system, which is used to compile returns from the state’s 254 counties.
“They basically said that’s not built out yet,” said Glen Maxey, the special projects director for the Texas Democratic Party who attended the meeting with state officials.
Late Wednesday, a spokesman for the secretary of state’s office, which initially had not responded to The Texas Tribune’s questions about the issue, contested that characterization, saying that “any allegations that delegate allocations will not be reported on election night are categorically false.”
At issue are 149 delegates that will be won by Democratic presidential candidates through a complex formula that divvies up those delegates based on the distribution of votes in each of Texas’ 31 state Senate districts. Maxey said he and other officials were told the state initially will collect election returns at the county level but not at the senatorial district or precinct level, which are needed to calculate how many delegates each candidate picks up. Party officials were told those more detailed numbers would be made available “the next day or so,” Maxey said.
In an email, agency spokesman Stephen Chang said the secretary of state’s office does plan to collect and publicly report votes for president at the Senate district level “in the same fashion” as previous primaries.
“In previous primaries, including the 2016 primary election, delegate allocations for both of Texas’ major parties on election night have been approximate allocations based on data self-reported by the counties,” Chang said. “The delegate allocations will be reported in the same fashion for the March 3rd primary election.”
An earlier version of the story did not yet have the response from the SOS office, so the answer to the question was looking like No. Part of the reason for this is that those delegates are doled out by Senate district, according to a formula that you can learn more about at the links in the story. Senate districts are of course all gerrymandered up, with many of them spanning multiple counties, so you can’t calculate the official delegate count until you have complete counts from all those counties. That could certainly make for a late night, but a reasonable estimate ought to be doable in the evening. If things are close, the allocations could be muddled, and there may not be a clear winner of the most delegates. In theory at least, we’ll have something. Hope for the best but be prepared for a late night. Still gotta be better than Iowa, right?
I think the SOS, the Democratic Party and the voters should stop worrying about getting their Amazon Prime one-hour delivery of election results and start worrying about just getting accurate elections results.
@Brad: amen.
To drive home the absolute necessity to prioritize accuracy over ANY other consideration, read this, hot off the press from the NYT. Contaminated precincts, and they’re not talking about coronavirus. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/06/upshot/iowa-caucuses-errors-results.html
Eliminate the caucus process and electoral college and go to an ‘anything goes cage match’, ie. a popular vote. Who cares if the winner only receives 16% of the vote ? Popular vote, baby !
I second that amen. We’ve become spoiled in regards to getting results now, Now, NOW!!!!, and accuracy is far more important.
Keep in mind that the Iowa caucus was a party run volunteer effort so ripe for a cluster.
Parties, Dem or Rep, can do whatever/however they want for choosing their candidates, but when it comes to the general election there can be no greater imperative than having secure and accurate results no matter the timing of releasing the results.
Since all this is done with electronic voting machines, I don’t see what’s so difficult about having fast AND accurate results. The debacle in Iowa however, wasn’t about that, it was the result of a panicked Democratic party trying to fend off a hostile takeover of the party by Bernie and his bros. You might remember a similar thing happening to the Republican Party, an outsider coming in and hijacking it. Dem. leaders are rightfully afraid of Bernie doing the same thing, and I would put nothing past the DNC to stop him, least of all fudging the vote.
Up next: several random bimbos accusing Bernie of sexually assaulting them decades ago. Wait for it.
Edit: All of this in Texas. I realize Iowa does things differently, but isn’t it curious that the company that created the ‘app’ was backed by none other than George Soros? Heck, they should have just hired Crowdstrike if they wanted to cheat. Crowdstrike was already in the system as a vendor, pretty easy to push a button and print out another check to them.
Sorry Bill the truth is that the company was hacked by the Russians at the request of the orange Cheeto, since you dwell in conspiracies. Trump’s campaign also paid people to go there to disrupt the counting.
By the way Bill, my conspiracy theories are much more likely to come out to be true that all the bull you and your Trump paid supporters can come up with.
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/4chan-iowa-caucus-sabotage_n_5e3ca6d1c5b6bb0ffc0e01b9
Manny,
Remember when Trump said his campaign was being spied on, and everyone said that was just a wild conspiracy theory? Then we found out it was true. Remember when we found out that Team Trump WAS spied on, but it was deserved spying. And then after the IG report, we found out that the spying wasn’t deserved, that the ‘dossier’ was the evidence, and the dossier was BS Russian disinformation paid for by Hillary and the DNC?
Remember after 2 and a half years, we found out that Trump was NOT a Russian agent? Remember Mueller testifying, looking like a doddering old fool?
Don’t you get tired of being lied to? i guess not.
Trump not being a Russian agent has not been disproved. As I used to tell my students when they asked if they should open the trunk when they were stopped by the police. If you don’t have anything to hide, open the trunk. If you have something to hide then don’t open it.
Trump obviously has a lot to hide, he is a crook an evil man. His family has a history of that. His grandfather fled to America because he did not want to serve in the military. Here in this country he made his money running whore house. No Trump has ever served this country in war.
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