Baytown ballot error caught as voting surges

Some residents of recent annex saw out-of-date races

Through four days of early voting, Harris County continued to keep pace with presidential-year turnout, as election officials in Baytown caught an error by the county voter registrar that affected nearly 300 ballots.

More than 58,900 residents voted in Harris County on Thursday, and another 4,200 ballots arrived in the mail, bringing the four-day total to 63,164. That total far outpaces early voting in any previous midterm election held in the county, and is slightly below the 2016 general election.

Harris County Clerk Stan Stanart has said balloting has gone smoothly, despite uncharacteristically long lines from Pasadena to Acres Homes. Still, errors have occurred.

Election workers in Baytown discovered some residents who lived on land the city recently had annexed from unincorporated Harris County received ballots that did not include city races.

City of Baytown spokeswoman Natasha Barrett said as many as 294 voters would have received incorrect ballots because the Harris County tax assessor-collector and voter registrar failed to update its maps reflecting the new city boundaries. Barrett said Baytown informed Harris County of the boundary changes in July.

“We submitted all of our paperwork,” Barrett said. “The tax office had human error over there.”

Harris County Clerk spokesman Hector de Leon said though the incorrect ballots were the fault of the voter registrar, the clerk’s office worked with Baytown officials to correct the issue immediately.

“We wanted all voters who hadn’t been impacted yet to receive the correct ballot,” de Leon said.

Residents who already voted using incorrect ballots are not allowed to vote again.

Harris County Tax AssessorCollector Ann Harris Bennett did not respond to questions about how the error occurred and whether her office failed to update voter records of residents in other municipalities.

Bennett’s office also bungled a challenge of 4,000 voter registrations this summer from a Harris County Republican Party official by mistakenly placing more than 1,700 registrations in suspension. The county attorney’s office said the registration challenges were invalid, and Bennett’s office never should have considered them.

The tax assessor-collector’s office has been without a communications director, voter registration director and chief of staff for several months, but clerks still registered 55,482 new voters between March and October, more than any other Texas county.