Laws hinder vote tallies, Longoria says
County elections chief tells state legislators deadlines impossible to hit without changes
If there aren’t changes to Texas election law, Harris County likely will continue to blow deadlines for reporting election results, the county’s election chief said Wednesday in Austin at a hearing with the House Elections Committee.
Last year, the Texas Legislature passed several bills relating to elections, including one that requires counties to use paper ballots. A previously existing state law set a 24-hour deadline to offer full, unofficial vote counts, and the elections official said the combination of the two is untenable moving forward for large elections.
Harris County failed to meet the 24-hour deadline in the March 1 primaries, the first major election since the law came into effect, when officials realized on election night that they had failed to count 10,000 votes. The county has lagged behind other large counties in the state in vote-counting, including the most recent election.
“I think given reasonable timelines and reasonable expectations of resources available to us … your March primaries, your November elections, I think it will become increasingly difficult for anyone working a paper system to hit that 24-hour mark,” said Isabel Longoria, the county’s election chief, who testified before the committee Wednesday. Longoria announced after the March primary that she would step down from the job July 1.
In Texas, counties largely pay for their own elections, so when the state adds more restrictive requirements or deadlines, the counties must foot the bill. Counting paper ballots is particularly difficult, Longoria said, as machines can jam, ink can be
smeared, or other physical mistakes can happen that delay the process and wouldn’t happen in computerized systems.
Committee members stressed a desire for the public to know who won elections by the end of election night.
Due to the math involved, this is just unfeasible for large elections, Longoria said.
Most voters go to bed by midnight, and polls close at 7 p.m., which leaves a five-hour window.All voters still in line when polls close must be allowed to vote. After they do, all the paperwork must be done, and the ballots must be collected and driven from each voting site to the central count location, where all those vehicles must then be checked-in and the ballots tallied, tracked and counted. For the most recent election, there were 465 voting locations in Harris County.
“There’s a certain amount of math to get all those counted by midnight that require space, time and people, all of which require money,” Longoria said. “Even Harris County doesn’t have all the space, time and people to get it done by midnight, and I worry about other counties that don’t have the resources that Harris County does.”
The 10,000 lost votes that were discovered after Election Day in March were the result of a miscommunication among staff, Longoria said. She noted that staff must work around the clock to try to make stringent election reporting deadlines. Lack of sleep in such circumstances can contribute to mistakes, one committee member noted.
Longoria said five staffers were hospitalized over a threeday period while counting the March primary election results.
Rep. Mike Schofield, a Harris County Republican, said that when there are “thousands of ballots suddenly showing up” after they were supposed to be initially counted, “It leaves open the opportunity for chicanery.”
“We’re not going to have any late, Lyndon-Johnson-style late ballots showing up and then I get beat,” he said, referring to the former president’s infamous 1948 election to the U.S. Senate. “I have to say, late-arriving votes that change the result of an election, I will be on the floor of the House challenging the election if that happens.”