A line of Democratic voters snaked around Kingwood Community Center on Tuesday morning, hoping to cast ballots and get to work on time. There was a technical issue with the dedicated Democratic voting machines and no option to share equipment with the folks on the GOP side, where there was no line.
Another location near NRG Stadium was impossible to get to because of rodeo traffic. At least 20 more had voters waiting until 11 p.m.
When the day was done and half a million votes were counted, the consensus from both political party leaders was that the primaries were successful but there’s room for improvement. The exact nature of those improvements, however, is up for debate.
“It worked,” said Harris County Democratic Party Chair Mike Doyle. “And it really was in spite of the Republicans not agreeing to joint primaries. The delay part happened in spades. First thing in the morning, I got a call because at Kingwood, they had a problem with the Democratic voting machines and they had a bunch of empty dedicated Republican machines just sitting there and people unable to vote because they couldn’t vote on the same machines.”
That problem was resolved, but some voters probably left and didn’t come back, Doyle said.
Republican Party Chair Cindy Siegel said the GOP prefers split primaries, a process by which voting equipment and poll workers aren’t shared between the two parties, saying voters trust it and it’s how local elections have operated for decades, with the exception of 2024.
“There were long lines and some of the rooms at the polling places were smaller than we would have liked,” Siegel said Thursday. “If there was anything that didn’t go well, it had to do with tension between the two parties. We had complaints that Democratic [election] judges were taking our tables and chairs and just not great behavior. The problems had nothing to do with this being a non-joint election.”
A real problem, according to Siegel, is the polling place locations.
Harris County offers countywide voting, meaning voters aren’t assigned to a particular neighborhood precinct as they were in Dallas County, where mass confusion ensued when hundreds got turned away on Tuesday for being at the wrong polling place.
Harris County had problems of its own, though. Backed-up rodeo traffic around a Wyndham Hotel polling site near NRG Stadium prompted election officials to issue a notice reminding people that they could go to another site. Siegel said she received a report that someone was trying to charge $60 for parking there.
Why have a polling place near NRG during rodeo events? It’s complicated, said Anthony Collier, primary director for the Harris County Democratic Party. Polling places are selected through a combination of state law requirements and logistical considerations such as ADA accessibility, security, wireless connections and available space. County Clerk Teneshia Hudspeth’s staff proposes the sites and the Harris County Commissioners Court approves them.
Voting centers change depending on the timing of an election because a school may be undergoing testing, or renovations may be underway at a community center. The party chairs could not explain Thursday why the site near NRG wasn’t taken off the list for primaries during rodeo time. Hudspeth was unavailable for comment.
Siegel said she hopes to meet with Hudspeth ahead of the November general election and discuss polling places. “In fairness to the clerk, they had an election in November, an election in December, a runoff in January, and now the primary and they’re going to have another runoff in May,” she said. “Some of these polls are not going to change. I think it would be good to go ahead and reserve the spaces for all the upcoming elections. They were jumping through hoops and they couldn’t get Spring Branch Elementary because they were doing STAAR testing.”
Collier said because the primaries ran in a split fashion this year, at least 20 locations, including Lone Star College and Denver Harbor Multi-Service Center, were still processing voters at 11 p.m.
“We had a whole other side of the room with voting machines we couldn’t use, and these were highly Democratic areas with virtually no Republican voters,” he said. “It was counterproductive and it could have been avoided,” he said. “Who knows how many voters we lost because they didn’t want to wait in line?”
Harris County Dems called a press conference the day before the election to identify what they say was a GOP effort to manufacture chaos so Republican Gov. Greg Abbott would have an excuse to take over Harris County elections. Siegel denied the allegations, saying she believes voter confidence is restored by having the Democrats and Republicans in separate lines and on separate machines. “I’m just a big believer that anything you can do to support the voters is a good thing,” she said.
The parties want a high turnout, and voters should anticipate that they may have to wait in line for a while, she added. Doyle countered that splitting the primaries means twice the equipment, twice the poll workers and twice the cost to taxpayers.
Hudspeth, a Democrat, doesn’t actually “run” the primaries; the parties contract with her office to manage them, so she doesn’t get a say in whether the elections should be split or joint.
Hudspeth inherited a department with a bad reputation due to running out of paper and accusations of voter fraud and election rigging in 2022. Local elections were temporarily moved from Hudspeth’s office to an elections administrator, and when that didn’t work out, they were returned to the clerk. Hudspeth told the Press earlier this week that she’s run 13 successful elections since then.
Doyle said Hudspeth and her staff have done an excellent job since the clerk took office for her first full term in 2023. Hudspeth was unopposed in her primary this week and will face Republican Mike Wolfe in November.
Doyle was defeated in Tuesday’s election by newcomer Traci Gibson, who will take over as the Democratic Party chair at the March 29 County Executive Committee meeting.
Siegel was also up for re-election as Harris County Republican Party chair. She received 49.63 percent of the vote and will face Don Hooper in a runoff. The same split primary process will be in place for runoff elections on May 26, with an early voting period running from May 18-22. The long lines shouldn’t be an issue because runoffs traditionally draw a lower turnout, officials from both parties said.
The long lines were exacerbated not just by the fact that Republicans and Democrats had to wait in separate lines but also because an unprecedented 500,000-plus people voted in the primaries, Collier said.
In addition to technical difficulties and long lines, Democrats also got a few reports of “bad behavior” at the polls, Doyle said, noting that one group of poll watchers reported that people were outside a polling place yelling, “Don’t vote for that guy because he’s a Muslim.”
“I would say [Hudspeth] did a fantastic job,” he said. “I still think the Republicans are going to take over the elections by hook or crook, but it worked at least as well, despite the obstacles, as in 2024.”