No straight ticket means longer waits

With straight-ticket voting no longer an option in 2020, the Harris County Clerk estimates the average resident will spend a significantly longer time in the voting booth this fall, which could cause long lines at polling sites in the state’s most populous county.

“No matter how much we do, I think at the end of the day there will be lines,” said Benjamin Chou, director of innovation for the clerk’s office. “It’s just a matter of, will we avoid a nightmare scenario by doing as much as we can, by stretching the limits of what we thought was possible even just a few months ago?”

The elimination of straight-ticket voting, combined with a ballot with more than 80 races and limited access to mail ballots have made this year particularly difficult for elections administrators. A stopwatch test by the clerk’s office calculated that a straightticket ballot takes two minutes to cast, while selecting a candidate for each individual race in November would take 15 minutes.

Using those estimates and turnout data from 2018, when 76 percent of voters selected a straight ticket, a Houston Chronicle analysis found county voters would spend a combined 187,000 more hours in the voting booth if forced to vote each race individually.

A more likely outcome is that some voters, late for work or family obligations or simply overwhelmed by the length of the ballot, make choices in only the top races, University of Houston political science Professor Elizabeth Simas said.

“The fear would be they go to vote for president, maybe vote for senator, and then they walk out,” Simas said. “And we’re not going to get a large number of votes cast for the races that are much lower down the ballot.”

Long lines historically have been more likely to occur in urban areas, which tend to favor Democrats, Simas said. The state Democratic Party unsuccessfully sued earlier this year to reinstate straight-ticket voting, arguing their voters were more harmed by the change than Republicans.

One key to the success of this fall’s election, Simas said, is how well the county clerk’s polling place wait times app functions. Poll workers failed to properly update the interactive map during the trouble-plagued March primary, leading voters to flock to sites that already were crowded. That was the first high-turnout election in which Harris County allowed voters to cast ballots anywhere, rather than their assigned precincts.

The clerk’s office is using a social media campaign to remind voters to select a candidate in each race, and is encouraging residents to take advantage of early voting. During the last presidential election four years ago, 76 percent of ballots were cast before Election Day. With an extra week of early voting, Chou said the county expects that figure to be higher this year.

In an effort to avoid voting delays, County Clerk Christopher Hollins has nearly tripled the number of early voting sites to 120 and increased Election Day polling places by 8 percent, to 808. The $27.2 million plan, the most expensive election in county history, also includes extended voting hours and drive-through balloting. Gov. Greg Abbott also has added an extra week of early voting.

The Legislature abolished straight-ticket voting, effective in 2020, in an effort to ensure residents make informed choices about candidates.

With a projected record turnout of as many as 1.7 million voters, Hollins also is asking eligible residents to consider voting absentee, and has sent mail ballot applications to all registered voters 65 and older. The Supreme Court has, at least temporarily, ordered Hollins not to send mail ballot applications to all 2.4 million registered voters, as he had planned, pending the outcome of a lawsuit from Attorney General Ken Paxton.

Paxton argued that ending applications to younger voters who are not automatically eligible to vote by mail would create confusion that would lead to voter fraud. Hollins disagrees, as the application also includes a list of eligibility criteria.

Registered voters under 65 are eligible for mail ballots if they are disabled, out of the county or incarcerated during the voting period. The Supreme Court ruled in May that fear of COVID-19 alone is not a disability; however, it can be combined with other health factors to qualify a voter. That leaves voters to decide for themselves whether they are eligible to vote by mail.

The county had processed 204,793 mail applications as of last week, nearly double the number requested in 2018. Early in-person voting begins Oct. 13.