GOP chair calls for ‘brigade’ of poll watchers
Volunteers recruited to monitor the city’s diverse voting sites
As Texas Republican lawmakers seek to expand the powers of partisan poll watchers — and Democrats warn doing so will lead to intimidation of minority voters — newly uncovered video shows the Harris County GOP is recruiting thousands of the volunteers to monitor voting in Black and brown communities in Texas.
In the video, leaked by government accountability nonprofit Common Cause Texas, a county precinct chair giving a March 10 presentation describes the need for an “election integrity brigade” of 10,000 Republicans in Houston’s predominantly white suburbs to volunteer in the city’s racially diverse urban core.
“We’ve got to get folks in these suburbs out here that have, you know, a lot of Republican folks that got to have the courage” to cover the city, says the speaker, who’s not named in the video.
“If we don’t do that, this fraud down in here,” he goes on to say as he circles the city with a pointer, “this fraud down in here is really going to continue.”
It is unclear what the speaker is calling “fraud,” since there was scant evidence of wrongdoing uncovered in 2020, even as Republican Attorney General Ken Paxton doubled the resources for his elections integrity unit and aimed it at Harris County.
“What we see in this video is a concrete, real-world example of why it is a downright dangerous idea to expand poll watcher powers while removing the ability of election workers to kick a disruptive poll watcher out,” said Anthony Gutierrez, executive director of Common Cause Texas. “Volunteer poll watchers who have no ill intent and who do not plan to disrupt voting would have no need to be ‘courageous’ about going into predominantly Black and brown communities.”
Harris GOP Chair Cindy Siegel disagreed with that portrayal of the video.
Common Cause “is blatantly mischaracterizing a grassroots election worker recruitment video in a shameful effort to bully and intimidate Republicans,” Siegel said in a statement. “Democrats need to stop race-baiting every issue. … The goal is to activate an army of volunteers for every precinct in Harris County.”
“There is nothing wrong with a training and development video encouraging citizen volunteers to have the courage and confidence to work the polls — whether it’s in a traditionally Democrat or Republican precinct,” she added. “The way the Democrats, including Mayor Sylvester Turner and (Harris County) Judge Lina Hidalgo, continue to weaponize the voting system does the opposite of restoring public confidence in the election process.”
The presentation described recruiting more than 6,200 poll watchers — 4,270 for early voting and 1,949 for Election Day — with two at each polling place, plus extras for 25 percent “contingency” and about 4,000 to be election judges and clerks.
Last November, the party had about 18 poll watchers during early voting and 100 on Election Day. Harris County had 122 early voting polling locations and 806 Election Day locations.
Bill strengthens watchers
The former swing county has shifted left as its population continues to become more diverse. In November, Democrats there scored their largest margin of victory at the top of the ticket in more than a decade. Joe Biden won the county by 13 percentage points and had a lead of more than 200,000 votes over Donald Trump.
The county’s Democratic-led election office implemented novel voting expansions in 2020 that have made it a target of state GOP lawmakers, who want to abolish methods it debuted, such as drivethru and overnight voting and mass-mailing of applications to vote by mail. Republican-backed voting legislation would also grant poll watchers greater access.
Senate Bill 7, for example, which was advanced by the Texas Senate last week and moved to the House, would make it a misdemeanor punishable by up to $4,000 in fines and a year in jail for an election official to “distance or obstruct the view” of a watcher, who must be allowed “free movement.”
The bill would also allow watchers to video- or audio-record voters with disabilities who require assistance “if the watcher reasonably believes” he or she is witnessing “unlawful activity.” The videos would not be allowed to be posted on social media or otherwise publicized and would have to be sent directly to the secretary of state, though Common Cause and other groups have raised concerns that there is no enforcement mechanism.
A House counterpart bill, House Bill 6, would prevent election judges from removing a poll worker for any reason other than voter fraud, effectively requiring them to get law enforcement involved if other disruptions were to occur.
Democrats and voting rights groups have decried the provisions of the bill as intended to deter minorities from voting, citing past examples of poll watchers in Texas yelling at and taunting voters.
In 2010, the Harris County Attorney’s Office received multiple such complaints of poll watchers at early voting polling places in predominantly Black and Hispanic neighborhoods including Kashmere Gardens and Moody Park. The complaints included poll watchers “hovering over” voters, “getting into election workers’ faces” and blocking or disrupting lines of voters waiting to cast their ballots.
The county Democratic Party blamed volunteers with ties to True the Vote, a Houston-based voter watchdog group that started as a project of a tea party organization. The group denied the accusations.
“It seemed like Republicans were targeting Black and brown voters when they sent out poll watchers in November,” the Harris County Democratic Party said in a statement to the Houston Chronicle.
The GOP plan to add thousands of poll watchers and give them more power ahead of 2022 elections “confirms exactly what we suspected.”
‘A way to suppress the vote’
Tony Diaz, who is a member of League of United Latin American Citizens Council 60, a Houston chapter, said the political fight over poll watchers is a “circus” distracting from real issues, such as increasing compliance with a state law requiring high school principals to give students a chance to register to vote.
The GOP proposal to increase poll watchers access is “a way to suppress the vote, but Texans are so used to voter suppression that they’re not going to be activated by it,” Diaz said, though it may “turn off folks who are not frequent voters or who are new voters.”
Rep. Harold Dutton, D-Houston, chair of the Texas Legislative Black Caucus, said he hopes to add a new provision to HB6 that would require poll watchers to take a course before volunteering. Dutton said he doesn’t understand the party’s overemphasis on fraud despite evidence and the GOP majority in Texas government.
Rather than reach out to minority voters, the party has “decided to throw up these barriers, barriers against them, to try to prevent them from actually exercising their vote,” Dutton said. “They’re going to do everything they can, but the reality is we’re still going to go vote.”
“They’re going to need a little more ‘courage,’ ” he added.