HOUSTON—As voters in Texas’ most populous county headed to their polling places for Tuesday’s primary election, they were met with seas of colorful campaign signs, hopeful candidates and electioneers delivering last-minute stump speeches.
Campaign supporters filled parking lots, sometimes playing music and handing out treats to rile up attendees. Politicos shook hands and waved posters all around.
But amid all the political glamor, voters at some polling sites were also met with long lines and malfunctioning voting machines. And those issues came on top of already significant struggles with SB 1, a voting bill signed into law last year that heightened ID requirements for mail-in voters, banned drive-through voting and banned 24-hour voting sites, which the county used in 2020.
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The problems started early. When voting began at 7 a.m., the county’s website mapping out nearby polling places for individuals crashed. In an effort to quickly mitigate the issue, Harris County Elections pointed voters to a written list of its polling sites, requiring early-morning voters to parse through a catalog of 375 different locations. Harris County allows voters to vote at any location within county limits.
Once voters arrived at a polling location, they faced dramatically mixed experiences with wait times and access. While some locations offered quick turnarounds, others were bogged down with hefty wait-times, sometimes spanning 30 to 45 minutes.
"People line up to vote in the primary election at the Lakewood Branch Library in Dallas, U.S., March 1, 2022. REUTERS/Shelby Tauber"
SHELBY TAUBERPrimary elections in Texas also structurally differ from county to county. Some counties offer joint primaries, where staff and equipment serve Democrat and Republican primary voters alike. Others—like Harris County—have consolidated primaries, where Democrats and Republicans stand in separate lines and use different equipment.
At times on Tuesday, that led to backlogs more severely impacting voters from one party over another.
At one of the county’s most popular polling locations, the West Gray Multi-Service Center, the parking lot was nearly full for hours, prompting voters to park outside stores across the street and walk over. And lines, divided by party affiliation, stretched well outside the building—but not for everyone.
Machines on Democrats’ voting side experienced technical issues throughout the morning, leaving voters waiting for long stretches of time while Republicans walked right in.
As they waited, Democratic voters had Republican-passed legislation on their minds.
“It tees me off that I can’t choose how I control my own body,” Karen, a Houston voter who declined to give her last name, told The Daily Beast in reference to a six-week abortion ban enacted in Texas last year.
Matt Lupin, a Harris County voter who works for an endocrinology clinic, told The Daily Beast that Abbott's decision to sign into law a ban on transgender health services for minors concerned him to the point he wanted to “get them out of office” because trans-children’s healthcare is “not child abuse" as outlined in the new law.
Tuesday wasn’t even the beginning of the county’s electoral woes. Harris County election officials last week reported a staggering 29 percent of returned ballots being at risk of rejection, in large part due to issues with the stricter ID requirements passed into law last year.
The new requirements stipulate that voters include an identification number that matches what the state has on file on both their mail-ballot application and their returned ballot. Individuals with rejected ballots in Harris County who did not resort to voting through other means, like going to a polling location, now have to rectify their ballot within six days of the election in order to be counted.
Rose Clouston, the voter protection director for the Texas Democratic Party, told The Daily Beast on Tuesday that Texas-Democrats’ voting hotline was filled with reports from voters about polling locations opening late, poll-worker shortages and people struggling to figure out how to navigate outstanding issues with their mail-in ballots.
Texas voters are entitled to a chance to correct their mail-in ballot if there’s an error, but elections officials say there’s a lack of uniformity from county to county on how voters are notified their ballot has an issue. Leah Shah, spokesperson for Harris County Elections, told The Daily Beast earlier this year that her office is well-staffed and fortunate to be able to handle the influx of work in contacting voters.
Other county elections offices—especially those in rural or less populous areas—aren’t always afforded the same level of resources.
“It’s been so frustrating and exasperating, quite frankly,” Clouston said of navigating the ballot correction process with voters, with some elections officials not using “common sense” in how they’ve alerted voters to needed changes.
Molly Cook, a 30-year-old Democratic candidate for the Texas state senate, told The Daily Beast that improving voting access in Texas is an essential priority. She’s running against incumbent state Sen. John Whitmer (D), who is also a candidate for Houston mayor.
“Most of us did not start off with a vote in this country… You have stay on top of maintaining civil rights,” she said.
And issues with voting on Tuesday have prompted Harris County election officials to pump the brakes on counting ballots, according to Houston’s Fox 26, which reports that Harris County election officials have asked the Secretary of State for a an extension beyond 24 hours to count ballots.
Amid much of Tuesday’s chos, voters remained persistent in making it to the ballot box. Marissa, who only gave her first name and was one of the last voters in line at the West Gray Multi-Service Center on Tuesday, told The Daily Beast showing up to vote was important to her. It’s a mean to enact change, she said.
“Change. This matters. This is everything,” she said.
