County gets OK on voting centers
Harris County has received state permission to use voting centers, which allow voters to cast ballots at any location they choose, in high-turnout elections, County Clerk Diane Trautman announced Monday.
Under such a system, voters are not required to visit their assigned precincts. Trautman, who has made establishing the centers a top priority since taking office in January, has said the change will make voting easier, beacuse residents can more easily cast ballots near work or school. Voting centers will be in place for the November general election.
Harris County, which has about 2.3 million voters, is the most populous U.S. county to adopt voting centers.
More than 50 Texas counties, including Fort Bend, Brazoria and Wharton, have added voting centers since Lubbock County launched its program in 2006. Travis County, which includes Austin, had been the largest to shift away from precinct-based balloting.
More than one-third of voters visited polling sites outside their home precincts during a trial run of voting centers during May’s low-turnout school and municipal elections, the clerk’s office said. Trautman called that test a success and asked the secretary of state to approve the use of the
system in general elections, which can draw more than 1 million voters.
“Feedback from communities across the county has been largely positive, and I am pleased that voters will be able to choose a convenient location to cast their ballot,” Trautman said in a statement.
During her campaign, Trautman said voting centers could increase turnout 2 to 5 percent. A working paper by University of Houston political scientists Jeronimo Cortina and Brandon Rottinghaus on the effects of voting centers in seven Texas counties found the highest increase in voters in low-turnout elections.
“(Voting centers) are good, but not the panacea people hoped they would be in terms of turnout,” Rottinghaus said.
If polling places are consolidated, Rottinghaus cautioned, turnout could decrease among less mobile voters, such as the elderly, poor and disabled.
Trautman spokeswoman Teneshia Hudspeth said the county clerk’s office will examine voting patterns in this November’s elections before deciding whether some little-used locations should be combined or closed. She said the county would work to ensure no voter loses access to the polls.
“For right now, we cannot really discuss consolidation until we
have evidence of how people will vote,” Hudspeth said.
All of the county’s 740 polling locations, included early voting sites, will be open on Election Day, which is Nov. 5. The clerk’s office will open a site at the University of Houston and plans to place another on the campus of Texas Southern University.
In past elections, Harris County featured countywide voting only at a small number of early voting sites and never on Election Day. The county operated 46 early voting locations and 739 precinct sites on Election Day during the 2018 general election.
The addition of voting centers is possible because the county adopted electronic poll books under Trautman’s predecessor, Stan Stanart. The books can communicate with each other, which prevents a voter from casting ballots in more than one location.
Paul Simpson, chairman of the Harris County Republican Party, said during the May election, poll books failed to quickly record a voter had checked in, creating an opportunity for fraud. In a letter to the secretary of state, a Republican election judge reported about half an hour elapsed before poll books updated.
“Currently, the county clerk’s electronic poll book system may not be ready for what could be one of the largest simultaneous voting operations in the nation in November 2020,” Simpson said in a statement Friday.
Hudspeth said the county Republican Party has shared no evidence of poll book issues directly with the clerk’s office. She noted the secretary of state’s office declared the county’s voting centers trial run was successful.
Simpson in June also said Republicans objected to Trautman’s proposal for a “joint primary,” which she said would be more efficient and offer more privacy to voters. The Republican and Democratic parties currently run their own primary elections.