Incoming county clerk focused on safety, possibilities in election
Chris Hollins, a Houston attorney who will be sworn in as interim Harris County Clerk on Monday, knows what he’s gotten himself into. That might be the most important qualification, in itself, for his new post.
“It is certainly going to be a lot of hard work,” he said Wednesday afternoon, sitting on the patio at Bar 5015 on Almeda Road as storm clouds gathered over the city. “Even before the global pandemic, an election in a place like Harris County is extraordinarily difficult to pull off.”
That’s an understatement. Harris County is the third largest in the country, with nearly 2.4 million registered voters — an electorate larger than that of many states. This year’s elections, thus far, have included some logistical challenges resulting in part from outgoing Clerk Diane Trautman’s shift to countywide voting on Election Day. The November election will include another major change, due to the end of straight-ticket voting across the state; that’s going to affect the efficiency of voting in Harris County, which routinely has a super-long ballot.
Plus, of course, there’s the pandemic.
The safety concerns Americans have about voting in person, for the time being, have led to a parallel political debate about mail-in voting, which has yet to be resolved. Democrats, in Texas and elsewhere, are pushing to expand mail-in voting to all voters, at least until the new coronavirus can be contained. Some Republicans, led by President Donald Trump, are arguing that this push is ideologically motivated. They keep insisting — without evidence — that an expansion of mail-in voting would lead to a surge in voter fraud.
Indeed, Trump has suggested that a surge in voter fraud is what Democrats want, and his rhetoric has been echoed by state leaders such as Republican Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick.
“The Democrat plan to have everyone in the USA vote by
mail is an invitation to fraud and a scam to rig the election,” Patrick tweeted Tuesday.
It’s going to require a cool customer to successfully administer Harris County’s elections in the midst of all of this. And Hollins clearly qualifies. His greatest concern Wednesday afternoon was for the men and women who will be stationed at hundreds of polling places across the county during voting for this year’s primary runoff in July, as well as the general election in November.
“If you’re a poll worker, you’re sitting in a room, enclosed — smaller than H-E-B, right? You’re talking about a smaller space — and you’re going to have thousands of people coming in there, so you’re putting yourself at risk,” he said. “We have to be doing everything we possibly can to protect those people.”
Hollins, who grew up in southwest Houston, has long been interested in politics. After graduating from Morehouse College, a historically black institution in Atlanta, he did a stint as a White House intern during the first year of the Obama administration. He currently serves as the vice chair of finance for the Texas Democratic Party in addition to owning a law firm focused on personal injury suits. But he’s never run for elective office and wasn’t expecting to end up in one this year.
What changed is that Trautman, a Democrat who unseated Republican Stan Stanart in the 2018 midterm elections, announced unexpectedly in early May that she would step down at the end of the month for health reasons.
At the time, Hollins was planning memorial services for his grandmother, Mary, who had died days earlier. He describes her as the matriarch of his family — and the woman who taught him to ride a bicycle, among other things. She once took him to traffic court, even though she didn’t have a ticket, to familiarize him with the experience.
However, the news of Trautman’s retirement reached him quickly.
“I kind of thought at that moment, ‘Wow!’ ” Hollins said.
“We’re in the midst of the biggest election of our lifetime, and the person who was set to administer it is now not going to be here.”
It occurred to him that he might be able to help, he said, given that prior to becoming a lawyer he worked as a management consultant for years, which involves coming into large organizations and getting up to speed quickly on their operations and issues.
So he submitted his résumé through an online portal and was nominated to serve as the county’s interim clerk by County Commissioner Adrian Garcia.
“For me, it was a priority to try to get someone who was going to be focused on making the elections work,” Garcia said at a May 19 Commissioners Court meeting, noting that Hollins wasn’t planning to seek election to the office when it was next on the ballot.
The court approved his appointment on a party-line vote, with the court’s other Democrats, Judge Lina Hidalgo and Commissioner Rodney Ellis, noting Hollins’ commitment to focus on the job at hand rather than campaigning for the November special election to replace Trautman.
Although there’s been some grumbling from Republicans about Hollins’ experience and his association with the Texas Democratic Party, there also seems to be a general recognition that he is a good fit for the task.
“At the end of the day,” Hollins said, “our priority is to make sure that every registered voter in Harris County has the ability to exercise their right to vote in a way that’s safe, transparent, accessible, fair. And that includes Republicans.”