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Election Day

You still have time to donate to the Democratic judges’ legal fund

Just a reminder:

See here for the background. That link takes you here, and while the in-person fundraiser mentioned there is now over, the Donate link remains. But due to a change in state law, you only have until March 8 to make a contribution. That’s a new statutory deadline for all judicial fundraising – it used to be the case that judges who were involved in lawsuits could continue past that deadline, but the law was changed in the last session, so here we are. Please give a few bucks if you can and help them all out. Thanks!

You can help Democrats being sued by election losers

From the inbox, sent to me by former HD133 candidate Sandra Moore:

Below is a list of the judges and electeds being sued by the Republicans. These are nuisance suits but the Judges and Lina have had to hire attorneys to represent them against the claims. Marilyn and Tenesha have pro bono attorneys but the others are not allowed to be represented pro bono due to conflicts of interest. The judge hearing the case is in San Antonio which complicates matters re time to get there and back for hearings. The travel time alone for the attorneys will be in the thousands when ZOOM meetings are not allowed! The average attorney charges $500 per hour. The fee can’t be lowered due to “appearance of impropriety” issues. The judges listed as well as Lina have little in their campaign coffers. That’s how it is for the judges. One judge whose race is being challenged, David Fleisher, lives in 133. This is the state house district in which I ran back in 2018 and 2020.

I was on several endorsements interviews with some of these judges through a different organization. This is how I learned how little was in their campaign accounts. The Republicans picked the judges with some of the smallest accounts.

It is believed that the purpose of these suits is to drag out the cases, have judges dip into personal resources, and be exhausted financially and emotionally by the time of their next race.

The Harris County Democratic Party is NOT doing anything to assist the 22 electeds. If even one is bounced, Abbott could appoint a replacement for those in the criminal courts. Judges are being sued “in their individual capacity.” That is why each person named in a suit has to retain their own attorney.

CLUBS IN ACTION is trying to raise 95K to donate to them. The maximum that a judge can receive from a PAC is $5000, so that is the goal for each judge and for Lina. We all know that Lina received very little in campaign contributions, especially compared to Mealer.

During the election CIA knocked on 300,000 doors. WHD knocked on about 1500. We worked hard to make this happen. No one wants all this hard work to go to waste. So, if you are willing to make a donation to CIA that would be great.

I was invited to this meeting because of the effort to create and carry out block walking events.

If you decide to make a contribution a check can be sent to:

CLUBS IN ACTION
2504 Rusk St. #110
Houston, TX 77003.

CIA plans to hold a fundraiser, hopefully on Feb 19. But I will send out word when I learn more. There is a deadline of MARCH 8 to raise funds!!

[…]

1 Cause No. 2023-00964; Alexandra Mealer v. Lina Hidalgo. Alexander Mealer is represented by Elizabeth Alvarez. Judge Hidalgo is represented by Neal Manne.

2 Cause No. 2023-00925; Michelle Fraga v. Judge Christine Weems. Michelle Fraga is represented by Elizabeth Alvarez. Judge Weems is represented by John Raley.

3 Cause No. 2023-00924; Elizabeth Buss v. Judge David Fleischer. Elizabeth Buss is represented by Elizabeth Alvarez. Judge Fleischer is represented by John Raley.

4 Cause No. 2023-00841; Tami Pierce v. Judge DaSean Jones. Tami Pierce is representing herself with co-counsel, Paul Simpson. Judge Jones is represented by Oliver Brown.

5 Cause No. 2022-79328; Erin Lunceford v. Judge Tami Craft. Erin Lunceford is represented by Andy Taylor. Judge Craft is represented by Steve Kherker.

6 Cause No. 2023-00927; Bruce Bain v. Judge Corey Sepolio. Bruce Bain is represented by Elizabeth Alvarez. Judge Sepolio is represented by John Raley.

7 Cause No. 2023-00932; Chris Daniel v. Marilyn Burgess. Chris Daniel is represented by Elizabeth Alvarez. Clerk Burgess is represented by Neal Manne.

8 Cause No. 2023-00930; Mark Goldberg v. Judge Erika Ramirez. Mark Goldberg is represented by Elizabeth Alvarez. Judge Ramirez is represented by John Staley.

9 Cause No. 2023-00934; Brian Staley v. Judge Monica Singh. Brian Staley is represented by Elizabeth Alvarez. Judge Singh is represented by Anthony Drumheller.

10 Cause No. 2023-00936; Mark Montgomery v. Judge Kelley Andrews. Mark Montgomery is represented by Elizabeth Alvarez. Judge Andrews is represented by John Raley.

11 Cause No. 2023-00937; Matthew Dexter v. Judge Genesis Draper. Matthew Dexter is represented by Elizabeth Alvarez. Judge Draper is represented by John Raley.

12 Cause No. 2023-00952; Nile Copeland v. Judge Latosha Lewis Payne. Nile Copeland is represented by Elizabeth Alvarez. Judge Payne is represented by John Raley.

13 Cause No. 2023-00958; Rory Olsen v. Judge Jason Cox. Rory Olsen is represented by Jared Woodfill. Judge Cox is represented by Cris Feldman.

14 Cause No. 2023-00955; James Lombardino v. Judge Audrie Lawton-Evans. James Lombardino is represented by Jared Woodfill. Judge Lawton-Evans is represented by Anthony Drumheller.

15 Cause No. 2023-01202; Stan Stanart v. Clerk Teneshia Hudspeth. Stan Stanart is represented by Elizabeth Alvarez. Clerk Hudspeth is represented by Neal Manne.

16 Cause No. 2023-01066; Dan Simons v. Judge Sedrick Walker. Dan Simons is represented by Elizabeth Alvarez. Judge Walker is represented by John Raley.

17 Cause No. 2023-301111; Will Archer v. Judge James Horwitz. Will Archer is represented by Elizabeth Alvarez. Judge Horwitz is represented by John Raley.

18 Cause No. 2023-01103; Kyle Scott v. Carla Wyatt. Kyle Scott is represented by Elizabeth Alvarez. Ms. Wyatt is represented by Neal Manne.

19 Cause No. 2023-01076; Aaron Adams v. Judge LaShawn Williams. Aaron Adams is represented by Elizabeth Alvarez. Judge Williams is represented by Anthony Drumheller.

20 Cause No. 2023-01067; Dan Spjut v. Judge Juanita Jackson. Dan Spjut is represented by Elizabeth Alvarez. Judge Jackson is represented by John Raley.

21 Cause No. 2023-01052; Sartaj Bal v. Judge Toria Finch. Sartaj Bal is represented by Elizabeth Alvarez. Judge Finch is represented by Anthony Drumheller.

I will pass along information about the fundraiser when I have it. You can also contribute to any candidate you like directly – just google them or find their campaign Facebook page to get to a suitable Donate link for them. It’s deeply annoying that we have to do this – as a reminder, these cases are stinking piles of nothing and the losers pursuing them damn well know it – but it’s where we are. Let’s make it a little less hard for these Dems who clearly and correctly won their races.

HD135 election contest dismissed

From the inbox:

This week, Speaker of the Texas House Dade Phelan dismissed the election contest filed by Mike May, the candidate who lost to Representative Jon Rosenthal in the 2022 election for house district 135. The case was dismissed because May failed to timely pay the security of costs required by Texas law.

“This quick dismissal shows these election contests are largely about political posturing and undermining our democratic processes,” said Harris County Attorney Christian D. Menefee. “I thank Speaker Phelan and Representative Morgan Meyer for upholding the law and ensuring the will of the voters stands.”

Under Texas law, the Texas House of Representatives presided over this contest because it was filed by a candidate for that body. Unfortunately, more than 20 other election contests are still pending in Harris County—most of those races had greater vote margins than May’s. Those cases are expected to proceed over the next few months.

See here for the background. This one was particularly unserious, and the resolution shows how weak it was. Here’s County Attorney Menefee’s Twitter post, with a copy of the letter to May from Speaker Phelan:

My post about the HD135 election contest ran on December 3, so it was filed at least one day before then. The deadline for paying the required fee – I have no idea how much, but if there was even a sliver of a chance this was for real, this guy would have had no trouble getting some fat cat to pay for it as needed – was December 9. Maybe he could have gotten an extension if he’d asked and had some reason for it, but practically speaking this thing has been dead for a month.

This has no effect on the other challenges filed by other losing losers, as legislative contests are heard in the House while these others will be argued in a courtroom. They aren’t any more valid, they’re just in a different venue. From the County Attorney’s press release, they may take awhile to be resolved. I will of course keep an eye on them. The Trib, whose story published after I drafted this and which mostly recapitulates what I’ve got here, has more.

Additional Losing Candidates File Election Contests in Harris County

That’s the subject of the following email I got in my inbox yesterday, and I can’t do any better than that for a post title.

Additional Losing Candidates File Election Contests in Harris County

Houston, Texas – Today, several losing Republican candidates filed election contests to void the more than 1 million votes cast in Harris County’s November 2022 election. Thus far, the Harris County Attorney’s Office has identified filings by (and we expect more filings to be made today):

  • Mark Montgomery, former candidate for Harris County Criminal Court at Law No. 6 (lost to Judge Kelley Andrews)
  • Matthew Dexter, former candidate for Harris County Criminal Court at Law No. 12 (lost to Judge Genesis Draper)
  • Brian Staley, former candidate for Harris County Civil County Court at Law No. 4. (lost to Judge Manpreet Monica Singh)
  • Mark Goldberg, former candidate for Harris County Criminal Court at Law No. 8 (lost to Judge Erika Ramirez)
  • Bruce Bain, former candidate for the 269th District Court (lost to Judge Cory Sepolio)
  • Michelle Fraga, former candidate for the 281st District Court (lost to Judge Christine Weems)
  • Elizabeth Buss, former candidate for the Harris County Criminal Court at Law No. 5 (lost to Judge David Fleischer)
  • Chris Daniel, former candidate for Harris County District Clerk (lost to Marilyn Burgess)

These filings are in addition to previously announced contests by:

  • Erin Lunceford, former candidate for the 189th District Court (lost to Judge Tamika Craft)
  • Tami Pierce, former candidate for the 180th District Court (lost to Judge DaSean Jones)
  • Alexandra Mealer, former candidate for Harris County Judge (lost to Judge Lina Hidalgo)
  • Mike May, former candidate for State Representative District 135 (lost to Representative Jon Rosenthal)

Below is the statement from the County Attorney released this morning:

“This is a shameful attempt by a group of losing candidates who couldn’t win the hearts and minds of Harris County voters and are now throwing nonsensical legal theories at the wall to see what sticks. Each of them should be deeply embarrassed and these claims should not be taken seriously by the public,” said Harris County Attorney Christian D. Menefee. “These losing candidates are finally laying bare what we all know to be true – for them, it’s not about improving elections or making sure our elections are secure, it’s about playing games with our democratic systems and refusing to accept the will of the voters.”

The contests being filed request that the more than one million votes cast in Harris County be voided and the county hold another election for the races being challenged (e.g., Harris County Judge, 189th District Court, 180th District Court, etc.).

“These election contests are frivolous attempts to overturn the votes of more than a million residents in the third largest county in the country. The county will now have to spend substantial resources handling these contests, time that could instead be spent serving the people of Harris County,” added County Attorney Menefee. “Voters have moved on. Public servants have moved on. These losing candidates should move on too.”

See here and here for the background. The judge in the Lunceford contest was assigned on December 13, I don’t know what has happened since then. I do know that at least one more loser has filed a loser’s contest, but I don’t care to give any of this any more validity. You can read the Chron story here and their explainer about election contests here. I think the Trib story contains the most relevant bit of information:

The Election Day problems were unlikely to have been substantial enough to swing the results of the Harris County judge’s race, according to Bob Stein, a political science professor at Rice University.

Nearly 70% of voters cast their ballots during the early voting period, but Mealer only cites issues on Election Day itself.

“I’m extremely doubtful that there is a legitimate legal challenge here,” Stein said. “It’s not like voters were told they couldn’t vote or that they had to go home. They were discouraged because the lines were long, or because they were told they’d have to wait.”

Those challenges do not amount to voter suppression, Stein said, but merely suggest that Harris County should operate fewer, better-resourced polling locations.

To make its case, Mealer’s legal team will have to find evidence that more than 18,000 voters were unable to cast ballots on Election Day, and that all of those voters planned to vote for Mealer, Stein said.

And every voter who might have been discouraged by issues at one location could have gone to another one, which would have been at most a couple of minutes away by car. Even at the highest end of the estimate of locations that had issues, more than 90% of them did not. We have multiple locations at which anyone can vote precisely as a hedge against problems at any one specific location. In the old days, when you had to vote at your precinct location, you really were screwed. Now you can just go somewhere else. Even in the case of the loser who lost to DaSean Jones by 449 votes, it’s extremely hard to imagine there could have been enough people who encountered problems and could not vote anywhere else and would have voted for the loser to make a difference. This is all bullshit and should be seen as such. Campos and the Texas Signal have more.

Judge assigned to hear election loser contest

From the inbox, a press release from Harris County Attorney Christian Menefee:

Judge David Peeples will preside over the election contest filed by Republican candidate Erin Lunceford to void the results of her race for the 189th District Court in the November 2022 Harris County General Election. Judge Peeples has set an initial status conference for today, Tuesday December 13, at 3:00 p.m.

“This will be an important case, and I’m glad to see it’s progressing,” said Harris County Attorney Christian D. Menefee. “The County will participate in the case, and we plan to make clear that it would be a grave injustice to throw out more than a million legally cast votes, especially given Ms. Lunceford’s completely baseless theories. Each of those votes represents a Harris County resident who participated in our democratic process. That is a sacred act, and we’re going to fight to protect it.”

Judge Peeples is based in San Antonio, and was appointed by the Honorable Susan Brown, the Presiding Judge of the Eleventh Administrative Judicial Region of Texas. Texas law disqualifies the judges in a county from presiding over an election contest filed in that county.

This contest is one of two current requests by losing Republican candidates to throw out the results of the November 2022 election in certain races. The other challenge is regarding State Representative District 135, which will be heard in the State House of Representatives.

“This election took countless hours of work not only by county employees, but by election judges and workers from both parties. We should be looking for ways to support these public servants rather than constantly undermining the hard work it takes to run an election in the third largest county in the country,” added County Attorney Menefee.

See here for the background. If the name sounds familiar, it may be because Judge Peeples was the jurist who ruled that the abortion bounty hunter law SB8 violated the state constitution last December, though he did not issue a statewide injunction against it. I did not see any news items related to this, so what you see here is all I know. Hopefully we will hear more about how this is progressing quickly.

And now we have a judicial loser contesting the election

The Republicans did warn us they’d be sore losers.

Republican judicial candidate Erin Lunceford filed a petition Wednesday seeking a new election in Harris County’s 189th judicial district court race after losing by 2,743 votes out of more than 1 million ballots cast.

Lunceford’s opponent, Democrat Tamika Craft, won the election by 0.26 percent of the vote.

The petition, which names Lunceford as the contestant and Craft as contestee, claims numerous violations of the Texas Election Code, including a failure to provide a sufficient amount of ballot paper to 25 polling locations.

Harris County Republican Party Chair Cindy Siegel indicated there could be more election contests to come.

“During the last month, we’ve had a lot of our candidates that were in very close races that have been talking to us wanting to know the information that we’ve accumulated and have reported,” Siegel said. “Several of them are considering election contests.”

Andy Taylor, general counsel for the Harris County GOP, is representing Lunceford.

Taylor accused Harris County Elections Administrator Cliff Tatum, who took over the office starting in August, of intentionally causing ballot paper shortages in Republican-leaning neighborhoods.

“If it was just mismanagement, it was just gross incompetence, wouldn’t one think that the lack of paper would apply equally and uniformly across the map, so that there would be roughly an equivalent number of Democratic stronghold precinct neighborhoods as well as Republican precinct stronghold neighborhoods?” Taylor said. “And, yet, that’s not the way it’s breaking.”

Taylor alleged 80 percent of polling places with paper shortages on Nov. 8 were in areas considered Republican strongholds.

“I want to send a message to the Harris County elections administrator,” Taylor said. “Mr. Tatum, your day of reckoning has just started.”

In a statement, Harris County Attorney Christian Menefee said his office will keep a close eye on Lunceford’s election contest.

“I’m disappointed to see another losing candidate challenging the results of their election. Judge Lunceford previously served on the bench, so I trust she understands the seriousness of asking a court to disregard the votes of over a million residents across Harris County,” Menefee said. “This case will focus on the details of every aspect of the November 8 election in Harris County. My office will be involved in the case every step of the way to ensure people’s votes are protected.”

The petition is filed in Harris County, but the case will be heard by a judge from outside the county, according to Menefee’s office.

So many things to say, so I’ll bullet-point it:

– This is different from the ridiculous election contest filed in HD135 by a candidate that lost by 15 points and over 6,000 votes. That one would be heard in the House by a House committee, if Speaker Phelan for some reason doesn’t toss it as a frivolous waste of time. This one will be heard in a courtroom.

– As a reminder and a general principle, never believe a word Andy Taylor says.

– To put it another way, good luck proving intent. Also, reports from the field on Election Day about paper issues were very much coming from Democratic sites. The Texas Organizing Project didn’t file its lawsuit to extend voting hours because of problems in The Villages and Cy-Fair.

– Random fact: In 2020, Democrat Jane Robinson lost her race for Chief Justice of the 14th Court of Appeals by 1,191 votes out over over 2.3 million cast, a margin of 0.06 percent of the vote. You know what she did? She conceded gracefully and went on with her life.

– Another reminder: There were 782 voting locations on Election Day, and you could vote at any of them. There were a half-dozen voting locations within walking distance of my house on Election Day. Anyone who ran into a problem at one location could have gone to another. By all accounts, there were maybe 20-25 sites that have paper issues. That left a mere 750 or so alternatives, including ones that would have been very close by.

– In other words, please find me the people who showed up to vote at a location that was having paper problems, and did not wait for them to be fixed, did not go to another location, did not come back later, and as a result did not vote. You really gonna claim that there were over two thousand of them, and all of them were going to vote for Erin Lunceford?

– Did I mention that the Republicans opposed the extension of voting hours in Harris County (and not in red-voting Bell County, which also had voting location issues), and also opposed the counting of provisional ballots cast by people who voted after 7 PM? As I said before, the obvious way to deal with delays in opening a given voting location is to push back the closing time for it. But the Republicans opposed that at every turn.

– Can you imagine what the Republican response to this would be if it were a Democrat complaining about voting location problems? You could have voted elsewhere! You could have voted early! It’s your own damn fault you didn’t vote! Look at how zealously they opposed all of the efforts to expand voting access in the pandemic, including the third week of early voting that Greg Abbott ordered. You’re immunocompromised and you want to vote by mail or from your car because you’re afraid of a deadly disease? Too bad!

– The remedy, if they somehow win on these laughable claims, would be to redo the entire damn election. To say the least, that is a massive, massive upending of the regular democratic order. The amount of evidence they’d need to provide to come close to justifying such an ask, I can’t even begin to comprehend.

– But really, this is all about making noise and trying to cast doubt on the election administrator’s office and government in general in Harris County. It’s just the Big Lie in a slightly sanitized package.

Candidate who lost by 15 points files election contest

Utterly ridiculous, and will hopefully be treated that way.

Rep. Jon Rosenthal

A losing Republican candidate for the Texas House of Representatives is challenging his defeat and asking the Legislature to void the results of the election.

Republican Mike May this week filed what’s known as an election contest with the Texas secretary of state’s office, citing reports of scattered paper ballot shortages at “numerous” polling places on Election Day. May lost to incumbent Democrat Jon Rosenthal by more than 6,000 votes in his bid to represent House District 135 in the Houston area.

The secretary of state’s office on Tuesday delivered May’s petition to House Speaker Dade Phelan, who can refer the contest to a committee for investigation and appoint another member of the House as a “master” to oversee discovery and evidence related to the contested election. If they side with May and void the results, another election would be required to decide the district’s representative. The House can also toss the contest by declaring it “frivolous.”

Election Day issues once again pushed Harris County’s election officials back under scrutiny, including from the state’s Republican leadership. Voting in Harris County was extended by court order for an extra hour after about a dozen polling places were delayed in opening. The county’s elections administrator Clifford Tatum has also acknowledged issues with insufficient paper ballots at some polling places, though he said election staff was dispatched to deliver additional ballots.

The fumbles prompted a lawsuit by the Harris County GOP, which alleged voters were disenfranchised by the paper shortages. The Harris County district attorney has since launched an investigation into allegations of “irregularities.” The Texas Election Code includes criminal penalties for various violations, including illegal voting, the unsolicited distribution of mail-in ballot applications by local election officials and the failure to distribute election supplies.

In his petition, May argued the results of the election were not the “true outcome” because election officials “prevented eligible voters from voting.” May did not immediately return a request for comment.

On Friday, Rosenthal’s camp framed May’s election contest as part of a national trend to “deny the outcome of an election when you lose.”

“This race demonstrated one of the largest percentage point differences in Harris County, it wasn’t even close,” Rosenthal’s campaign manager, Bailey Stober, said in a statement. “The opposition presented himself and his positions and was rejected by voters overwhelmingly. That is how democracy works.”

The statement came soon after Harris County Attorney Christian D. Menefee criticized the contest as an effort to “call into question the 2022 election in Harris County and lay the groundwork to force a redo.”

It’s unclear how Phelan will handle the contest. His office declined to comment Friday. But Menefee said he was hopeful that Phelan would throw out the challenge.

“And I trust that he will ensure a fair process before impartial legislators, without interference from the state leaders and other elected officials who have a history of making baseless claims against Harris County elections,” Menefee said.

The House took on a similar exercise in 2011 following a challenge by Travis County Republican Dan Neil, who, after a recount, lost to state Rep. Donna Howard, D-Austin, by 12 votes. The House eventually upheld Howard’s win. She remains in the Texas Legislature.

Up till then, the Legislature had seen 113 election contests since 1846, according to the Texas Legislative Council, an in-house legal and research arm of the Texas Legislature. The losing party, however, had not managed to turn the outcome of the election at least in the last 30 years. In the one case in which the House ordered a new election in 1981, the winner of the initial contest was again elected.

There was also an election contest following the 2004 win by Rep. Hubert Vo, then a challenger, over then-Rep. Talmadge Heflin. The contest examined a number of votes that Heflin claimed were illegal, including at least one vote cast by a non-citizen (a Norwegian national who stated that he voted straight ticket Republican), upheld most of them, and in the end Vo still won. In both cases, the number of votes separating the winner and the loser was miniscule. There’s no planet on which this challenge even remotely resembles those two.

The Chron adds some context.

Larry Veselka, a Houston lawyer who represented Democrat Hubert Vo when Vo’s 2004 election to the Texas House was challenged by his Republican opponent, said the legal standard for voiding an election result and ordering up a redo typically requires “clear and convincing” evidence that would be near-impossible for May to obtain.

“It’s too speculative,” said Veselka, who previously served as chair of the Harris County Democratic Party in the 1980s. “I mean, how do you say who walked away at this hour or at this one location where they were short of ballots? … Have they gone out and found people that can credibly swear, I left and didn’t vote somewhere else?”

May’s election challenge sparked outrage among Houston Democrats, including Rosenthal, who called it “more a political stunt than any type of serious complaint or concern.”

Harris County Democratic Party Chair Odus Evbagharu, who previously served as Rosenthal’s chief of staff, said the petition “reeks of Republican desperation.”

“The Republican candidate is attempting to alter a certified election with this baseless charge,” Evbagharu said. “Clearly, they’re running out of options in the election-attack playbook.”

Mark McCaig, a Houston attorney and conservative activist, also condemned the election contest in a tweet.

“There were HUGE problems with the election in Harris Co, but frivolous election contests like this are a gift to Dems (which is why Rosenthal is eating it up),” McCaig tweeted. “The focus needs to be on the very real problems that occurred.”

Jason Vaughn, former president of Houston Young Republicans, added: “I’m highly involved in Republican politics in Harris and didn’t even know this guy existed. The district was literally drawn to be a Democrat district.”

To put a few numbers on this, if you threw out every vote cast in the HD135 race on Election Day, Rosenthal still wins by 4,161 votes. Mike May collected 6,055 votes on Election Day. If you doubled that, if you somehow accept that the problems at a handful of voting locations prevented as many people who voted for him on all of Election Day from voting for him at all, without anyone who might have not voted selecting Rosenthal instead, he would still lose by 131 votes. This doesn’t come close to passing the sniff test. The only rational response by Speaker Phelan is to declare it frivolous. We’ll see. A statement from Rep. Rosenthal is here, and from County Attorney Menefee is here.

SCOTx allows provisional votes to be counted

Good.

The Texas Supreme Court ruled Tuesday that Harris County can include about 2,100 ballots cast during an extra hour of Election Day voting when officials certify the midterm results. But the state’s highest civil court also ordered Harris County to determine whether those late-cast ballots would affect the outcome of any races — and kept alive Attorney General Ken Paxton’s challenge to counting them.

It’s a win, at least temporarily, for Harris County officials in a fight against Paxton’s attempt to discard thousands of midterm ballots as election results are set to be certified Tuesday.

In an interview Tuesday, Harris County Attorney Christian D. Menefee said that about 2,100 provisional ballots cast after 7 p.m. Election Day should be counted. Those ballots were cast after a district court judge ordered Harris County polling places to remain open an extra hour because many locations had opened late that morning.

“The votes that were cast during that time period pursuant to a court order are still perfectly legal. And there’s nothing in the law that prohibits them from being counted,” Menefee said. “So our perspective is that those provisional ballots are no different than any other provisional ballots — they are to be counted.”

Harris County officials argued as much in a filing to the Texas Supreme Court on Tuesday. That came one day after Paxton petitioned the Supreme Court to toss the late-cast ballots.

[…]

In at least one race, the provisional ballots could impact the outcome. After provisional and mail-in ballots were counted, the incumbent for Harris County’s 180th Criminal State District Court, DaSean Jones, went from trailing Republican Tami Pierce to leading by less than 500 votes, the Houston Chronicle reported.

See here for the background and here for the court’s order. It’s just one page long, and the gist of it is this:

In this mandamus proceeding, which challenges Harris County election officials’ processing of the “later cast votes,” we grant the following temporary relief under Rule of Appellate Procedure 52.10(b):

  • Respondents are directed to conduct the canvass of the November 2022 election as required by the Election Code.
  • As part of the canvass, respondents are ordered to separately identify in the vote tabulations the number of “later cast votes” for each candidate in each race and for or against each proposition, so that candidates, the parties, and this Court may ascertain whether the “later cast votes” would be outcome-determinative and so that the parties can assess the extent to which further litigation is warranted.
  • Respondents are ordered to provide the Court with a copy of the canvass results, including the separately tabulated “later cast votes,” as soon as they are available.

The petition for writ of mandamus remains pending before this Court.

I presume that last line is there in the event the provisional ballots have an effect on the 180th Criminal District Court race, in which event (again, I presume) the merits of the arguments will have to be addressed. Lawyers, please feel free to correct me as needed. The only other race that is close enough to be even theoretically affected by the provisional ballots is the County Criminal Court #3 race, where Porsha Brown trails by the even smaller margin of 267 votes. However, given that the provisional votes cast on Election Day favored Democrats, it’s even less likely for that race to be affected, and it would be impossible for both of them to be in a position to change.

I maintain as I said yesterday that it is highly unlikely that the 180th Court will be affected. If you throw out all of the Election Day provisional ballots, DaSean Jones still leads by 89 votes. There are apparently 2,100 provisional Election Day ballots in question, out of 2,555 total E-Day provisionals and 2,420 that included a vote in this race. The odds that Jones could lose the entire 360 vote net he got from the E-Day provisionals plus another 90 votes in this subset of the total ballots just strike me as extremely remote. I wish the stories that have been published about this would go into more detail about this as I have done – yes, I know, math is hard, but you could at least use “highly unlikely” language to offer some context. By the time this runs in the morning we’ll know what the official canvass says, and from there we’ll see if an election challenge will follow.

The Chron story, from a bit later in the day, has more details.

While the provisional ballots are included in the official count certified by Commissioners Court, the Supreme Court also is ordering the county to include in the final canvassed results a separate report that details the votes of the “later cast votes for each candidate in each race.” That way, candidates can determine whether this group of ballots would change the outcome of their race and “assess the extent to which further litigation is warranted.”

Given that Harris County voters cast more than 1.1 million ballots overall, the 2,000 provisional ballots have little chance of changing most election outcomes. However, a handful of candidates in tight races may consider legal challenges over election results.

“At this point, we do not anticipate that it impacts the outcome of any races,” Harris County First Assistant County Attorney Jonathan Fombonne said. “Of course the [Texas Supreme Court] proceedings remain pending and the court could rule on something. And of course there can always be election contests. Many of those races were close, and it wouldn’t surprise us to see candidates filing election contests.”

[…]

On Election Night, the Texas Organizing Project, Texas Civil Rights Project and ACLU of Texas obtained a court order from a judge requiring all Harris County polling locations to extend voting hours until 8 p.m. after the groups argued in a lawsuit that late openings at some polling locations prevented some residents from voting.

Voters who were in line by 7 p.m. were able to vote normally, while those who arrived between 7 and 8 p.m. were allowed to cast provisional ballots.

That evening, in quick succession, Paxton’s office filed its writ of mandamus asking the Texas Supreme Court to vacate or reverse the court order, and the Supreme Court responded by staying that order, saying votes cast after 7 p.m. “should be segregated,” without specifying whether they must be excluded from the final count.

Because the proceedings are still ongoing, it is too soon to know whether the ability to extend voting hours in the future could be impacted.

“The court hasn’t specified whether or not that’s legal,” Fombonne said. “The proceedings are pending. There may be an opinion in the future that addresses that question.”

Hani Mirza, legal director of the Texas Civil Rights Project’s voting rights program, was part of the team that sought the court order extending voting hours this year. The group also filed a lawsuit in 2018 obtaining a similar court order in Harris County. Mirza said in the case four years ago, Paxton’s office did not ask the Texas Supreme Court to intervene.

Nor did Paxton’s office intervene this year when voting hours were also extended by one hour in Bell County because of early morning glitches with check-in systems. The Bell County attorney confirmed last week that a court order there had not been challenged by the Attorney General’s Office or another party.

“It doesn’t make any sense outside of, obviously, cynical partisanship and these targeted actions against Harris County, the most diverse county in the state” Mirza said.

That sort of addresses my question above about the last line in the SCOTx order. We’ll just have to keep an eye on that. The election has been certified by Commissioners Court, which if nothing else avoids the drama of any further delays. As to who might file a contest, again we’ll have to see. Seems like a lot of fuss for something that is unlikely to go anywhere, but who knows.

Paxton sues to prevent some provisional votes from being counted

On brand. Always, always on brand.

Best mugshot ever

The Texas Attorney General’s office is attempting a last-minute intervention to toss out 2,000 provisional ballots before a Harris County Commissioners Court meeting Tuesday to certify the November election.

The ballots in question were cast during a one-hour period on Nov. 8.

“Although the ballots were processed, Harris County now intends to include them in the final vote canvass,” Christopher Hilton, chief of the Attorney General’s office general litigation division said Monday. “We have never agreed that these ballots can be part of the final election results, and this afternoon we’re going to ask that the Texas Supreme Court rule that these late-cast votes should be excluded as Texas law requires.”

The petition was filed Monday afternoon. Hilton declined to comment on why the office did not ask for the ruling sooner.

“A court of law ordered Harris County to keep the polls to open for an additional hour on Election Day and people across our county cast their ballots during that time,” Harris County Attorney Christian Menefee said in a statement. “My office is going to do everything we can to protect every single vote that was cast. Republican, Democrat, or Independent — no eligible voter should have their ballot thrown out because the Attorney General can’t accept the results of Harris County elections.”

[…]

According to emails shared with Chronicle, parties including the Texas Attorney General’s office, Harris County Attorney’s office, Texas Civil Rights Project, Harris County Republican Party and Harris County Democratic Party all signed off an agreement on Nov. 11 for processing the provisional ballots.

First Assistant County Attorney Jonathan Fombonne wrote the Harris County Attorney’s office was approving the agreement “based on the understanding that the Texas Supreme Court’s order does not prohibit the tabulating of those votes as long as the ballots themselves remain segregated.”

Kimberly Gdula, deputy chief of the Attorney General’s office general litigation division, signed off on the agreement in an email: “The State is good with this.”

However, Sunday evening, two days before the commissioner’s court meeting to certify the election results, Hilton, the chief of the Attorney General’s office general litigation division, sent an email to the parties questioning the legal basis for including the provisional ballots cast after 7 p,m. in the final count and seeking clarification “so that the parties can pursue any legal remedies, if necessary.”

In a statement Monday, Harris County Attorney’s office spokesperson Roxanne Werner said: “Representatives from the Attorney General’s office and the Harris County Republican Party asked for the language describing that process to be removed from the agreed order, leaving Harris County to process and count the late ballots as they would other provisional ballots while ensuring they were kept segregated. All parties were put on notice that the votes would be counted.”

“This 11th-hour ask to throw those votes away should not be tolerated, especially considering the State rejected the County’s offer to hold off on counting these votes while it sought clarification from the Supreme Court,” Werner added.

See here and here for some background about the litigation that allowed polling locations to remain open until 8 PM. As the story notes, Bell County had similar issues with some polling locations and also got a court order allowing locations to remain open until 8 PM, which the AG’s office has not opposed. The main takeaway here is that not only can you not trust anything Paxton says, you also can’t trust anything his office says, even if they sign their names to it. No wonder he’s having a hard time retaining staff.

As a reminder, and as you can see from the report released by the Elections Office on the 18th, DaSean Jones netted 360 votes from the provisional ballots cast on Election Day. However, he is leading by 449 votes, so if you threw out all of the E-Day provisionals, he would still be ahead by 89 votes in his race. He had already overcome the 165-vote deficit he had in earlier reports thanks to the counting of cured mail ballots, which had gained him 259 votes.

It’s actually not clear from the story how many ballots we’re talking about. The story refers to “2,000 provisional ballots”. I can’t tell if this is just using a round number because exact figures are confusing or if this is the exact figure. There were 2,555 provisional ballots cast on Election Day, of which 2,420 included a vote in the DaSean Jones – Tami Pierce race. I guess it’s theoretically possible that of the provisional E-Day ballots that were specifically cast by people who got in line after 7 PM (because if you were already in line you were always allowed to vote), Jones had a net advantage of at least 450 over Pierce. To say the least, that would be an extraordinary circumstance. (*)

I point this out to say that barring something truly weird, Paxton’s bad faith filing will not – can not – have any effect on any race. That doesn’t change the fact that his filing is trash and should be rejected by SCOTx on the grounds that these people deserve to have their votes counted. The remedy for having to vote late because of voting location problems is to extend voting hours to accommodate those that were affected. Just like what happened in Bell County (won by Greg Abbott 59.04% to 39.52%, in case you were curious), which the AG has accepted as fact. I for one don’t see any difference between the two.

(*) I did search on the Supreme Court webpage for Paxton’s mandamus filing, which might have been more specific and thus answered my questions. Looking on the Electronic Filings search, I think this case is number 22-1044. However, the hyperlink for that case didn’t work when I tried it, and searching for the case via that number returned no results. If you can do better than I did, or if the webpage eventually fixes itself, let me know.

UPDATE: The Trib story also references “2,000 ballots”, which does not help clear up my confusion. They also refer to the overall total of about 4,000 provisional ballots – the actual overall total is 4,333, of which 1,778 were cast early and are clearly not at issue. So, until I hear otherwise, it is my contention that these provisional ballots are not enough to alter any race’s result, and also that this doesn’t matter because all of the ballots should be counted. We’ll see what the Court says.

Precinct analysis: Early voting versus Election Day

In his pre-election analyses of the early vote, Republican consultant Derek Ryan (whose numbers I have used in the past) suggested that there was still a significant number of regular Republican voters who had not voted yet, which could make Election Day redder than early voting was. I thought I’d take a look at the data to see how accurate that was. Short answer: Pretty accurate.


Candidate   Early%  E-Day%  Total%  Ratio
=========================================
Abbott     53.75%   57.05%  54.80%   1.06
Beto       45.14%   40.98%  43.81%   0.91
Others      1.11%    1.97%   1.39%   1.77

Note that “Early” here includes mail ballots, as the Secretary of State website combines mail ballots with early in person ballots to give that number. “Ratio” is just the Election Day percentage divided by the Early percentage, which you can interpret to mean that Abbott did about six percent better on Election Day while Beto did about nine percent worse. The Others include the Libertarian and Green candidates plus two write-ins. I am greatly amused by the fact that their voters are the real traditionalists for voting on Tuesday.

If you’ve followed the numbers from Harris County, you know that Democrats overall did at least as well on Election Day as they had done in early voting. I assumed there was a range of outcomes here, so I sorted the data by Abbott’s Ratio, to see where he did best and worst – relatively speaking – on Election Day. Here are a few counties of interest for each. First, where he improved on Election Day:


County                Abbott     Beto  Others
=============================================
Travis Early          24.07%   74.83%   1.10%
Travis E-Day          30.52%   66.96%   2.52%

Bastrop Early         53.93%   44.58%   1.50%
Bastrop E-Day         64.15%   33.53%   2.32%

Williamson Early      47.73%   50.94%   1.33%
Williamson E-Day      54.19%   43.20%   2.62%

Hays Early            42.52%   56.01%   1.46%
Hays E-Day            46.87%   50.30%   2.84%

Bowie Early           73.12%   25.96%   0.92%
Bowie E-Day           80.32%   18.17%   1.52%

Dallas Early          34.85%   64.18%   0.97%
Dallas E-Day          38.08%   60.02%   1.90%

There are numerous small counties in there that I haven’t listed, I’m just highlighting the ones of interest. Travis County was in fact the top Ratio value for Greg Abbott – he did 29% better on Election Day than he did in early voting. This is where I point out that “doing better (or worse) on Election Day” is not the same as doing well (or poorly). That said, Abbott did well enough on Election Day in Williamson County to nudge past Beto’s vote total for that county. Now here are a few where Abbott dropped off on Election Day:


County                Abbott     Beto  Others
=============================================
Fort Bend Early       47.58%   51.07%   1.35%
Fort Bend E-Day       44.72%   52.94%   2.33%

Lubbock Early         70.30%   28.64%   1.06%
Lubbock E-Day         67.54%   30.49%   1.97%

Harris Early          45.06%   53.79%   1.15%
Harris E-Day          43.31%   54.45%   2.24%

Gregg Early           73.76%   25.52%   0.72%
Gregg E-Day           71.09%   27.35%   1.56%

Jefferson Early       56.56%   42.33%   1.10%
Jefferson E-Day       54.61%   43.38%   2.01%

It’s interesting to me to see Central Texas counties filling up that first table, while the Houston area is more present in the second one. I could have included Waller, Wharton, and Chambers in the latter as well. Whether that’s a fluke or a tendency, I couldn’t tell you. But it’s finding weird things like this that makes doing this kind of exercise so much fun.

Does any of this matter on a more macro level? Again, I don’t know. Honestly, I don’t think it matters that much, in the sense that the votes all count the same and from the perspective of a campaign’s win number it doesn’t make a difference. It’s certainly nice to have a bunch of votes banked before Election Day – if nothing else, it mitigates some risk from bad weather and technical difficulties at voting locations. But ultimately, either your voters show up in the numbers you need or they don’t. I think this data is interesting, and it may suggest some strategies for how better to deploy campaign resources. Beyond that, it’s what you make of it.

DaSean Jones wins after provisional and cured mail ballots are counted

I’m sure someone is going to throw a fit over this.

Judge DaSean Jones

The Harris County felony judge race for the 180th criminal state district court flipped Friday night in favor of incumbent DaSean Jones after new mail and provisional ballots were counted.

Jones, who assumed office in 2019, has taken a 449-vote lead over Republican Tami Pierce. Pierce led by more than 1,200 votes the morning following the election. That number dwindled to 165 votes on Nov. 10.

Nearly 5,300 new ballots were counted in the latest update by Harris County Elections — including a little under 1,000 mail, nearly 1,800 early provisional and about 2,500 E-Day provisional.

[…]

According to Harris County Elections, the results posted Friday are the “final unofficial posting” before Tuesday when Harris County Commissioners Court is scheduled to canvass the results. The Elections office is still working on the reconciliation form.

See here, when I published the previous count, which was as of November 10 at 2:42 PM. Those were the last results before provisional votes were counted – as we know, those always take a few days for review. With the new restrictions on mail ballots, the same law that added those restrictions also allows for mail ballots that have a defect in them, such as lacking the correct ID number (drivers license number or last four digits of the SSN, depending on which you used to register with), to be corrected up to six days after the election, as noted by the Secretary of State. I presume that means up through Monday the 14th, I haven’t checked to see what the exact specification in the law is.

Be that as it may, here’s the November 10 report, which as noted had no provisional ballots and still some uncounted mail ballots. At that time, a total of 60,302 mail ballots had been counted, and as we know they favored Democrats countywide. Beto was leading in mail ballots in that report 62.25% to 36.76% over Greg Abbott, a net of 15,151 votes, while Lina Hidalgo had a 60.26% to 39.65% (11,960 votes) advantage. DaSean Jones was up 31,382 (56.12%) to 24,541 (43.88%) as of the 10th.

In the report from the 18th, which included the final mail totals as well as the provisionals, Jones gained 259 net votes, going to a 31,914 to 24,814 lead. Counted provisional votes were sorted into those from Early Voting and those from Election Day. His opponent Tami Pierce netted five votes in the former, winning them 850 to 845, but Jones added another 360 to his margin by taking Election Day provisional votes 1,390 to 1,030.

Overall, the EV provisional votes had a slight Democratic lean – looking just at the judicial races, the Democratic share of the EV provisionals was generally a fraction of a point to a point higher than the overall early vote percent. Jones was one of three Democratic judicial candidates to not carry the EV provisionals – Genmayel Haynes, one of the four remaining Democrats who lost, and Tami Craft, who had the closest margin of victory among the Dems who won before Jones’ ascent, were the other two. Dems won the Election Day provisional vote by a much more solid margin, in the 57-60% range in the judicial races I looked at. That right there suggests to me that the Republican claims about voting location problems affecting them disproportionately are bogus.

For what it’s worth, Beto now has 54.03% of the vote in Harris County; my previous post with the 2022 update on how statewide results compared to Harris County is now out of date, which is a lesson I’ll learn for next time. Lina Hidalgo increased her lead to 1.67 percentage points, now 0.09 points bigger than her percentage margin from 2018 though her raw vote margin of 18,183 is still slightly less. The Democrat among the four who lost who came closest to winning is now Porsha Brown, who now trails Leslie Johnson 50.01% to 49.99%, a 267 vote margin. Final turnout is 1,107,390, or about 43.75% of registered voters.

If Greg Abbott demands an investigation, Greg Abbott will get an investigation

This is all still so dumb.

Harris County District Attorney Kim Ogg is launching an investigation into “alleged irregularities” during last week’s election after receiving a referral from the Texas Secretary of State’s office.

Ogg sent a letter to Texas Department of Public Safety Director Steven McCraw asking for the Texas Rangers’ assistance on Monday, the same day Gov. Greg Abbott called for an investigation and the Harris County Republican Party filed a lawsuit accusing Elections Administrator Cliff Tatum and the county of numerous violations of the Texas Election Code.

The allegations include paper shortages at 23 polling locations, releasing early voting results before polls closed at 8 p.m., the improper disposition of damaged ballots and inadequate instructions on how poll workers were to manage instances in which the two-page ballots were not completely or adequately scanned into machines.

Under Harris County’s countywide voting system, residents had 782 locations to cast their ballots on Election Day. The paper shortages affected a small number of polling places.

The GOP lawsuit, however, claims “countless” voters were turned away due to the paper shortages and did not go to a second location to vote.

See here for the background. Ogg, who was not exactly an asset to Democrats in this election, has taken some heat for this. I get that and I’m not here to defend any of her recent actions, but I’m not exercised about this. There was going to be an investigation of some kind once Abbott threw his tantrum, and given that it can’t be Ken Paxton unless he’s invited in, it may as well be the local DA. Having the Texas Rangers assist makes sense in that it’s best to have outside help for an internal political matter. If this turns out to be much ado about nothing, as I believe it is, then let the Rangers take the blame from the Republicans for not finding anything. I am not going to waste my energy sweating about this at this time.

In the meantime:

Harris County Elections Administrator Cliff Tatum, speaking at length publicly for the first time since Election Day, pledged a complete assessment of voting issues Tuesday but said the county is in “dire need” of improvements to the way it conducts elections.

“A full assessment is in order,” Tatum told Harris County Commissioners Court on Tuesday. “We have started that assessment, but I’d like to remind you and the public we are still counting votes.”

He said his office still was working its way through about 2,100 provisional ballots cast after 7 p.m. last Tuesday. A state district judge ordered the county to keep the polls open until 8 p.m. because some voting locations failed to open on time. Those provisional ballots are being kept separate from the unofficial count, pending a court ruling on the validity of those votes.

The deadline for the county to canvass the vote is Nov. 22.

[…]

Tatum told Commissioners Court his staff is contacting each election judge to gather feedback and assess challenges they faced, including any technical difficulties and the response they received.

At least one polling place had a late opening and certain locations ran out of paper, Tatum confirmed.

Tatum took over the job in August, just two months before early voting in the November election began. So far, he noted the county is in “dire need” of some critically needed improvements, including a better communication system, more maintenance and operations personnel and a tracking system for monitoring requests from the election workers running polling locations.

Tatum said he has spoken with election judges who requested technical help and did not receive it.

“Because I can’t track that technician within the system that I have, I can’t tell you what happened,” Tatum said.

I dunno, maybe wait until all the work is done and see what happens before storming the barricades? And yes, especially now that they have full control over the budget, the Democratic majority on Commissioners Court needs to ensure this office has sufficient resources. We need to do better. Reform Austin has more.

This is all so dumb

I’m going to quote a large swath of this Reform Austin story because it sums up what has been happening the past couple of days better than I could.

Gov. Greg Abbott called for an investigation into Harris County’s election practices last Tuesday, saying that he wanted to get answers as to why a myriad of election administration issues occurred. Delayed openings at some polling places openings, a shortage of paper ballots at some polls, and understaffing problems plagued the county on election day.

“The allegations of election improprieties in our state’s largest county may result from anything ranging from malfeasance to blatant criminal conduct,” Abbott said in a statement but did not offer further details.

He added: “Voters in Harris County deserve to know what happened. Integrity in the election process is essential. To achieve that standard, a thorough investigation is warranted.”

But Harris County Elections Administrator Clifford Tatum responded that the county is “committed to transparency” and is already participating in the state’s election audit process.

“The office is currently reviewing issues and claims made about Election Day and will include these findings in a post-elections report to be shared promptly with the Harris County Elections Commission and the County Commissioner Court,” Tatum said in an emailed statement.

Harris County Precinct 2 Commissioner Adrian Garcia said that any problems on Election Day were technological and were related to the new voting machines Harris County was forced to purchase to bring the county into compliance with the new state law.

That law mandated the new models would be used as they produce a paper backup in addition to electronically capturing voter input. GOP state legislators passed the legislation called SB1 in their post-2020 “election integrity” campaign, despite any evidence of irregularities or fraud.

“Rather than waste resources on this nonsense, Gov. Abbott ought to investigate how many permitless guns have been used in violent crime,” Garcia said.

Also Monday, the Harris County Republican Party filed a lawsuit against Tatum and the county, alleging paper shortages at some voting centers amounted to violations of the Texas Election Code.

But Harris County Democratic Party Chair Odus Evbagharu disputed the GOP’s assertions, saying that “The claim that there was, like, thousands and thousands of people who were disenfranchised, there’s no claim to that, there’s no proof of that,” Evbagharu said.

The delayed openings of roughly a dozen polling places on election day led a state district judge to allow an extra hour of voting time at those sites in response to a last-minute lawsuit filed by progressive advocates.

The Texas Civil Rights Project argued the case on behalf of the Texas Organizing Project, which sued to keep polls open. The suit stated it felt compelled to take legal action because election operation disruption earlier that day had caused voter disenfranchisement.

Hani Mirza, voting rights program director at the Texas Civil Rights Project said in a statement “We went to court because these closures and errors, especially in communities of color across Harris County, robbed voters of the opportunity to cast their ballot.”

Harris County District Judge Dawn Rogers ruled the effort was likely to prevail, and that the government had infringed upon voters’ rights, and thus she approved the additional time.

Not surprisingly, Republican Attorney General Ken Paxton’s office appealed the organization’s suit immediately, prompting the Texas Supreme Court to order the county to segregate votes cast during the extension while it reviews the judge’s action.

Honestly, all things considered, I thought Election Day didn’t go as badly as some people are saying. There were some glitches, and for sure we could do a better job with the paper, but we’re talking twenty-some locations out of 782. One reason we have so many locations is to give people plenty of other options if the place they went to is having issues. It’s a pretty small percentage, and so far as I can tell, no one has come forward to say that they were prevented from voting. Even more, the obvious remedy to voting locations that opened late or had to shut down for a period while paper issues were being sorted would have been to allow voting to go on for some extra time, so that anyone who was unable to get to another location and could not return before 7 PM would still have a chance to vote. Which the Texas Organizing Project and the Texas Civil Rights Project sought to do and got an order from a district court judge, which was then opposed by Ken Paxton and shot down by the Supreme Court. You can’t have it both ways.

The Elections Office is going to have to make its mandated reports. There was already going to be an audit of the November election, in case anyone has forgotten. Paxton is going to do whatever he’s going to do. If the local GOP is claiming that there was some kind of conspiracy to make it harder for Republicans to vote – pro tip: never believe a word Andy Taylor says – all I can say is good luck proving intent. Until shown otherwise, this all looks like a bunch of hot air and sour grapes. The Trib, the Chron, and the Press have more.

The “less is more” option for improving Election Day

This deserves serious consideration.

Widespread problems with Harris County elections likely would be relieved if officials reduced the number of polling locations in favor of fewer sites that operate more efficiently, a Rice University researcher and some recent reports say.

“We do just fine with early voting,” said Robert Stein, a political scientist and fellow at the school’s James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy. “We have all kinds of locations over 12 days and that count goes fine. Then, at the end of election night you have 900 people standing in line.”

That line, like plenty of others, is made up of frustrated voters who, despite Harris County offering 782 polling locations with roughly 11,000 voting machines, encounter confusion and delays as poll workers troubleshoot problems, wait for instructions or replacement equipment from election officials.

County Election Administrator Clifford Tatum, the county’s fifth person to oversee elections since 2018, said Wednesday that officials would assess and investigate problems with this week’s mid-term election once they have completed the final tally and verified election results.

“We will look at every polling location,” Tatum said.

[…]

Tuesday’s election and others in recent years indicate the way to a smoother day is to decrease the number of places where problems can occur by reducing where people can cast a vote, Stein said.

Stein, who has studied local elections for more than 40 years and spent the past decade examining turnout and voter habits, said numerous analyses have shown voters likely can be better served with larger, more efficiently operated polling locations strategic to where they can conveniently vote.

The benefit would be two-fold, Stein said.

First, poll workers could be better distributed on Election Day so issues can be triaged as they arise. Currently, a polling location with six workers can grind to a halt if a single machine goes down and all the workers are huddling to handle the problem. Larger facilities can operate more smoothly because some election officials can focus on specific issues, such as technology, while less tech-savvy poll workers maintain the operations and check voters in. Reducing locations also means polling sites would have more machines at their disposal.

All of those changes would allow better use of “queuing theory,” the same research stores use to sell people more items with fewer workers. Better management of lines has been shown to improve not only the time voters spend in line, but their confidence in elections and likelihood to vote, according to a study jointly managed by Caltech and MIT.

Fewer polling places also would reduce the number of voting machines that need to be brought to a central counting location, verified, certified and uploaded, which should speed up the counting process.

Stein said more study is needed to calculate exactly how many polling locations are the correct amount for Harris County, and where they should be located, but it is likely a more efficient election could be conducted with hundreds of fewer sites.

Harris County already had trimmed the number of polling places this year, mostly because of a new state law requiring all votes be backed up with a paper ballot, that meant the county had to purchase and train scores of election volunteers on new machines. In 2020, the last major election — held during the COVID-19 pandemic — election officials offered 122 locations for the 12 days of early voting and 807 on Election Day.

[…]

The challenge to reducing polling locations in the Houston area, however, is politics of the most local level. Opposition to reducing the number of polling stations, historically, has been widespread because of fears it would disenfranchise low-income Black and Latino voters by removing neighborhood-centric sites and force suburban — often Republican — voters to drive farther to cast a ballot.

Most voters, however, do not vote in their neighborhood precincts, studies and the recent election show. Of the 1.1 million ballots cast in Harris County this cycle, nearly 700,000 were completed at 99 locations during early voting. Another 61,000 ballots were submitted by mail.

That leaves the approximately 350,000 people who voted Tuesday, many of whom crowded into major locations such as the Metropolitan Multi-Service Center on Gray Street, Trini Mendenhall Community Center and Jersey Village Municipal Government Center, all of which acted as early voting and Election Day sites.

Election officials could not produce a detailed list of where people voted Tuesday, citing the work they doing to finalize the election, but early voting indicates — as Stein said research also suggests — people vote where it is convenient for them but not necessarily closest.

Stein compared election locations to Starbucks, where someone’s habits may change but center on the most convenient choice. It may not be the closest one, he said, but it is the one on their way to work or while running errands.

“I can go back in time and model it,” Stein said. “You have got to know exactly where every voter is going to vote and you can get close with it. Is it perfect? No, but you can get pretty close.”

Additionally, local officials can leverage other options to easily connect people with polls. Metropolitan Transit Authority already offers free rides to polls through early voting and on Election Day, for example.

Early voting indicates voters already are finding their way to the most convenient places. Despite the 99 early voting locations being chosen to cover most of the county, the locations visited by the most voters are those located in major hubs for shopping or business, or where high concentrations of people pass by on their daily commutes. As a result, 50 of the locations handled 537,471 of the voters, while the other 49 saw 155,007 voters.

I feel like we had a version of this debate when the idea of voting centers was first proposed for Harris County. People at the time were very attached to the idea of voting in their neighborhood, and that’s understandable. Black and Hispanic communities have fought for generations for access to the ballot box, and being able to vote in their neighborhoods was both a symbol of their victory and an activity that had a lot of meaning. The fear that they would not be able to do that and would have to go someplace unfamiliar, possibly unwelcoming, and possibly inaccessible to some, was legitimate and a real reason to be wary if not opposed to the concept.

I believe that is different now, mostly because early voting is so popular and because voting at any location on Election Day is no longer new and unknown. The reason we have nearly as many Election Day locations where anyone can cast a vote as we did precinct locations where you could only vote at the one where you lived is basically the compromise that allowed for this hybrid version of voting centers to be initiated. The idea was always to consolidate voting locations on Election Day. It really does make sense and should eliminate a lot of the issues that caused delays, as Stein lays out in the story. And now that people are much more acclimated to the idea of voting wherever on Election Day, not to mention the fact that far fewer people wait until Election Day to vote, I would think moving towards that original vision, coupled with a plan and a promise to make both the voting experience and the vote-counting experience smoother and simpler and less time-consuming, ought to work. It’s absolutely worth a try. Campos and Stace have more.

So what if anything will come of that SCOTx ruling on the extra voting time?

I have no idea.

The Texas Supreme Court on Tuesday set the stage for a legal fight over whether to count ballots Harris County voters cast during an extended hour of voting ordered by a lower court.

That lower court ordered that the state’s most populous county extend voting hours until 8 p.m. after several polling places were delayed in opening. The state’s highest civil court blocked that ruling and ordered Harris County to separate ballots cast by voters who were not in line by 7 p.m., the normal cutoff for voting in Texas. The Supreme Court’s order followed a request by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton to reverse the lower court’s order. The Supreme Court posted the order on Twitter at 8:30 p.m.

It’s unclear how many votes were cast during the extra hour of voting, but Harris County Attorney Christian Menefee raised the prospect that the state would ask for those votes to be thrown out. The attorney general’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment on whether they would pursue such action.

Voters who got in line after 7 p.m. were required to cast a provisional ballot, which the county had already said would take more time to process and would not be initially counted in election night returns. Harris County is home to nearly 2.6 million registered voters.

The order to keep polls open an extra hour at nearly 800 polling places came after the Texas Organizing Project sued Harris County, citing issues at numerous polling locations that opened more than one hour late Tuesday. Many Harris County voting locations also experienced voting machine malfunctions that caused delays and temporary closures throughout the day, the lawsuit claimed. The county did not fight the request for extra voting time.

“We didn’t oppose the original relief because we want to make sure every single eligible voter in Harris County has the chance to cast their ballot, and there were polling places that had some issues,” Menefee said. “But the Supreme Court of Texas will decide what happens here.”

In its request for extra voting time, the Texas Organizing Project argued the delayed openings violated the Texas Election Code because polling locations that opened after 7 a.m. would not remain open to voters for 12 hours. State law says polls must be open from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m.

In a court motion filed earlier Tuesday, the attorney general’s office argued that a county’s failure to open polls at 7 a.m. does not justify ordering them to remain open past 7 p.m.

[…]

“We went to court because these closures and errors, especially in communities of color across Harris County, robbed voters of the opportunity to cast their ballot,” said Hani Mirza, the voting rights program director at the Texas Civil Rights Project, which filed the lawsuit. “These folks got to the polls early, wanting to do their civic duty, and they would have were it not for these issues.”

Earlier in the day, a state district judge also ordered polling places to remain open an extra hour in Bell County in Central Texas. It is unclear if the attorney general’s office is also challenging that extension.

See here for some background, and here for a Twitter thread from the TCRP about their filing. At this point, I don’t believe any election is close enough to be potentially affected by however many provisional votes there could be. (I have no idea what that number is now, we’ll find out after the election is canvassed.) It would be nice to settle this as a matter of law and precedent, of course, and I would strongly argue that the voters shouldn’t be put in a position to be disenfranchised because of issues with a polling location – sometimes things go very wrong and it’s nobody’s fault – but I’m under no illusion that the Supreme Court will see it that way. Honestly, they’ll probably declare it moot once the provisional ballot numbers are confirmed, and that may be the best result we can hope to achieve. At least then there will be hope for the next time these things happen.

UPDATE: From the Chron:

Harris County officials declined to provide the number of voters who cast ballots during the extended period. The state’s highest civil court ordered these ballots be set aside until it issued a final ruling. In the meantime, all the votes during this period remain in legal limbo.

The Harris County district judge ordered that votes after the original 7 p.m. closing time be cast as provisional ballots, which are not counted until election workers confirm a voter’s eligibility.

Harris County Election Administrator Clifford Tatum declined to state how many ballots were cast during the extended period, but said Wednesday he didn’t believe any races would be affected by those provisional votes – or any provisional ballots left to count for other reasons.

“I don’t believe there are enough provisional ballots,” he said.

[…]

As of unofficial results, at least four district and county judicial races that flipped from Democrat- to Republican-held were close, separated by vote margins in the thousands and one as small as about 500.

As noted above, incumbent judge Dasean Jones is currently trailing by 465 votes, the closest countywide race. Jones won on Election Day with 50.24% of the vote. That means that if there are 10,000 provisional votes resulting from the problems with voting locations – this is, I want to emphasize, a huge over-estimate of the number of provisional ballots, but it’s a nice round number and will be nicely illustrative – and they vote at the same percentage for Jones, he’d have a net gain of 48 votes (524 to 476 for Jones). Of course, these problems occurred at specific locations which likely have more partisan characteristics – there’s no reason why they’d vote in exactly the same way as the county overall. Jones would need to win these 10K votes with 52.33% in order to pull ahead. If there are 5,000 provisional votes, he’d need to win them with 54.66% of the vote. If it’s 1000 provisional votes, it would need to be 73.3% of the vote. You get the idea. I don’t think it would be impossible for Dasean Jones to win with these votes, but unless those are extremely Democratic locations, the math is pretty challenging. For the candidates who lost by larger margins, even if those margins are tiny in absolute terms, it quickly becomes impossible to make up the ground. This is why recounts basically never change the outcome of even the closest elections.

UPDATE: There were still votes being counted when I wrote this. Looks like mostly mail ballots – there are another 1,116 of them in the latest report. County turnout is just over 1.1 million now. The bottom line, since mail ballots were much more Democratic than in person ballots, is that as of this writing Dasean Jones is now trailing by 165 votes, having closed the gap by 300. However, I think this is the end of that line. But if indeed there are a significant number of provisional ballots and they are mostly accepted, then the chances that Jones could edge ahead are greater than what the math had suggested before. I still think it’s unlikely, but it’s less unlikely now.

Omnibus 2022 election results post

It’s already midnight as I start writing this. I’m just going to do the highlights with the best information I have at this time.

– Nationally, Dems are doing pretty well, all things considered. As of this writing, Dems had picked up the Pennsylvania Senate seat and they were leading in Georgia and Arizona. They held on in a bunch of close House races. The GOP is still expected to have a majority in the House, but not by much. The Senate remains very close.

– Some tweets to sum up the national scene:

– On that score, Republicans appear to have picked up CD15, which they drew to be slightly red, while the Dems took back CD34. Henry Cuellar is still with us, holding onto CD28.

– Statewide, well. It just wasn’t to be. The running tallies on the SOS Election Result site are a bit skewed as many smaller red counties have their full results in while the big urban counties have mostly just the early votes counted. Heck, they didn’t even have Harris County early results there until after 10:30 PM (the point at which I went and snoozed on the couch for an hour because I was driving myself crazy). It will be a ten-point or more win for Abbott, I just can’t say yet what. A survey of some county results early on suggested Beto was around where he’d been percentage-wise in most of the big counties (Tarrant, where he was a few points behind, being an exception) but was going to need some decent Election Day numbers to approach his raw vote margins. He didn’t do as well as he had done in 2018 in some of the larger suburban counties like Collin and Denton and didn’t do as well in South Texas.

– He also didn’t do as well in Harris, which made for some close races and a few Republican judicial candidates with early leads. A couple of those had eroded by the 11:30 addition of more Election Day and mail ballots, but we might see a few Republican judges on the bench next year. As of that 11:30 PM vote dump, Beto was leading Harris County by nine points, well short of where he had been in 2018.

– But as of this time, and with the proviso that I don’t know which voting centers have reported and which are still out, the Harris County Democratic delegation was all ahead, though not be a lot. This includes Lesley Briones for County Commissioner, which if it all holds would give Dems the 4-1 margin on Commissioners Court that they sought. There are still a lot of votes to be counted as I type this.

– Going back to the state races, Republicans may pick up a seat or two in the Lege. HD37 was leaning their way, and they may hold onto HD118. Dems were leading in HDs 70 (by a little) and 92 (by a more comfortable amount), two seats that had been drawn to siphon off Dem voters in formerly red areas. As of this writing, the open SD27 (Eddie Lucio’s former fiefdom) was super close but all of the remaining votes were from Hidalgo County, where Dem Morgan LaMantia had a good lead in early voting. That one will likely be a hold for Dems. On the other hand, SBOE2 was leaning Republican, so Dems may be back to only five members on the SBOE.

– There were of course some technical issues.

Tight races in Harris County, where around 1 million votes will be tallied, could hinge on whether ballots cast after 7 p.m. will be included in the count, after an Election Day filled with glitches and uncertainty for voters and poll workers alike.

Harris County District Court Judge Dawn Rogers signed an order keeping all county voting sites open until 8 p.m., only to have the Texas Supreme Court stay her order just in time to create confusion at voting locations letting voters arrive late.

In a three-sentence order, the court said voting “should occur only as permitted by Texas Election Code.” The high court also ruled that votes cast in the final hour should be segregated. That means those votes can’t be counted until the court issues a final ruling.

That ruling could be critical in the event that certain county races, including the hard-fought battle for county judge between Democratic incumbent Lina Hidalgo and Republican challenger Alexandra del Moral Mealer, are close enough to be decided by those set-aside votes.

“Every single vote counts,” said Laila Khalili, a director at the voter engagement group Houston in Action. “Some elections can be won by just a couple of votes.”

Khalili watched a handful of voters file provisional ballots at the Moody Park voting location.

The request to keep the polling sites open late was made by the Texas Organizing Project, Texas Civil Rights Project and ACLU of Texas, citing what they said were late election location openings and poor planning that disenfranchised some voters.

“These delays have forced countless voters to leave polling places without being able to vote,” the groups said.

Harris County was unable to estimate or confirm how many votes were cast after the typical 7 p.m. cutoff that allows for anyone in line by that time to cast a ballot.

Voters who arrived between 7 p.m. and 8 p.m. cast a provisional ballot, according to the county attorney’s office. Some voters, later in the evening, complained that election workers even denied them that option, as the Supreme Court stay was broadcast to the 782 polling locations.

There were some issues with temporarily running out of paper at some locations and some long lines at others. We’ll just have to see how many provisional votes there are.

– Finally, for now, all of the county and city bond issues were passing. The closest ones as of this time were city of Houston prop E, up by eight points, and Harris County prop A, up by 11.

I’m going to hit Publish on this now and go to bed. I’ll make updates in the morning, either here or in a new post.

UPDATE: It’s 2:30 and I never actually got to sleep. With 334 of 782 voting centers reporting, Dems have gained some more ground in Harris County. Beto leads by nine points, while Judge Hidalgo is up by almost two full points and over 15K votes. She has led each aspect of voting. A couple of Dem judges who trailed early on are now leading, with a couple more in striking distance. There will be some Republican judges next year barring something very unexpected, but the losses are modest. All things considered, and again while acknowledging there are still a lot of votes out there, not too bad.

UPDATE:

An email with the summary file hit my inbox at 4:51 AM. Democrats officially have a 4-1 majority on Harris County Commissioners Court. By my count, Republicans won five judicial races in Harris County.

Today is Election Day

Get out and vote if you haven’t done so yet.

Here’s the interactive map to find the polling location nearest you. Remember that you can vote anywhere in the county, so “nearest you” is however you want to define it. Note that they show 50 locations at a time, so if you’re not seeing anything near you, either click through the “Next 50” button or just enter your address and search for your locations. An alphabetical list of them is here.

I’ll be up late tracking results, which will probably not be final until I’ve given up the ghost and gone to bed. I’ll at least have summaries of the state and local elections of interest. I have no idea what to expect, so we’ll just find out together. Happy voting!

The counting process

I don’t think I had seen this explained before.

Harris County residents likely will have a long night waiting for election returns Nov. 8, according to county Elections Administrator Clifford Tatum.

It takes around one minute for the county’s equipment to read a digital drive that contains a polling location’s vote count — and election workers will be receiving a drive from each of the county’s 782 polling locations.

The county’s equipment can read two of those drives at the same time, which would put the total counting time — assuming no problems arise — at more than six and a half hours.

“That sort of tells you how long it’s going to take to process all of the results that come in from Election Night,” Tatum said.

“The reality is that we will not have all of the final results tabulated before midnight,” Tatum added. “The math simply does not lend itself to allow us to do that.”

The county has not had complete results before midnight in decades, owing largely to the population and sprawling geography poll workers had to traverse to turn in ballot boxes and voting machines after the polls closed. In recent years, however, wait times for results have stretched further into the early-morning hours. This year’s March primaries took 30 hours to tally, prompting harsh criticism of Tatum’s predecessor, who later resigned over vote-counting issues. Harris County was the only one in the state to exceed the 24-hour limit.

Tatum said the elections office’s top priority is accuracy over speed.

“We just need our voters to know that simply because all the results aren’t in before midnight doesn’t mean that there’s something wrong,” Tatum said. “It’s just the process.”

Asked why the county does not have more equipment available to cut down the reporting time, Tatum said the challenge is balancing speed and accuracy.

“If you have multiple readers going, you want to be sure that the operators that are operating those readers are following the processes and procedures. So, if we have the opportunity to add in an additional reader, we’ll do that. But right now, our plan is to read two at a time. They are expensive equipment. It’s about control and accuracy in the process.”

Sounds reasonable. Usually, we get most of the votes tallied by around midnight – the May elections were both like that, thanks in part to the reduced turnout. The primary this year was an exception, and the blowback from it was exacerbated by a lack of communication from the Elections office. Here, Administrator Clifford Tatum lays out a schedule for when we can expect updates, and if we get that plus clear communications if and when something is causing a delay, I think we’ll be fine. Campos has more.

Some thoughts on Primary Day

Will we learn more about the mail ballot debacle?

Mail ballot usage during early voting has dropped precipitously since 2018, with tens of thousands of voters — especially Republicans — ditching the forms after two years of the GOP’s baseless claims that absentee voting facilitates fraud.

By the end of early voting on Friday, roughly 77,000 mail ballots had been processed in Texas’ 15 most populous counties, representing .7 percent of registered voters there. Four years ago, the total was 126,000 — about 1.3 percent of voters in those counties. (The Secretary of State does not provide statewide early voting totals for the 2018 election.)

The dropoff is most dramatic among Republicans, whose party has repeatedly alleged, without evidence, that state-approved expansions of mail ballots during the pandemic led to widespread fraud in the 2020 presidential election.

During the last midterm primary election in 2018, more than 67,000 Republicans in the state’s most populous counties filled out a mail ballot by the close of early voting. This year, the total hasn’t cracked 27,000.

The number dropped slightly for Democrats, too. More than 50,000 Democratic voters in those counties have cast an absentee ballot this year, compared to 59,000 in 2018.

[…]

By the time the application deadline passed on Feb. 18, Dallas County had rejected about 15.7 percent of all forms, the majority of them for a missing or incorrect ID. In Travis County, the rejection rate was 9 percent.

Now, county officials are dealing with the same problem for the actual ballots, which must be submitted by Tuesday. As of Friday, 30 percent of mail ballots were rejected over the new ID law in Harris County. In Dallas, it was 27 percent.

We’ve discussed this before. We need to know more about what happened with mail ballots. Remember, there were two parts to this, one for the application for the mail ballot, and one for the ballot itself. How many applications, from each party, were initially rejected for not using the right form or not being filled out correctly, with the right voter ID information? How many of those were subsequently fixed, and how many were never resolved? Of the mail ballots that were then sent out and returned, how many from each party were initially rejected for (again) not having the right voter ID information included? How many of those were then fixed and successfully submitted? Of the people who didn’t get their mail ballots fixed and returned, how many then voted in person? How many people who voted by mail in the 2020 and/or 2018 primaries and who are still on the voter rolls did not vote at all this year? More data, please!

What do you think the Expectations Line is for the gubernatorial primaries?

What will likely be the biggest heavyweight battle for governor of Texas in nearly 30 years is just days away from getting underway in Texas.

While Gov. Greg Abbott and Democrat Beto O’Rourke have been sizing each other up and jabbing at one another in nearly every corner of the state, both have unfinished business on Tuesday. But first they need to finish off a collection of underfunded primary challengers.

What little public polling there has been suggests neither Abbott nor O’Rourke has much to worry about on Tuesday, but that hasn’t stopped an urgency from slipping into the stump speeches as they plead with supporters to go vote.

“We’ve got to get everyone turned out,” O’Rourke told a crowd of supporters in McAllen in the Rio Grande Valley last weekend despite a recent University of Texas poll showing him winning the primary with 90 percent of the vote. “We’ve got to make sure we reach out to everybody.”

The same poll had Abbott avoiding a runoff by holding on to 60 percent of the vote in his primary. Yet in El Paso earlier this week at a get-out-the-vote rally, Abbott warned his supporters that “freedom itself is on the ballot.”

The article is mostly about the forthcoming general election battle between the two, but I’m curious what number the pundits will have in mind for their percentage of the vote in the primaries. Remember, when Beto got 61.8% in the three-way 2018 primary, it was seen as underperforming, even to the point of speculation from some corners that the overall Beto experience was overhyped. I think we know how that turned out. I also think we all expect Beto to do a lot better than 61.8% this time around, even though he has a bigger field and one opponent who managed to draw some attention, even though she’s basically been invisible since then. Beto is much better known this time and he’s been at least as active as he was in 2018, so maybe 75% for him? There are always some people who do their own thing. The only number that really matters is 50%+1, and after that it’s all in the interpretation. I’m not going to worry about it.

As for Abbott, I fully expect him to win without a runoff. (I still think Ken Paxton will, too, but I won’t be surprised to be wrong about that.) Abbott got 90% against two no-names in 2018 (I will give you $1 right now if you can tell me who they were without looking it up), but he ain’t getting that much this time around. Being forced into a runoff will be seen (correctly) as a disaster for Abbott, but if he clears the fifty percent line, I think he’ll be seen as the winner regardless of by how much. Remember, Rick Perry in 2010 got only 51% of the vote in his primary, but because he led KBH by 20 points (because no one took Debra Medina seriously) it was seen as a resounding victory for him. I think Abbott wins in round one, Huffines and West split the super-crazy vote so that he has a sizeable margin against each of them, and nobody talks much about the primary afterwards. Anyone disagree with that?

Of course, your vote in the Republican primary for Governor is really a vote for your favorite jackboot billionaire. Also mostly true in the Republican legislative primaries. Maybe we should talk a little more about that?

Here’s the Derek Ryan email for the end of early voting:

Good afternoon! Early voting wrapped up on Friday and the final totalsare that just over one million people voted early (or by mail) in the 2022 Republican Primary and 620,000 people voted early (or by mail) in the 2022 Democratic Primary. That means roughly 6% turnout on the Republican side and 3.6% turnout on the Democratic side.

In the 2020 Republican Primary, 54.5% of votes were cast by mail or during early voting. If those percentages hold up this year, that would equate to around 1.85 million votes being cast in the Republican Primary. (In the 2018 Republican Primary, there were 1.5 million votes cast.)

In the 2020 Democratic Primary, 49% of votes were cast by mail or during early voting. If those percentages hold up this year, that would equate to around 1.3 million votes being cast in the Democratic Primary. (In the 2018 Democratic Primary, there were one million votes cast.)

The average age of voters in the Republican Primary is 62.6 years old while the average age of voters in the Democratic Primary is 58.5 years old.

14.1% of votes cast in the Republican Primary are voters who did not vote in any party’s primary between 2014 and 2020. On the Democratic side, that percentage is 13.8%. These are individuals who have been general election-only voters, but it also includes voters who have moved to the state, just become eligible to vote, and individuals who have been registered to vote but haven’t participated in an election over the last eight years.

Only half of voters who voted in all four of their party’s last four primary elections ended up voting early. Over 85% of these individuals typically end up voting in a midterm primary election and there are 248,000 of these on the Republican side and 107,000 on the Democratic side who have not voted early.

I’ve based most of my comparisons on 2018, as it’s a non-Presidential year, but there’s no reason not to take 2020 into account. Ryan will have two more reports after Election Day.

Finally, a bit of final turnout data from Hector DeLeon:

I’ve made my guesses, now we’ll see what the reality is. The 19th has more.

Today is primary day

Today’s the day!

The interactive map of voting locations is here. Note that they list 381 total locations, but only show 50 at a time, and they seem to be ordered more or less in a north-to-south fashion. Don’t freak out if you don’t see anything close to you at first glance. A PDF list of locations is here – it’s alphabetized instead of being in precinct order, so it’s probably more useful if you have a location in mind and just want to verify that it’s available.

Probably about half of the votes for the primaries in both parties will be cast today, so it should be brisk business but hopefully not too congested anywhere. This will be the first real test of the new voting machines with paper receipts, but as long as each location has multiple printers there should be some mitigation for technology issues. We’ll see how that goes. I also hope that the issue of how many machines are dedicated to each party at each location is resolved in a better way than it was in 2020. I really don’t want to see anyone still voting at midnight. I’ve got another post up about various Election Day things, and of course I’ll have results tomorrow. Check in with your experience in the comments if you vote today.

2021 runoff results

Here are the vote totals, and here’s an early Chron story which has the results right but was just before the last batch came in. To summarize:

– Sue Deigaard had the only easy night – she led by 30+ points early on and cruised to a 64-36 win.

– Bridget Wade had a modest early lead, which stretched out to a 54-46 win.

– The next closest race was in HCC, where Eva Loredo had a small lead all the way, eventually winning by five points.

– Elizabeth Santos held on by 41 votes, and unfortunately Kendall Baker finally managed to get elected to something, by 78 votes. It would not surprise me if there are recounts in either or both of these, though as we know, those seldom make any difference.

– The HISD board has Republicans on it again, for the first time since the 2017 election that put Deigaard and Holly Maria Flynn Vilaseca on and gave Anne Sung a full term. Democrats now hold a 7-2 advantage on the board. I fully expect Wade and Baker to make trouble, but they’re not going to be able to get anything passed unless they can convince at least three other members to go along with them.

– So is this a portent of Bad Things to come for Democrats? Eh, maybe, but I wouldn’t read too much into it. These were pretty solidly Republican districts – as was Deigaard’s – before 2017, and both Sung and Vilaseca were caught up in the Abe Saavedra fiasco. For what it’s worth, Harvin Moore beat Anne Sung by a similar 53-47 margin in the 2013 race, while Mike Lunceford in V and Greg Meyers in VI were unopposed. In fact, the last election in District VI before 2017 that wasn’t unopposed was in 1997.

– Total turnout in the four HISD district was about 35K, which is right about where I thought it would be.

– Election results came in at normal times, with the first Election Day numbers coming in at 8:15 and the final tallies being posted three hours later. Isabel Longoria tweeted that it was a wrap at 11:27. I saw some concerns about slowness at the voting sites related to the processing of the paper receipt, but I think that can be ameliorated by having more scanners at voting locations for future, higher-turnout elections.

It’s 2021 Runoff Day

The interactive map of voting locations is here, and a list with addresses is here. I do believe that most of the votes for the runoff have already been cast, but I’ve been wrong before. I’ll have results tomorrow. Those of you in HISD district V (Sue Deigaard), VI (Holly Maria Flynn Vilaseca), and VII (Anne Sung) really need to make sure you vote.

Election Day 2021

You know what to do.

Find a voting location in Harris County near you here. You can vote at any location. If you prefer a list, here you go. I suspect that if you’re reading this, you’ve probably already voted or have a plan to do so today, but you never know. I’ll post results tomorrow.

2020 primary results: President

Before we get to the numbers, one last word about polls. As we know, polls released over the weekend were quite favorable to Bernie Sanders. However, there was more polling done since then, and both nationally and in Texas there was a big swing back towards Joe Biden. Obviously, a lot of votes were already baked in thanks to early voting, but there was still a lot more voting to do. And with that, we can sum up what happened in two more tweets:

You want another illustration of that, here’s the Bexar County early vote – Bernie has 25,847 and Biden 14,289. Now here’s Bexar County Election Day, and with about two-thirds of the vote in, it’s Biden 18,682 and Bernie 17,685. Yeah.

This was a very big night for Joe Biden, who won most of the Super Tuesday primaries (with the caveat that California’s vote-by-mail ballots will take several days to count) and who may have vaulted into the delegate lead by the time you read this. Michael Bloomberg is likely to drop out today, and while it may not be the end of the line for Elizabeth Warren, you feel like you can see it from here. (Full disclosure: I voted for Warren.) If nothing else, we have a lot more clarity now.

Primary Day voting information

From the inbox:

On Super Tuesday, March 3, eligible voters will be able to cast their ballots at any of the 401 voting centers across the county. The polls will be open from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. For the first time in Harris County, there will be both Democratic and Republican polls at all voting sites.

“Although there are a lot of races on the ballot, I encourage everyone to always vote all the way down the ballot.” added Trautman. “Remember, you can bring a sample ballot, notes, or an endorsement card into the voting booth with you.”

Voters can access individual sample ballots for both parties, find polling locations, and use the wait time feature at www.HarrisVotes.com. The wait time feature, allows users to find voting centers and get an idea of what the lines look like. This gives voters the option of choosing a convenient location with little or no wait time.

The Harris County Clerk’s Office also reminds registered voters to make sure they have an acceptable form of identification when they head out to the polls. Click here for list of acceptable ID.

Winners of the primary elections will move on to the general election on Tuesday, November 3. If the primaries end in a runoff, the 2020 Primary Runoff Elections will be held on May 26. The last day to register to vote for the runoffs is April 27, 2020.

Unofficial Election Day results will be posted on www.HarrisVotes.com as they come in on election night. Official results will be posted after the canvass is completed.

You can see the list of polling locations here, and the interactive map is here. Remember that map only shows twenty locations at a time, so enter your address to easily see the locations near you. Any location works for either party. It should be a busy day – like, more votes cast on Tuesday than in the entire 2015 Mayoral race – but the map should give an indication of how busy each location is, so choose accordingly. I will of course be following developments and report it all out beginning on Wednesday. Happy voting!

Today is Runoff Day in HD145

From the Inbox:

Tuesday, March 5, 2019, is Election Day for voters in Texas State Representative District 145. There will be 27 Voting Locations open from 7 am to 7 pm. Voters may visit the County Clerk’s election page, www.harrisvotes.com for more information.

“Only individuals who are registered to vote in SRD 145 may vote in this election,” said Harris County Clerk Diane Trautman, the Chief Election Official of the county.

At the end of the Early Voting period, only 1,417 votes had been cast in the election. This election will determine who will be the next Texas State Representative for District 145.

“While Harris County is seeking approval to implement a Countywide Polling Place Program, voters should remember that currently on Election Day, they must cast a ballot at the polling location where their precinct is assigned,” stated Dr. Trautman.

State Representative District 145 registered voters can find their sample ballot, as well as their Election Day location, by visiting www.HarrisVotes.com or by calling the Harris County Clerk’s office at 713.755.6965.

The list of polling places is here. You can vote in the runoff whether or not you voted in the original special election, you just have to be registered in HD145. Not many people have voted so far, so your vote counts for a lot. I voted for Melissa Noriega, and I encourage you to vote for her as well.

Meanwhile, early voting in the HD125 runoff is underway.

After a special election with four Democratic candidates and one Republican, the runoff has turned into a classic face-off between one candidate from each party. Former District 6 City Councilman Ray Lopez, a Democrat, narrowly won a spot in the runoff election last month with 19.5 percent of the vote, while businessman and Republican Fred Rangel easily led the pack with 38 percent.

Lopez said he doesn’t consider the previous margin to be indicative of how the runoff will shake out because the district is made up of mostly Democratic voters.

“Crystallizing the message for all Democrats to get behind is important, and I believe we’re doing that,” he said. “All my co-candidates [from the previous election] have endorsed me and supported me. They all realize party unity is important. We don’t want to lose a predominantly Democratic area to a Republican.”

Both candidates have acknowledged school finance reform is paramount in their district, as it is in the Legislature, but differ on secondary priorities. Lopez has championed veteran services and job creation, while Rangel said he wants to see property tax relief and lists his anti-abortion stance as a priority on his campaign’s Facebook page. But most of Rangel’s efforts currently focus on telling people an election is happening, he said.

[…]

Early voting for the runoff is Monday through Friday. The lack of weekend early voting is typical for this type of election, Bexar County Elections Administrator Jacque Callanen said. There are seven early voting sites, and there will be 31 poll sites on election day, which is March 12. Callanen also reiterated that all of the 101,000 registered voters in the district are eligible to vote in this election.

“There’s always confusion when we have a runoff, where some people still think you must have voted in the first election to be able to vote in the runoff,” she said. “That’s not true. If you’re a registered voter in that area, you’re eligible to come to the polls.”

Voters can go to any poll site during early voting but must go to their precinct on election day. Check here for locations. If you’re unsure in which House district you live, you can search by address or ZIP code here. Bring a Texas driver’s license, a U.S. passport, or one of five other valid forms of ID.

Polls will be open from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. Monday through Wednesday and 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. Thursday and Friday.

Get this one done, Bexar Dems. We don’t need any more accidents.

Today is election day

It’s what we’ve been waiting for, for what seems like forever. From the inbox:

Tuesday, November 6, 2018 is Election Day. Voting locations will be open from 7 am to 7 pm. Voters may visit www.HarrisVotes.com, the County Clerk’s election page, for more information.

“There are four important steps voters should take before heading to the polls,” advised Harris County Clerk Stan Stanart, the chief election officer of the County. “Go to HarrisVotes.com and look yourself up, study your personal ballot, see where your poll is located, and make sure you have one of the seven acceptable forms of Photo ID.”

At www.HarrisVotes.com, voters can find the answers to their voting questions. The website now provides voters an interactive Google map with directions to their Election Day polling location from the “Find Your Poll and Ballot” page.

“Please study your personal ballot,” urged Stanart. Voters may bring their marked up ballot into the voting booth to expedite the voting process and are strongly encouraged to review their selections before pressing the “cast ballot” button. Be sure you see the waving American Flag before exiting your voting booth. “If you have a question while voting, notify the election official in charge at the poll.”

There is still time to vote.” concluded Harris County Clerk Stanart. “Remember, on Election Day, a voter must vote at the polling location where their precinct is assigned to vote.”

The Election Day polling locations, a list of acceptable forms of identification to vote at the poll and information about “curbside voting” can be found at www.HarrisVotes.com. For more information, voters may also call the Harris County Clerk’s election information line at 713.755.6965.

Check the elections page for your own county if you’re not in Harris and you need to know where to go. Remember that if you’re in line by 7PM, you still get to vote. I will be at KTRK doing my thing and probably appearing on camera for thirty seconds at some random time. As for what happens today, well, your guess is as valid as anyone else’s. I’ll leave you with two thoughts. First, from Derek Ryan:


In case you’re wondering, turnout in 2008 was 8,077,795, in 2012 was 7,993,851, and in 2016 was 8,969,226. So, you know.

And also, because I didn’t see this in time to post it earlier:

Mayor Sylvester Turner will ask the city council next week to approve a $1.3 million contract with a law firm to represent the city in anticipation of possible litigation over Proposition B, a measure that would grant firefighters the same pay as police of corresponding rank and seniority.

The contract with Norton Rose Fulbright — which could be approved the day after Tuesday’s general election — would set aside $250,000 for the firm to handle litigation over real estate purchases in connection with infrastructure projects; the rest would be set aside for a court fight over pay “parity.”

[…]

The mayor’s office cast the decision as a simple act of preparing for the election.

“The city is seeking outside counsel to review and assess all options in case Proposition B should pass,” mayoral spokesman Alan Bernstein said. “It is a prudent course of action.”

I have believed all along that there would be litigation regardless of the outcome, so they may well need to assess their options in the seemingly unlikely event that Prop B fails. Something to look forward to after the election.

Primary Day 2018

From the inbox:

The Harris County Clerk’s Office wants voters to know the top 5 items they need to know to ensure they are able to cast their ballot in the March 6, 2018 Democratic or Republican Primary Election.

According to Harris County Clerk Stan Stanart, the chief election officer of the County, voters need to know the following before heading to the polls on Tuesday:

Voters should know if they are registered to vote in Harris County.  In Texas, voters must be registered to vote 30 days before Election Day. To verify registration, voters may visit www.HarrisVotes.com.

Voters should know the Primary election in which they want to participate:  There are two elections taking place at the same time, the Democratic Primary Election and the Republican Primary Election. Voters may only vote in one of the elections.

Voters should know the designated Election Day polling location for their precinct:  On Election Day, all voters must vote at their designated Election Day poll for the precinct where they are registered.  Voters may find their designated polling location by visiting www.HarrisVotes.com and clicking on the “Find Your Poll and View Voter Specific Ballot” link on the front page. By entering their name or address, the search page will show them the polling locations for both the Democratic and Republican Parties.  Remember, voters may only vote in one of the elections.

Voter should know what is on their ballot:  Voters may view a sample ballot at www.HarrisVotes.com listing the contests and candidates that will appear on their actual ballot.  Voters may print their sample ballot, mark it and take it to the poll for reference, as long as the sample ballot is not visible to other voters.

Voters should know the forms of identification which is required to vote at the poll:  Voters possessing one of the acceptable forms of photo identification must present it when voting in person.  Voters who do not possess and cannot reasonably obtain an acceptable form of photo identification may complete a Reasonable Impediment Declaration at the poll describing a reasonable impediment to obtaining photo identification, and then show other acceptable form of identification.  A list of the acceptable forms of identification to vote can be found at www.HarrisVotes.com.

Primary elections are conducted by the major political parties to determine their nominees for Federal, State and County offices in advance of a general election.  Each party determines the number of polling locations available to voters on Election Day, where the polls are located and the staffing for those polls.  Election Day polling locations are open from 7 am to 7 pm.

To find more Election Day voting information, view a personal sample ballot, or review a list of acceptable forms of identification to vote at the polls, voters may visit www.HarrisVotes.com or call the Harris County Clerk’s office at 713.755.6965.

You can find your polling place here. If you know you precinct, the list of Dem locations is here, and of Republican locations is here. For my Woodland Heights peeps, note that Rs are voting at Hogg and Ds are at the First Baptist Church Heights Fellowship Hall across from Harvard Elementary. Check your polling location before you head out. I’ll have results tomorrow and beyond. Happy voting!

Today is Election Day

From the inbox:

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Harris County Clerk Stan Stanart urges voters to prepare before heading to vote on Tuesday, November 8, 2016. “Harris County Voters can find their Election Day polling location and review the list of acceptable forms of identification required to vote by visiting www.HarrisVotes.com.”

Unlike Early Voting, on Election Day, voters are required to vote at their designated polling location for their precinct. Election Day polls are open from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. All voters in line at 7 p.m. will be allowed to cast their ballot.

“All voters should make sure they have an acceptable form of identification. New to this election are options for voters who do not possess one of the acceptable photo IDs,” reminded Stanart, the chief election officer of the County. According to state guidelines,

A voter must show an acceptable photo identification at the polling location before the voter may be accepted for voting, unless the voter has a reasonable impediment to obtaining one of these forms of acceptable photo identification or the voter qualifies for one of the other exemptions. The forms of acceptable photo identification include:

• Texas Driver’s License issued by the Department of Public Safety (“DPS”)
• Texas Election Identification Certificate issued by DPS;
• Texas Personal Identification Card issued by DPS;
• Texas Handgun License issued by DPS;
• United States Military Identification Card containing the person’s photograph;
• United States Citizenship Certificate containing the person’s photograph; or
• United States Passport.

With the exception of the U.S. citizenship certificate, the identification must be current or have expired no more than 4 years before being presented for voter qualification at the polling place.

If a voter does not possess one of the forms of acceptable photo identification listed above, and the voter cannot reasonably obtain such identification, the voter has the right to execute a Reasonable Impediment Declaration and present one of the following supporting documents: Valid voter registration certificate; Certified birth certificate (must be an original); Copy of or original current utility bill; Copy of or original bank statement; Copy of or original government check; Copy of or original paycheck; or Copy of or original other government document that displays your name and an address (though an original is required if it contains a photograph).

“For voters with disabilities, look for the greeter wearing the bright lime vest. They are there to ensure your access to the voting process,” concluded Stanart. “The election officials at the polls are there to ensure every voter has a great election experience. I encourage every registered voter to join us at the polls.”

To review a list of acceptable credentials to vote at the polling location, find a list of the Election Day polling locations, view a personal sample ballot and other election information, voters may visit the Harris County Clerk’s website at www.HarrisVotes.com or call 713.755.6965.

You can find your polling place here – remember, unlike early voting, there is only one place you can go if you vote today. Metro is offering a free ride to the polls if you need it. For all of the chatter about early voting turnout, it remains to be seen how many people there are left to vote today. I think that just on sheer population increase, we’re going to see a decent bump in turnout over 2012, both in Harris County and statewide. Whether the turnout rate climbs above 62-63% locally or above 60% statewide, that’s the real question. Have you voted yet> You have till 7 PM.

Today is Runoff Day

From the inbox:

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Runoff Election Day is Saturday, Dec. 12 for citizens registered to vote within the legal boundaries of the City of Houston and Houston ISD Trustee District II and III. Polls will be open from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m.

“I encourage every eligible voter to do their homework on the candidates and vote in this important election,” stated Harris County Clerk Stan Stanart, the chief election officer of the County. “Your vote will determine half of Houston’s governing body as well as two of the HISD Board of Trustees.”

There are over 800,000 registered voters in Harris County residing in unincorporated areas whose address may include “Houston” but do not reside in the Houston city limits. “It is very important to confirm your eligibility to vote before heading to the polls; and, if eligible, find out where your precinct is designated to vote on Election Day at www.HarrisVotes.com,” advised Stanart.

City of Houston voters registered to vote in Harris County and Montgomery County, and Houston Independent School District (HISD) voters may visit www.HarrisVotes.com for Election Day polling location information and to find out if they are eligible to participate in the Runoff Election.

City of Houston residents registered to vote in Ft. Bend County may vote at the location designated by the Fort Bend County election office. For more information, Fort Bend County voters should visit www.fortbendcountytx.gov.

“Remember, eligible voters are not required to have voted in the Nov. 3 Election to vote in the Runoff Election,” concluded Stanart.

I’ve got a copy of the polling places list here. Be sure to check that your usual place is being used before you head out. Metro is offering free rides to anyone with a voter registration card, so you don’t even have to drive. You don’t need me to tell you what the stakes are, so go do your thing. I’ll have results tomorrow.

Election Day: Get yourself to the polls

From County Clerk Stan Stanart:

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Harris County Clerk Stan Stanart strongly encourages citizens who plan to vote on Tuesday, Nov. 3 to be prepared before voting on Election Day. “It is very important for voters to know the answers to Where, When, Who and What before heading to the polls on Election Day,” said Stanart, the chief election official of the county.

Where do I go to vote?

In Texas, on Election Day a voter must vote at the precinct where the voter is registered to vote. Voters can find their Election Day polling location by searching on their name or address on the Harris County Clerk’s election website at www.HarrisVotes.com.

When can I vote?

Polling locations are open from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. Voters in line to vote by 7 p.m. are allowed to vote.

Who and what is on my ballot?

Voters can only vote on candidates and measures for districts in which they reside. Voters can view what they will see on their specific ballot by searching on their name or address on the “Find Your Poll and View Voter Specific Ballot” link at www.HarrisVoter.com. Voters may print their sample ballot to study and take with them into the voting booth.

What must I bring to the poll be able to vote?

A voter is required to present one of the following forms of photo identification at the polling location:

  • Texas driver license issued by the Texas Department of Public Safety (DPS);
  • Texas Election Identification Certificate issued by DPS;
  • Texas personal identification card issued by DPS;
  • Texas concealed handgun license issued by DPS;
  • United States military identification card containing the person’s photograph;
  • United States citizenship certificate containing the person’s photograph;
  • United States passport.

Voters who do not present an acceptable form of photo identification may cast a “provisional ballot”. For the provisional ballot to be counted, the voter must present one of the required photo identifications to the Voter Registrar within 6 days after the election.

Voters cannot wear or display items that promote a candidate, proposition or a party inside of the polling location and should be aware that use of personal electronic devices, including cell phones, is prohibited. Voters may bring in documents that will assist the voter to vote.

“A well-informed voter helps make the voting process a more efficient and positive experience for all,” concluded Stanart. Voters may visit www.HarrisVotes.com or call 713.755.6965 for more election information.

Go here to find your polling place or to browse the list of all polling locations in Harris County. Unlike some elections where there tends to be some consolidation of polling locations, the vast majority of precinct locations should be open today.

Need a ride to the polls? Here’s one option:

Voting on election day is a big decision. We want you to think about what’s important to you – not how you’re going to get to and from your local polling place.

That’s why we’re offering new users in every Uber city throughout Texas a free ride to and from the polls (up to $15 each way) on November 3rd.

Check out this link to find your local polling place and other helpful Texas voting information.

Note that this only applies to new users – you need to sign up with promo code TexasVOTES to qualify – though it is good anywhere Uber operates in Texas. It’s crass promitionalism, but it’s crass promotionalism for a good cause. If you’d rather not hand your personal information over to a venture capital-funded company, there’s another option to consider:

[Metro is] offering free rides on our local buses and trains to all registered voters.

Simply carry your voter registration card and show it to the bus driver, or be ready to show it to a fare checker on our trains. Not sure where to vote? Go to HarrisVotes.com to find your polling location. The free rides do not apply to our Park & Ride buses.

Make your voice count tomorrow – and get to your polling place, courtesy of METRO.

You can then go here to plug in your starting address and the address of your polling place to get your ride mapped out. No excuses, y’all.

I’m an early voter, and judging from my Facebook feed so are a number of my friends, but by no means all of them. I’m certainly hoping that the share of people who vote like me will be higher today than it was during the EV period. We’ll know in a few hours. I will be at the KTRK studio tonight, doing some blogging, possibly dusting off my dreading looking ahead to the runoffs. See you tonight.

Special Election Day for SD26, HD123, and HD17

At long last, we have some endorsements. The Express News recommends TMF for SD26.

Martinez Fischer has demonstrated distinctive leadership that makes him the clear-cut choice for the Senate.

Early in his career, Martinez Fischer stirred the pot ineffectively. The 44-year-old lawyer admits he is “rough around the edges,” but he learned his legislative lessons well and emerged as a powerful force in recent years.

More than any other Democratic legislator from San Antonio, Martinez Fischer has demonstrated a knack for being in the center of the action when it matters most.

Martinez Fischer has generated the most headlines for the confrontational aspects of his role as the chairman of the Mexican American Legislative Caucus and his sometimes overexuberant partisan comments.

But his use of the levers of power to be positioned to help make crucial decisions — even in the Republican-dominated House — is the more important aspect of his performance.

[…]

We are confident that Martinez Fischer will be as effective as a Democrat is able to be in the GOP-dominated Senate. He has the standing to be a go-to guy for progressives as well as San Antonio’s pragmatic civic leaders.

They also recommend Diego Bernal in HD123.

During his tenure at City Hall, Bernal showed courage by successfully sponsoring a highly controversial nondiscrimination ordinance that provided new protections for sexual orientation, gender identity and veteran status.

Bernal, 38, also took the lead in creating an advisory panel to study the future of Alamo Plaza. The plaza has received lip service over the years, but the city has failed to nurture the downtown asset. Bernal’s efforts have revived hope for real improvements.

The former councilman has demonstrated a commitment to public service, and voters have good reason to expect that he will get up to speed on state issues quickly.

Both excellent choices, in my opinion.

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I don’t know what to expect from the three legislative special elections today except low turnout, the likelihood of at least one runoff, and the eventual need for another such election to fill the seat of either State Rep. Trey Martinez-Fischer or Rep. Jose Menendez. For those of you in one of these districts, here’s where you are voting today if you have not already done so:

Bexar County polling sites.
Bexar County Precinct Finder.

Bastrop County Precinct Finder. There’s no general listing of polling sites. It appears you have to do the precinct location lookup to find out where you need to go to vote.

Caldwell County polling sites.

Gonzales County election information. There is no information specific to the January special election that I can find. I recommend calling the voter registrar at 830-672-2841 to inquire.

Karnes County election information. There is no information specific to the January special election that I can find. I recommend calling the elections administrator at 830-780-2246 to inquire.

Lee County elections information. They still have info pertaining to the SD18 special election up, but nothing for this one. I recommend calling the elections administrator at 979-542-3684 to inquire.

According to the Bastrop County Elections webpage, 3,114 early votes were cast in the HD17 election. I didn’t see any similar data for Bexar County. There were 35,196 total votes cast in the HD17 election in November, so you can get a feel for just how minuscule overall turnout is going to be. The Austin Chronicle has a good last-minute look at the races and the candidates if you’re still undecided.

Finally, yesterday was the filing deadline for the January 13 special election to fill the HD13 seat vacated by Sen. Lois Kolkhorst. The list of candidates that have filed, according to VoteTexas.govBecky Berger, Republican. Berger was a candidate for Railroad Commissioner least year. She’s also a wingnut.

Carolyn Cerny Bilski, Republican. Bilski is the Austin County Judge. Here’s a brief profile of her.

Leighton Schubert, Republican. This appears to be the press release announcing his candidacy.

Cecil R. Webster, Sr., Democrat. Webster was a candidate for Fayette County Judge last year, and garnered 22% of the vote, which put him ahead of the statewide Democrats in that county.

Here’s a Victoria Advocate story about the HD13 election. I’ll do some more searching for stories later this week.

Runoff Day is finally here

It’s the day on which the toxic idiocy of the GOP runoffs for Lt. Governor and Attorney General finally come to an end and we get a brief respite before the general election gets into full swing. But first, you have to vote if you didn’t vote early, and that means you have to find your polling place. From the inbox:

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Voters should visit www.HarrisVotes.com to verify their Election Day polling location before going to the polls on Tuesday, May 27th. Due to precinct consolidations, polling locations for the Democratic and Republican Primary Runoff Elections have changed from the March Primary Elections for many voters.

“Voters participating in the Primary Elections are reminded on Election Day that they may only vote at their designated polling location,” said Harris County Clerk Stan Stanart, “To avoid frustration and confusion, please check www.HarrisVotes.com to find your Election Day voting site.

The Democratic & Republican Parties, who select the locations in primaries, have significantly reduced the number of polling locations. Primary Voters should not assume that they will be voting in the same location they voted in the March Primary. Election Day polling locations will be open from 7:00 a.m. to 7:00 p.m.

Voters, who voted in the March Primary, are only able to vote in the same party’s election for the Primary Runoff. If they did not participate in either Party’s March 4th Election and are eligible to vote, they may participate in the Runoff Primary of their party choice.

“Voters may also use the website’s ‘Find Your Poll and Ballot’ feature to print out a sample ballot to review,” said Stanart, who is also the county’s Chief Elections Officer. “The election webpage provides voters the information they need for the who, the when, the where, and the how to accessing the polls.”

To view a list of acceptable forms of Photo ID that can be presented to vote at the poll, Election Day polling locations and other voting information, voters may visit HarrisVotes.com or call 713.755.6965. On Twitter, voters can obtain timely voting updates by following the County Clerk’s Voter Outreach Office: @HarrisVotes.

Definitely check where your polling place is before you head out. I’ll have results later and tomorrow.

Today is Runoff Day in SD06

From the inbox:

Harris County’s Chief Election Official Stan Stanart reminds eligible voters in State Senate District 6 that the last day to vote in the Special Runoff Election is Saturday, March 2, 2013. Polls will be open from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. and voters must vote at their precinct polling location.

“If you are qualified to vote in the runoff election and have not voted, Saturday is your last chance,” said Stanart who is also the County Clerk. “I encourage all eligible voters who reside within the boundaries of Senate District 6 to vote. In a low turnout election, every vote is significant.”

Despite an abbreviated 7 day early voting period, the number of persons processed to vote during early voting for the runoff election topped the number of voters processed during the 12 day early voting period in the first round of voting, 5,526 to 5,369. Additionally, more voters have requested and returned mail ballots for this runoff election than those in the first round of voting. “Thus far, voter participation in SD6 is increasing, which is unusual in that runoff elections tend to attract fewer voters,” asserted Stanart.

Stanart also reminds Senate District 6 voters who requested a mail ballot but did not mail it in time, that they can take the mail ballot to their Election Day poll and vote a regular ballot. “If a voter who requested a mail ballot does not take the mail ballot to the poll the voter will have to vote a provisional ballot,” explained Stanart.

On Election Day, voters must vote in the polling location in which their precinct is voting. To find your Election Day polling location, voters should visit www.HarrisVotes.com or call 713 755 6965.

The Clerk’s office has now published this spreadsheet of Election Day polling locations, so check to see where you need to go before you head out to vote. For all the complaints people may have about the delay, the process, the candidates, whatever, the important thing is that in a few hours the people of SD06 will be represented again. I’m going to be away from the Internet for a few hours this evening, so I won’t be able to post about the result until late. Feel free to keep track of things in the comments. Good luck to Carol Alvarado and Sylvia Garcia, and may the best candidate win.

UPDATE: Sylvia Garcia is the winner. Congratulations to her.