Technical issues on Election Day left longtime voters in Houston’s Precinct 344 frustrated.
Dispatches from Harris County
First one machine blinked out. Then two were down. By 7:03 a.m., three minutes into regular voting on Election Day, six out of six devices were malfunctioning. It wasn’t long before the group of voters waiting to cast ballots at the Greater Love Missionary Baptist Church — most of them elderly, most of them African-American — began to despair.
“They feel like it’s a conspiracy,” said Amy McCan, the election judge at the polling station. “I’ve never seen my elderly frustrated like they were frustrated today.” She estimated that 15 or 20 voters, some with walkers, canes and accompanied by caregivers, opted to leave during that busy morning stretch.
Each set of three machines was linked like a daisy chain to an operating machine, and the electricity kept flickering in and out, taxing the breaker. An electrician said the wiring in the ramshackle outbuilding named Precinct 344’s polling place needed an overhaul. The wires might have been chewed by rodents. Two different Harris County election technicians came out at different times to unplug and reboot the system.
The set-up was working at 10:30 a.m. But by 2 p.m., four of the six machines were out again. “I can’t cut the A/C on because sparks are going to fly,” said McCan said, juggling two phone calls on her own and a borrowed cell phone. She leaned over an elbow to examine a machine’s display screen with a coworker.
“We need a better polling location,” she said. “They need to X this one off. I’ve been telling them that for years.”
For more than two decades, McCan, 44, has been overseeing voting at this site just north of the 610 Loop. She first helped as a clerk in 1991, when she supported Gov. Bill Clinton and her cousin kept arguing that H. Ross Perot should be in the White House. When she was 21, Rev. Samuel H. Smith, of Mount Horeb Missionary Baptist, and a woman she knew as Miss McLemore, the previous judge, both encouraged McCan to take over the Greater Love polling location.
“They taught me to care for my voters and make it as easy as possible for them to vote,” she said. “I let them know what the provision of votes stands for. I have a lot of elderly here. That’s their right. All I can do is help them.”
McCan is the mother of three grown daughters and the youngest of 10 children. On work days, she serves drinks at NRG, Toyota Center, Minute Maid and BBVA Compass.
Her grandmother, who was born in 1919, made McCan and her older siblings and cousins promise they would never take their votes for granted. On Tuesday morning, one voter told McCan that his father was blasted with the firehose during civil rights protests in Alabama.
Standing on the porch of the precinct’s outbuilding, she drew a deep breath, watching a county technician pour gas into a generator to provide backup electricity.
“My ancestors, their ancestors, fought for this right,” she said. “To see my elderly go through this was a problem for me. To go through what they went through and then have this... it is not fair.”