The Texas Legislature is advancing a bill that would allow the secretary of state to redo elections in Harris County, which saw a number of Democratic candidates post strong midterm election results and has been dogged by GOP claims of election mismanagement.
The bill was passed by the state’s Republican-controlled Senate on Tuesday and sent to the state House of Representatives. If enacted, it would allow the secretary of state to toss out election results in the state’s largest county and call a new vote if there is “good cause” to believe that at least two percent of polling places ran out of usable ballots during voting hours.
The bill applies only to counties with populations greater than 2.7 million, effectively singling out Harris County, which is home to Houston and has by far the largest population in the state at nearly 5 million residents. In recent decades, Harris County has become more Democratic.
Last year, the Harris County Republican Party sued the county and Clifford Tatum, its election administrator, over the administration of last year’s election, and numerous Republicans also challenged their losses and called for the election to be redone. During the election, a legal battle arose over whether to extend voting hours at Harris County’s polling places after several locations had issues including ballot paper shortages and late openings.
The Harris County Election Administration Office later conducted an assessment of the 2022 midterms and preliminarily could not conclude if paper shortages resulted in the turning away of voters.
Tatum’s office replied to a request for comment with a fact sheet listing upgrades for future elections and examples of issues with elections before the county created an election administrator role.
Republican state Sen. Mayes Middleton, a cosponsor of the bill, said the measure provides a remedy for “systemic ballot paper denial.”
“We had 253 counties that had no issues really with ballot paper. We had one that did,” Middleton said Monday in a speech on the Senate floor. “This is an important accountability tool.”
State Sen. Borris Miles, a Democrat who represents part of Harris County, acknowledged that the county had problems with election administration, but said some of the claims of mismanagement were “more conspiracy than fact.”
State Sen. Sarah Eckhardt, also a Democrat, said in criticizing the GOP bill that redoing an election could cost tens of millions of dollars.
“I completely agree that no polling place should run out of paper,” Eckhardt said. “But the bill has no requirement that the blunder must have had, or even probably had, any effect on the outcome of the election.”
A Texas Secretary of State office audit of the 2020 election, which was managed by Tatum’s predecessor and took place at the height of the Covid pandemic, found that Harris County had “very serious issues” in its handling of electronic media. But it did not find evidence of fraud or intentional disenfranchisement.
Election mismanagement and fraud allegations by conservative candidates and their supporters have become increasingly common in the wake of former President Donald Trump’s baseless claims of voter fraud over his 2020 election loss.
Mimi Marziani, a professor at the University of Texas School of Law and former president of the Texas Civil Rights Project, a nonprofit that advocates for voter rights, said the bill was a “partisan power grab” over Harris County on the Legislature’s part.
“It gives an unelected person the authority, without any procedural guardrails, to overturn an election when there are paper ballot issues,” Marziani said about the bill. “It’s very easy to see how this vast authority could be abused in a way that’s profoundly undemocratic.”
She added that there are existing mechanisms to address election errors, including recount litigation.
Source: | This article originally belongs to Nbcnews.com
