This Monday, voters made their way through canvassers crowding the Metropolitan Multi-Service Center on Gray, to join a line that wrapped around the building. There was no sign of the federal monitors that officials in Houston and Harris County had been asked to be present.
According to Roxanne Werner, the Director of Communications and Outreach at the Harris County Attorney’s Office, the county’s initial request to the Department of Justice was received but remained unapproved with three more days left of early-voting and a week until Election Day on Tuesday, November 8..
Although Harris County has seen a steady flow of voters arrive to the polls for early-voting, overall voter turn-out is slightly lower, when compared to the last midterm election in 2018.
Questions about voter security in the midterms arose when the Secretary of State, John B. Scott announced in a letter that he was deploying election monitors to Harris County. This was followed by Attorney General Ken Paxton’s Office saying it was sending a legal Task Force. Though it is usual for the Secretary of State’s office to send election monitors it is not standard practice for the Attorney General’s Office to do so.
“We don’t think it can be taken at face value as a mere effort to ensure a credible election,” James Slattery, senior attorney at Texas Civil Rights Project, said last week. “Especially, when you consider the allegations, the Secretary is making against the county, which arise from the partisan audit that they are conducting at the request of Donald Trump. It appears to be part of the continuing campaign to delegitimize the 2020 election and the integrity of elections in Harris County in 2022.”
According to Slattery, those who continue to deny the results of the 2020 election pose threats to the security of the upcoming election. Just this Monday, Catherine Engelbrecht, the founder of True the Vote, a Houston-based conservative nonprofit, alongside contractor Gregg Phillips were jailed on contempt of court after declining to name the person who gave them access to voter information. Both claim to have had access to this information via Konnech, an elections logistic software company. They also claim that this information proved that there was widespread voter fraud in the 2020 election, but they have not provided any documentation to substantiate that claim to the public.
In response to these potential breaches in election security, the Texas Civil Rights Project also filed a request on October 25, to the Department of Justice for federal observers to be stationed at the poles.
“I don’t want voters to hear about this and think that there’s going to be some kind of armed guard standing in the way of them voting, but it is a very troubling issue regarding the election as a whole that needs to be addressed,” Slattery said.
Though federal monitors may not be expected at the polls any time soon, poll watchers have been observing both Harris and Fort Bend County’s polling locations.
“I know almost every site has at least one a day, in some cases maybe there have been two present, but they usually have at least one there,” John Oldham. Fort Bend County elections administrator, said.
In Harris County, there is a daily average of around 13 monitors across all polling sites. Most of them are from the Harris County Democratic Party; with the rest representing True Texas Elections, the Harris County Republican Party, individual candidates and other small partisan political groups.
So far, poll watchers in Fort Bend County have not yet reported any major issue since the start of early voting, and the county has recorded an average of 15,000 voters a day. Oldham said Fort Bend has not had state presence at polling locations but may expect to see several state-issued monitors on Election Day.
Harris County had their highest voter turnout on the first day of early-voting, Monday, October 24, with 60,854 voters arriving at the polls. Since then, they see between 50,000 to 55,000 voters daily. The lowest voter turnout was recorded last Sunday, October 30 with 25,117 voters recorded.
According to Nadia Hakim, the deputy director of communications for Harris County elections administration, the transition to in-person training of election workers has allowed them to be more comfortable with voting equipment and procedures, compared to in the primary earlier this year. The only complaint the election workers have received is how long it takes to cast ballots because of the high number of offices and candidates up for election.
Early voting ends this Friday, November 4. After Friday, the last opportunity to vote is on Election Day, Tuesday, November 8. In Fort Bend County, all early voting polling locations are open from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. The county’s Election Day sites have the same operating hours. In Harris County, early voting from October 31 to November 2 is open from 7a.m. to 7 p.m. On November 3, sites are open from 7 a.m. to 10 p.m. and on November 4 from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. On Election Day, their polls will be open from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. Voters who are voting by mail need to return their mail-in ballots postmarked and turned in by 7 p.m. on Election Day.
This article appears in Jan 1 – Dec 31, 2022.
