Now they’re just letting Republican officials throw out elections whenever they want — in Democratic counties.
The Texas Legislature is advancing a bill that would allow the secretary of state to redo elections in Harris County, where a number of Democratic candidates posted strong midterm election results and which has been dogged by GOP claims of election mismanagement.
The Republican-controlled Senate passed the bill Tuesday and sent it to the state House. If it is 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 2% of polling places ran out of usable ballots during voting hours.
The bill would apply 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. 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.
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Mimi Marziani, a professor at the University of Texas School of Law and a former president of the Texas Civil Rights Project, a nonprofit group that advocates for voter rights, said the bill was a “partisan power grab” over Harris County.
“It gives an unelected person the authority, without any procedural guardrails, to overturn an election when there are paper ballot issues,” Marziani said. “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.
They did post-election assessment and couldn’t find any evidence that people were turned away because of the shortage of paper ballots. It’s all BS of course.