After excessive voting lines on Super Tuesday forced Texans to wait for up to six hours to vote, state lawmakers are directing their attention toward challenges voters faced in trying to cast a ballot for the presidential primary election.
The Mexican American Legislative Caucus on Thursday announced it would hold a joint hearing this month with the Texas Legislative Black Caucus and another nonpartisan caucus to hear from election officials, experts and voters affected by long lines and other issues at the polls.
“Texas must quickly fix the problems encountered by voters during Primary Election Day so that we do not see a repeat of these failures during the November General Election,” state Rep. Rafael Anchía, the Dallas Democrat who chairs MALC, said in a statement. “We received reports of limited polling locations, workers and machines, ridiculously long lines, equipment malfunctions and elections website failures.”
You know what I think. I’m in favor of anything that will lead to more transparency and and honest assessment of what happened and what can be done about it. It’s entirely possible that I’m way off base in my perspective and that there were a lot of things happening on Tuesday that I don’t know about. Well fine then, let’s hear what those things were so we can figure out how to fix them. Let’s hear from the people who were affected, let’s hear from the people who advocate for those people, and let’s hear from the people whose job it is to put on an election that doesn’t require this kind of endurance from anyone. You can’t fix a problem until you diagnose it and understand its root causes. Let’s get to that.
If you think it was bad in the primary election just wait until the general election where there will be no straight party ticket voting! Cluster x 2 as voters navigate 35-40 candidate vote without being able to put an R or a D down and walk away in 10 seconds.
I am a vote on election day person and when I went to vote at a nearby polling location at Nottingham Park Community Center the line was painfully slow. It didn’t move in 12 minutes and doing quick math in my head based on the # of folks ahead of me I wasn’t interested in an 1-1.5 hour wait.
An hour later I went to my specific precinct polling location (Westchester Intl Academy). No line, but it did take more than 5 minutes for the Democratic poll worker to figure out how to check me in with my ID…very painful to watch.