Delay in reporting Harris County election results is troubling
Harris County Clerk Diane Trautman had a few worries on the eve of Tuesday’s mayoral election in Houston — and we know now she had cause to be concerned.
Although Trautman had overseen several elections since unseating two-term Republican Stan Stanart a year ago, Tuesday’s election was to be the biggest test so far for the Democratic officeholder and the new countywide voting system she’d called for as a candidate. And there were a few warning signs.
Turnout had been subdued during early voting compared to Houston’s 2015 mayoral election.
Trautman was hoping that more Harris County voters would turn out to vote on Election Day given the option of doing so anywhere in the county — as is the case during early voting — rather than in their respective precincts.
More troubling, from Trautman’s perspective, was that the Texas secretary of state’s office had thrown a monkey wrench into the county’s plans, insisting on a last-minute change for election-night reporting.
That county’s plan had been to transmit unofficial Election Day results electronically, using a secure and encrypted network, from 10 relay sites that would collect the results from 757 polling places. This was, Trautman explained, the same way Election Day results were reported during the county’s joint election in May — and, for that matter, during the general election last November supervised by Stanart. But some observers believed Trautman’s plan would violate a state statute, adopted 10 years ago, that said voting equipment can’t be connected to an external network.
Trautman told me that neither she nor the county attorney was persuaded by this argument because Harris County’s plan involved an internal network — an intranet — as opposed to the internet. But with the election just days away, she explained, she decided to go with a backup plan to have the results delivered manually, just to be safe.
Can you spell delay?
“We could certainly have challenged this, but I did not want there to be any question of legality hanging over this election,” she said. “I don’t think that’s fair to the candidates or the voters of Harris County.”
“The main thing is to get through the election and make sure people have a good voting experience and that people understand the new program we’ve worked so hard to provide,” she continued.
That mission wasn’t quite accomplished on Tuesday.
While voters were able to cast ballots at the precinct of their choice, we didn’t learn the outcome of the Houston mayoral race — which will require a December runoff — until Wednesday morning. At midnight Tuesday, just 8 percent of election results had been tallied.
In addition, snafus were reported at several polling sites amid the shift to “vote anywhere.” When some voters tried to cast ballots electronically in polling places outside their home precincts and their efforts timed out, some poll workers handed them the wrong ballots to finish.
The good news is that there was a surge in turnout on Election Day, amid the switch to countywide voting. And some voters seemed to like the change.
Chris White, an IT professional, voted at his daughter’s elementary school, after dropping her off for the day.
“Voting is ... easy? Amazing,” he said on Tuesday.
But the delay in reporting election results is troubling, as is the finger-pointing between Democrats and Republicans in its wake — especially with a high-stakes presidential election less than a year away.
A former member of the Harris County Board of Education, Trautman had campaigned on a promise to bring countywide voting to Harris County by Election Day — and moved quickly to implement the change, which had worked well in some other counties.
Harris County GOP chairman Paul Simpson had asked state officials in February to reject
Harris County’s request for approval of such a pilot program. In Simpson’s view, the change would result in “serious risks of disenfranchising, discouraging, and confusing voters (among other problems).”
Democrats might argue that’s rare for Republicans to lose sleep over such possibilities. And, in this case, the Harris County GOP played a role in the last-minute change of plans, via its Ballot Security Committee.
The party noted in a statement that Harris County’s size presents a unique problem — the county has 1,012 precincts — and the dedicated phone modems that had been used to transmit unofficial election-night results can only handle 999 precincts, apparently.
Prior to the shift to countywide polling on Election Day, this wouldn’t have been an issue, because each Mobile Ballot Box contained data for only one precinct. But the change necessitated the use of a different technology. And Alan Vera, the chairman of the county GOP’s ballot security committee, had concerns over whether the new procedure would pass legal muster, because the county’s intranet can be accessed by any county employees.
I asked Vera why he didn’t raise this issue in May, when countywide voting was first implemented in Harris County.
“Well, that one got by me,” Vera conceded. “That one slipped past, because it was such a small election.”
He said he felt there was a simple solution to this issue, which was laid out in an Oct. 23 advisory from the secretary of State’s advisory: Harris County can transmit unofficial election results electronically if the data stored on the MBBs is copied first onto a separate storage device.
It’s incumbent upon the Harris County clerk and the Texas secretary of state to figure out what went wrong on Tuesday, and how to ensure that such bungles can be avoided in the future.
For all the benefits of countywide voting, folks on both sides of the aisle were left rightly frustrated this week — and concerned about what some of the issues portend for 2020.