I wish we could talk about something else, but we have to do this.
Hervis Rogers, the hero we don’t deserve
Dozens of Democratic voters were still waiting to cast ballots at midnight in Houston, turning Super Tuesday into a painful slog for some citizens amid questions about how the County Clerk’s office had allocated its voting machines across the county.
Janet Gonzalez left work early and at 5:30 p.m. checked a website the clerk’s office runs to show wait times at polling places. It seemed Texas Southern University had a short wait, but when she arrived she found a massive line. She waited an hour outside and three more inside before she finally cast her ballot.
Officials with the clerk’s office acknowledged the accuracy of the wait-times website is reliant on election workers manually updating the status of their polling places.
Some people in line gave up and walked away, Gonzalez said. Others briefly sought refuge on a scattering of chairs before giving them up to others as the line inched forward.
[…]
Democratic County Clerk Diane Trautman and her staff said each of the county’s 401 polling places started with between 16 and 48 machines, depending on anticipated turnout, but at each location the machines were divided equally between the Democrat and Republican primaries, regardless of whether the location heavily favored one party or the other.
“If we had given one five and one 10, and that other one had a line, they would say, ‘You slighted us,’” Trautman said late Tuesday. “So we wanted to be fair and equal and start at the same amount. Through the day, we have been sending out additional machines to the Democratic judges to the extent that we ran out.”
During Election Day the clerk’s office dispatched 68 extra voting machines to Democratic polls, including 14 to TSU, in response to election judges’ requests. Trautman added that some of the machines assigned to TSU to start the day had to be replaced after malfunctioning.
Trautman said a joint primary — which would have allowed both parties’ ballots to be loaded on each voting machine, rather than separating the equipment by party — would have reduced the lines, but the GOP rejected the idea.
[…]
County Democratic Party chair Lillie Schechter said her staff did not grasp until Tuesday that when Trautman spoke of allocating the machines “equitably” she meant dividing them equally at each polling site, rather than giving each party the same number of machines but concentrating most of them in areas known to be strongholds of each party.
“We’re thrilled that turnout has been so high today and that’s been super exciting, but I think the story with the voting machines goes a step farther back than just how the voting machines are allocated,” she said. “The machines are part of the problem but not the whole problem.”
In order to preserve citizens’ ability to vote at any polling place on Election Day – a new policy under Trautman, and one GOP officials have opposed – Schechter said the parties needed to agree on shared polling locations. That gave Republicans more power in the negotiation, she said, and resulted in more than 60 percent of Tuesday’s polling sites being located in Republican-held county commissioner precincts, with less than 40 percent in commissioner precincts held by Democrats.
It’s kind of amazing that more people didn’t just give up and walk away after hours of waiting on line. You think you’re committed to American ideals and democracy, tell that to Hervis Rogers and the other people who waited as long as they did to exercise their right to vote. Every last one of them deserves our thanks, and a hell of a lot better from the experience next time.
This story expands a bit on that last paragraph above.
The clerk’s office dispatched additional machines to some poll sites, located in heavily black and Hispanic neighborhoods including Third Ward, Acres Homes and Gulfgate. They provided only partial relief.
At Texas Southern University, where just 48 Republicans voted early, the final Democratic voter cast his ballot after 1 a.m. after waiting in line for more than six hours.
Democratic election workers at a Sunnyside voting center reported functioning machines were broken in a successful ruse to get the clerk’s office to send more, a spokeswoman for Trautman said.
The sheer expanse of Harris County’s 1,777 square miles and most-in-Texas 2.3 million registered voters long has posed problems for county clerks in primary and general elections. When Democratic precincts in past elections had extremely long lines, some in the party blamed the Republican county clerk.
Problems persisted in Tuesday’s primary, however, even though Democrats have controlled every countywide post since last year.
Yes, and many people noticed, though a lot of blame still accrued to Republicans thanks to their long and dedicated record of vote suppression. But we don’t have Stan Stanart to kick around any more, and the spotlight is on us to fix this, not just for next time but on a more permanent basis.
I mean, I can accept that the Harris County GOP’s refusal to go along with a joint primary and the certainty that they’d pitch a fit if Dems got more voting machines than they did even though it was a virtual certainty that Dems would be the larger part of the Tuesday electorate was a problem. But we elected Diane Trautman to solve problems like that, and on Tuesday she didn’t. The onus is squarely on her to be completely transparent about what happened and why it happened, and to come up with a plan to ensure it never happens again. That doesn’t mean just brainstorming with her staff. That means concrete action involving all of the stakeholders – people from the community, election law experts, Commissioner Ellis and Garcia’s offices, County Attorney Vince Ryan and 2020 nominee Christian Menefee, grassroots organizations like TOP and the Texas Civil Rights Project and whoever else, and the HCDP since they have as big a stake in this as anyone. Convene a commission, get everyone’s input on what they saw and what they experienced and what they know and what they need, and come up with a plan for action.
Among other things, that means having much better communications, both before the election so people have a better idea of what polling places are open and what ones aren’t – yes, this is on the website, but clearly more than that needs to be done – and on Election Day, when rapid response may be needed to deal with unexpected problems. Why weren’t there more voting machines available on Tuesday, and why wasn’t there a way to get them to the places with the longest lines in a timely manner? Let the Republicans whine about that while it’s happening, at that point no one would care. Stuff happens, and anyone can guess wrong about what Election Day turnout might look like. But once that has happened, don’t just sit there, DO SOMETHING about it. It really shouldn’t have to take election clerks pretending that machines had malfunctioned to get some relief.
Also, as useful as the voting centers concept is, we need to recognize that for folks with mobility issues, having places they can walk to really makes a difference. Add Metro and transit advocacy folks like LINK Houston to that list of commission attendees, because the mobility of the people in a given neighborhood needs to be weighed into decisions about which Election Day sites are open and which are consolidated in the same way that relative turnout is. If a significant segment of a given population simply can’t drive to another neighborhood to vote, then all the voting centers in the world don’t matter.
I get that in November we’ll have all locations open, and there won’t be any squabble over who gets which voting machines. That will help. But in November, no matter how heavy early voting will be, we’re going to get a lot more people going to the polls on Election Day than the 260K or so that turned out this Tuesday. Voter registration is up, turnout is up, and we need to be much better prepared for it. Diane Trautman, please please please treat this like the emergency that it is. And Rodney Ellis, Adrian Garcia, and Lina Hidalgo, if that means throwing some money at the problem, then by God do that. We didn’t elect you all to have the same old problems with voting that we had before. The world is watching, and we’ve already made a lousy first impression. If that doesn’t hurt your pride and make you burn to fix it, I don’t know what would.
(My thanks to nonsequiteuse and Melissa Noriega for some of the ideas in this post. I only borrow from the best.)
UPDATE: Naturally, after I finished drafting this piece, out comes this deeper dive from the Trib. Let me just highlight a bit of it:
Months before, the Democratic and Republican county parties had been unable to agree to hold a joint primary, which would have allowed voters to share machines preloaded with ballots for both parties.
The Harris County Democratic Party had agreed to the setup, but the Harris County GOP refused, citing in part the long lines Republican voters would have to wait through amid increased turnout for the pitched Democratic presidential primary.
“We wanted them to do a joint primary where you would just have one line and voters could use all the machines, but they couldn’t agree on that,” said Harris County Clerk Diane Trautman, who was elected to her post in 2018.
Without a resolution, Trautman chose to allocate an equal number of machines for both primaries at each polling site “because we didn’t want to slight anyone,” particularly as Harris moved to countywide voting to free voters from precinct-specific voting. But the move essentially halved the number of voting machines available to Democratic voters on a busy election day. That meant Republican voting quickly wrapped up across the county while Democratic lines made for extra hours of voting at multiple polling places.
In a Wednesday press conference, Paul Simpson, the chair of the Harris County GOP, reiterated that the party was adamantly opposed to joint primaries and sought to preempt any blame for long Democratic lines. To Simpson, Trautman misfired by pursuing a 50/50 split of voting machines across the board instead of using past turnout data to adjust allocations, and he pointed to the party’s recommendation to give Republicans only four machines at Texas Southern University.
“The county clerk refused and failed to follow our suggestion to avoid the lines that we predicted last summer were going to happen,” Simpson said.
(Previous voting patterns weren’t available for Texas Southern University, which was only added as polling place under Trautman.)
But Lillie Schechter, the chairwoman of the Harris County Democratic Party, said the excessive wait times Democrats faced Tuesday were part of a broader electoral divide in a county that has turned reliably blue in recent years. That change in power has come with voting initiatives that local Republicans have not warmed up to, including a move to countywide voting that allows voters to cast ballots at any polling place in the county on election day.
To keep countywide voting for the primary election, the political parties needed to agree on the distribution of shared polling places. But the map the GOP pushed for on Super Tuesday established more voting centers in the two county commissioner precincts represented by Republicans, Schechter said.
“If you look at the story to say let’s blame the county clerk’s office, you’re missing the big picture here,” Schechter said.
In the aftermath of the wait time debacle, Trautman acknowledged that Democratic voting on Super Tuesday was bogged down by both technical and training issues. The county’s voting machines — the oldest in use among the state’s biggest counties — went down at different points in the night. Election workers weren’t always able to make the adjustments to bring them back into order. Both machines and election workers were “stretched to the max” during the late-night voting slog, she said.
At midnight — seven hours after polls closed — voting was again interrupted at the two polling places that were still running, including the Texas Southern University site, when the tablets used to check in voters automatically timed out and had to be rebooted.
Later on Wednesday, Trautman signaled she was assessing what the county needed to fix moving forward — a better method for rerouting voters to nearby voting sites with shorter lines, a wait time reporting system that’s not dependent on busy election workers, pushing for more early voting and, perhaps most notably, purchasing additional equipment for the November election.
“We will work to improve to make things better,” Trautman said.
It’s the right attitude and I’m glad to see it. The Clerk’s office is also in the process of scoping out new voting machines, which can’t come soon enough but which will introduce new challenges, in terms of adapting to the new technology and educating voters on how to use it. All this is a good start, and now I want to see a whole lot of follow-through.
Why is Harris County leadership not doing studies to evaluate the merits of switching to a county Elections Administration Office? We could combine the VR and CC functions in one office and presumably reduce or eliminate the inherent inefficiencies we live with by clinging to the current arrangement. The stars are aligned with Democrats controlling Commissioners Court and the two offices that would give up their election functions. Many Texas counties have gone this route; why is Harris County, in 2020, still behind the eight ball? Why isn’t this obvious idea even part of the conversation?
What prevents a voting machine from handling any party affiliation? Tech problem or political problem?
“You think you’re committed to American ideals and democracy, tell that to Hervis Rogers and the other people who waited as long as they did to exercise their right to vote.”
Charles, your comment above is a little over the top. Let’s have some perspective. This was a primary election, not a genera election where actual leaders were being elected.
Keep in mind that millions of dollars of tax payer funds are being spent on letting two private entities, the Republican and Democratic parties, choose their candidates.
Let these private parties spend their own private money to choose their private entities candidates.
Question: why does the election official of Harris County need to ask these 2 private entities what they want? Trautman should be just doing what is best for the county’s voter.
Doug – Pretty sure it’s a political issue in this instance, but am prepared to be told I’m wrong by someone who knows better.
Voter_worker – The idea has been floated before, by then-Judge Emmett. It never got past the discussion stage. Search my archives, I’ve blogged about it. I was probably skeptical of the idea then, which may have been mostly a reflection of my lack of faith in Commissioners Court as it was then populated. It’s a reasonable idea and we can look at it if we want, but I don’t think that was the cause of the issue.
brad, thanks for stressing the private entity status of the two parties and the fact that they hold too much sway over the public office which is providing election support. One of the questions I’d like to have answered concerns whether or not an Election Administrator would have more authority to call the shots when contracting with the parties than the CC does.
In my precinct in the Heights the long Democrat lines at closing (maybe 200 folks at 7 p.m.) were not a result of too few machines, many of which were awaiting voters, but instead, elderly Democrat poll workers having trouble figuring out the iPad in the process of checking in millennial voters, and many of those young prospective voters having glitches in their voter registrations.
From Alan Vera at the Ballot Security Board: “COUNTY CLERK MISLEADS THE MEDIA–AGAIN
The county clerk and the Democrats are blaming HCRP for long lines for the Democrat Primary election. They will never accept responsibility for their bad decisions.
They’ve forgotten about video evidence.
At Commissioners Court on 2/25/20 the Administrator of Elections stood up and bragged to the commissioners that the Republican Party had requested too few election machines for March 3. He says that in his wisdom, he overruled the party and allocated twice as many machines as we requested.
His actions resulted in the Democrats being short of machines and that’s what created the long lines at Dem polling places. He made the decision that created the long lines on election day.
Here’s the link to the video from commissioners court with Winn’s testimony. The debate over election matters starts at the 1:02:47 mark. Just use the time bar at the bottom to advance the video.: https://harriscountytx.new.swagit.com/videos/43406 “
Charles, I’m not suggesting that having a split office caused these problems but I am suggesting that a single appointed office would result in better organizational procedures and input from stakeholders that would prevent all or most of these issues from manifesting in the first place.
As someone who leans more RIGHT, the idea of allocating the same number of machines is a 3rd grade solution to a classic queuing problem. It’s the same problem the TSA has. The solution should have been to load both party tickets on the same machine, but enforce the 80/20 rule (or something along those lines). Twenty percent of the the machines would be allocated to the (in this case) Republican voter who can go to the shorter Republican line. If 20% of machines are not used (no one in the line), they can be used (by the Democrat voter) until such time as a Republican voter shows up to vote. You should always leave one open machine on the Republican block of voter machines so that they are quickly satisfied. his way you’d eliminate as best you can the queuing problem and gain as near as you can in the 90% efficiency usage range.
Now, in open contested years you would allocate have everyone vote on the same machine (perfect efficiency).
Now where to put the polling places is another problem altogether.
My 2cents.
Chris Daniel,
This talks about one single precinct…correct? Not the entire county…correct?
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the Democrats just love throwing blame when they screw stuff up. All my D friends voting in super long lines while it took me 15 minutes. And all i could say was well it’s the county clerk that’s over the elections so…There’s no way they can throw blame on GOP they were correct in saying the Democrats having more machines would be suppression on Republicans.
Adoile,
Head slap.
Yes, you voted in 15 minutes…BECAUSE THE REPUBLICANS REFUSED TO DO A JOINT PRIMARY ON VOTING MACHINES where ALL voting machines would be ready at polling locations for either Dem or Rep voters depending on who showed up.
It shouldn’t matter what a voter’s political affiliation is when they show up to vote. First come first served no matter what affiliation.
The mistake by the election official was asking the Reps and Dems what they wanted in the first place. She should dictate what is best for all voters/citizens, not the political parties.
I wish you Reps and Dems would pay for your own primaries and not piggy back off the taxpayers in the first place.
Please do a bare minimum of research before posting. And frankly the last bit of your posting is a bit incoherent.
And who are you, @brad a man behind a computer with an opinion. so quite frankly stop replying to me if what i say is so incoherent. how are you able to even respond if that’s the case.
my point still stands that democrats throw blame when they screw up even you admit her asking in the first place was a screw up. but yet and still she threw the blame where?
Adoile Turner III
The Republicans never ever do that ,do they? Budget Deficit was so important to Republicans and no not a word about the trillion dollar a year debt.
Besides the Republicans have become the party of liars, or alternative reality if one prefers.
The orange cheeto is still blaming Obama for things that happen today, blaming him for this administration messing up, at least he can claim that he made America number 1 in one category
https://www.businessinsider.com/coronavirus-death-rate-by-country-2020-3
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LOL! That guy, the last voter, the one who waited hours and hours…..not eligible to vote. He’s on parole for a felony!
https://www.rightjournalism.com/video-texas-voter-who-had-to-wait-seven-hours-to-cast-his-ballot-is-not-eligible-to-vote-under-texas-law/
Hopefully he gets arrested for this.
Shut up Bill
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