Diane Trautman
Commissioners Court has formed a working group to review Harris County’s shift to voting centers and examine what effect it had on hours-long lines at the polls on Primary Day, which Precinct 1 Commissioner Rodney Ellis called unacceptable.
During an at-times contentious discussion with County Clerk Diane Trautman during Tuesday’s Commissioners Court session, Ellis questioned whether she had become too focused on county-wide voting centers, her signature initiative since taking office last year.
Ellis noted that the March primary was the second election overseen by Trautman that had problems. In last November’s municipal elections, the county clerk did not post full voting results for nearly 12 hours. Trautman blamed the delay on a last-minute directive from the secretary of state that forced Harris County to change its vote counting method; that directive, however, came out weeks before Election Day.
“I’d hate for a third one; because at some point, the discussion will have to be held, are voting centers worth it if you have all these unintended consequences?” Ellis said.
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County Judge Lina Hidalgo said she was surprised to learn, just days before the primary, that nearly two-thirds of polling sites would be in Republican commissioner precincts. She said that was “functionally discriminating” against Democratic voters, who outnumbered Republicans 2 to 1 on Election Day.
Trautman countered that the voting sites were set by an agreement between the Democratic and Republican parties.
Hidalgo was unsatisfied with that response. She said if Trautman had been more forthcoming about potential voting problems, and asked for more resources from the county, Commissioners Court would have tried to accommodate.
“I don’t know what I don’t know,” Hidalgo said. “I’ve been nothing but supportive of your guys’ effort to expand access to the vote.”
More than 50 counties in Texas use voting centers, including Bexar, Travis, Dallas and Tarrant, according to the secretary of state. November will be the first general election in Harris County to use the system, when more than 1 million voters are expected to cast ballots.
Ellis said he may not have supported the creation of voting centers had Trautman explained how the switch could affect primary elections.
Trautman called the election “a very sad night” for voters and pledged to do better. The working group formed this week will include a representative from each court member’s office, as well as county clerk staff.
See here, here, and here for the background. I’d like to see a broader group involved in that working group, but if they solicit public input I’ll be satisfied with that. People like the voting centers, and there’s nothing here that shouldn’t be fixable, but we need to really understand what happened and then do what it takes to deal with it. It’s not rocket science but it is a commitment. And Judge Hidalgo is right, better communication from the Clerk’s office is going to be a vital part of this effort. Let’s get this going so we can all feel confident about November.
What your seeing is a huge oversite of mega site voting locations – so u end up having 12 precint polling locations all going to bayland to vote or west gray multi service center ,in order to avoid this you would Not have the huge centers but maintain additional precint locations Or you could put 400 voting machines in each center ( theres plenty of room for that)and a line wouldnt be possible . The fact is specifically at west gray the gymnasium should of been the area for the voting machines with 400 of them , Not 25 machines in the small break room in the back of the facility – go with the 400 machines at the mega voting centers , that’ll do it .
How about a Wayz-type service that tells voters how long the lines are at all locations, so that voters can decide where to go based on that?
PS – JBB, the number of typos in your comment is so vast I can hardly believe they aren’t intentional. Fire your autocorrect.
The fact that more voting locations are in Republican commissioner districts does not mean that these locations are hard for Democrats to get to. A good 40% of the voters in each of the GOP held districts are themselves Democrats. The contested CD 7 and 22 congress races for the GOP is sufficient rationale for many of those sites.
Joel–there already is a service to tell how long the lines are at voter locations. The election officials did not update it, so it did not work, and gave wrong information.