When Does Incompetence Become Cover for Intentional Wrongdoing?

This is going to be a debrief of our Harris County election last Tuesday, which was pretty much a disaster.

In a pair of press conferences over the weekend (Friday here and Monday here), Harris County Republican Chair Cindy Siegel listed some of the problems:

·       Double booking election workers to the same polling place.

·       Telling election judges who were planning to work that they weren’t needed, instead of sending them where they were needed.

·       Delivering equipment to the wrong places—even to a place that wasn’t even a polling place.

·       Missing equipment.

·       Equipment that didn’t work.

·       Delivering the wrong size paper (the very long ballot required two legal-size pages; they sent letter size to some locations).

·       Poor training, delivered late in the process.

And more.

from left, Alan Vera, Sen. Paul Bettencourt, Cindy Siegel,
Marga Matthews, and Steven Mitby,
screenshot from Friday's press conference

First today I’ll debrief our polling place, which, because of our experience, handled problems relatively smoothly. But—there was a lot the County did that made things more difficult than they needed to be.

Then I’ll cover a bit more of what happened countywide that has led to a lawsuit asking for the resignation of the unelected bureaucrat hired to run our elections “more efficiently.”

 

Our Polling Place

We got to run our usual polling place this time. But back in November, we waited and waited for the County to give us our assignment. When they finally did, they assigned us to another place about 20 minutes away, and assigned our polling place to some random Democrat judge. Traditionally, the party with the majority of votes in the previous election gets to run that place, so I was entitled to it as precinct chair. But since the Democrats took over County government in 2018, they have been trying to marginalize precinct chairs and prevent our connection to our voters. So this wasn’t that surprising.

That November election—a low-turnout election with very little on the ballot—was our first experience with the new paper ballot system. It was a good one to practice on. The system is built by the same makers as the previous eSlate system: Hart. We don’t use Dominion anywhere here in Texas; too many flaws. This paper system was first used last May’s special district elections. But our area didn’t have anything on the ballot, so we didn’t experience it then. Anyway, this election is the third round for the County to be using it.

This system, in theory, is pretty good. Nothing is connected to the internet except the ePollbooks—the tablet we use to identify registered voters, which we’ve been using since around 2016. We use photo ID to check them in. A driver’s license works best; it has a code on the back that can be scanned to bring up their registration, which works pretty well. Other forms of ID—or none of those, under certain circumstances—can be used for those without a driver's license. Some of those we have to type in the information and do a search of the voter rolls. When that doesn’t work, the presiding judge handles it with a call to the County to verify a person’s eligibility.

Once the person is checked in, we print them a code to use at the voting booth. In this system, the machine is called a Duo. They can enter their code in any Duo tied to the Controller that printed out their code. They then insert the paper, just until it catches; it hangs out. They make their voting decisions on the touch screen of the Duo. Once they’re ready, the Duo prints the ballot. It is heat-sensitive paper, which makes it permanent and difficult to duplicate. Once the ballot is printed, the voter goes over to the Scanner, a totally separate machine, and inserts the ballot. The Scanner records a digitally-scanned image of the ballot, saved in a sealed part of the machine, and the paper ballot is dropped into the ballot box below. So the digital scans are quick to count at the end of the voting day, but the paper ballots are available for comparison in case of a recount.

In theory, that’s all good. There are some physical difficulties. The Duo machines are prone to misfeed the paper. If a voter inserts the paper very carefully, with two hands and a lot of patience, no problem. But in real life paper frequently misfeeds.

Add to that, this past week’s ballot required two legal-sized pages—have I mentioned that we have the longest ballot in the country? There were 99 choices (89 races plus 10 resolutions) on the ballot. You need to insert the first page and let it hang out of the machine while you make all those choices on the touch screen. You need to do something with that second sheet of paper. We instructed voters to place it carefully alongside the privacy screen at the side of the Duo. But if a person held it in hand, or let it get scrunched or bent, is was more likely to misfeed. We were suspicious that some machines were more likely to misfeed than others, maybe because paper that had gotten stuck earlier left scraps inside that got in the way. But we were pretty busy running an election to verify that.

For every paper that got scrunched, we had to replace the paper and reprint that page—and we accounted for each spoiled page, and identified on the voter on the judge’s tablet. Those spoiled pages got placed in an envelope for that purpose and were returned to the counting center with the judge’s box at the end of the day.

This was a problem everywhere and kept us busy. We had a sense there were more Republican spoiled ballots than Democrat—but then we had a lot more Republican voters. So it’s hard to know whether the percentage was comparable, or whether our equipment was more often malfunctioning.

The real problems of the day—all around Harris County—were at the Scanner. Sometimes the Scanner wouldn’t scan a page. This happened if the Duo misprinted or smeared. This could easily happen if a Duo only slightly misfed but came through eventually and the voter didn’t notice. It could happen if a voter thought the Duo was finished printing and gave the paper a tug just a tad too early. Anyway, it was a vulnerability. It happened a number of times at our location, but nowhere near as often as the Duo misfeeds.

When the Scanner would not scan a page, we could place the unscannable page in the emergency ballot box, attached; those ballots would be hand counted at Central Counting at night. We followed procedure at the end of the day, placing those unscanned ballots from the emergency box into a special envelope for the purpose, and then sealed them inside the Scanner—which has a coded seal related to chain of custody, as all counted materials do.

But the County changed procedure during the day. Not entirely. We still did all the right things. But this was such a problem for so many polling places, with workers new to the equipment, that they feared people would not follow procedure and would leave those ballots inside the ballot box container.

We broke down the ballot box container as trained. We took out the gray ballot box from inside, made sure there were no stray ballots fallen elsewhere in the box container (there weren’t), and sealed the ballot box. We took the ballots out of the emergency box and placed them in their special envelope, sealed inside the Scanner machine, which was now separated from the box container. And we folded up the box container, which was completely empty of ballots, and placed it on the rack with the other voting equipment—and sealed the rack.

We got to our counting location about 9:40 PM (more below on why it took so long to get there). At 10:10 PM my husband, the presiding judge, got a text—that we didn’t see on his phone at that time—instructing us to remember to bring the black, folded up ballot box container with us to the dropoff location. When we got to the front of the line another 15 minutes or so later, we had everything in order—except no black empty folded-up ballot box container.

It turns out they had sent a text to the tablets—the ePollbooks, but the presiding and alternate judges keep theirs separate to do their other duties—sometime early afternoon. We were busy all day and did not notice the text. It’s not obvious when a text has come in; you have to remember to go look for them.

So at the dropoff location, the official from the County is saying, “That’s on us. We own that. We should have communicated better.” But how do they take accountability for that error? They try to send us back to our polling location in the middle of the night, where we would have to break the seal on the equipment, and retrieve that item, and bring it back to them; but they would let us skip the line when we returned, so kind of them. It was going to require my husband calling the school contact to have them call the custodians to come to the door and let us in to do that—when we knew there were no ballots left inside, because we had followed the appropriate protocol as trained. So we didn’t go get it. Which meant we also didn’t leave the rest of the equipment unsealed, so that’s good for us.

That statement of “It’s our fault; we own that—but we’re making you make up for our mistakes anyway” was a theme of this election.

My husband picked up his equipment on Saturday at the appointed time. Lines got long later, despite appointments, but weren’t too bad for him. He had been warned they were a couple of hours behind at the beginning of the day, so they had adjusted all appointments until they could catch up. They called back on Sunday for him to come and get more ballot paper. According to the explanation, someone had miscalculated and planned for only the amount of paper for one per voter—when each voter needed two. But we actually needed about five times what they’d originally given us. It worked out, but it was an additional inconvenience. Fortunately the pickup location was only about 15 minutes from home.

equipment pickup line on Sunday, February 27
photo posted on Facebook by Robert Jeter III

On Monday night, before Election Day Tuesday, we needed to set up our equipment. We were given a spare orchestra room at the middle school where we usually run our polls. But we shouldn’t have to run a primary election in the same smallish room as the other party. Two years ago, slightly pre-COVID, we did it with a lot of inconvenience. My husband tried to get the school to allow them to use the hallway outside the room—which is already gated off from the rest of the school, so there’s no contact with students. The school said no, so we knew we were stuck. He had tried multiple times to find out who the Democrat PJ would be, to coordinate. There was none by Monday night.

It took about 2 ½ hours to do our setup—this is all so that the morning setup only takes another hour and a half, so we can open at 7:00 AM. The Democrat equipment was there, but was not set up.

He had his alarm set for 4:30 AM, to get to the polling place at 5:30, to be ready for the 7:00 AM start. At around midnight he got a text—asking him to run both the Republican Primary and the Democrat Primary—with no additional staff. He happened to wake and see the text, but at that point there wasn’t anything he could do to prepare.

The priority was to set up our polling place and then do what we could. This required the equipment setup that should have been done Monday night, plus getting the equipment turned on. He managed to get six Duos set up for the Democrats—in addition to the 14 Duos for Republicans. There were more Duos, but not more workers. We got a high school student technician, who was hired by the Democrats to report length of line every so often during the day—at the same $17/hour as the other clerks. We used her, under our supervision, because we had to, to run the Democrat Controller, checking in voters and handing them their codes. Late in the day we got a seventh Duo connected to their line. There were times when three to five Democrats waited in line for an available machine. Rarely did Republicans have to wait. We had more than double the number of machines, so we handled the higher number of voters (about 100 more Republicans than Democrats by end of day).

It took beyond 7:00 AM to get theirs open to voters. A couple of voters got told to vote elsewhere. Another stayed, seeing ours was getting close, because she’d already been to two other locations that weren’t yet open. Much of our delay was because their ePollbook tablet wasn’t working. It required the County to reset it remotely, but that couldn’t be done until their help line wasn’t busy and we could reach them.

So we handled all their voter instruction, machine help, and the extra take down of their polling place at the end of the day. And all the paperwork. Everything. For no extra pay except the extra hour or so that it took us to close down at the end of the day.

There was an explanation that the two county party chairs had consulted and worked together to help each other. So, at some polling places where Republican judges had quit at the last minute (because they weren’t willing to be blamed for running an election with the wrong equipment, etc.), Democrats stepped in, and vice versa. Except—ours didn’t quit at the last minute; they never hired one for our location. And, if we’d been told even a day earlier, we could have done that setup Monday night.

 

County Problems

Alan Vera, screenshot from here

This past Saturday we held our precinct conventions, at locations by House district, and I ran into Alan Vera, head of the HCRP Ballot Security Committee and national election expert. I asked him if we were going to debrief this election. I told him we didn’t have big fraud, but we had some problems. And he said, essentially, what I heard him say later, in today’s press conference. It was in response to a question about how the HCRP was characterizing the problems: incompetence, or intended to influence the outcome. Alan said,

I am wrestling with the question directly related to your comment. The question is this: At what point does election incompetence become the perfect camouflage for election malfeasance? Incompetence because, on equipment pickup day, dozens of judges, both Republican and Democrat, left the pickup point with no ballots at all to run the election. Nothing. But, at least as of right now, only Republican judges were given the wrong ballot size, so that their voters voting on the wrong ballot size, 10 to 13 of their votes at the edge of that 8 ½ by 11 paper will never be counted.

And there's at least 140 voters so far, that we know of, who lost those votes. On Election Day, scores of Republican and Democrat judges had to deal with equipment that didn't work. The Duos wouldn’t boot up; the Scanners wouldn’t scan. That was widespread. But it was only three Republican judges who got to their polls and found there was no equipment at all. Their voting equipment had been delivered to another location, which wasn't even a polling place.

So the question you asked is a good one. At what point does election incompetence lead to election malfeasance? We'll keep digging until we find out.

Let’s add a couple of other details. Longoria asked for an extension to the 24-hour counting requirement. This is law from the 1950s and 1960s, not some new legislation from just last summer. Every previous election official has been able to meet the requirement. She finally got the count done, and certified that all the votes were counted. And then, I think it was Saturday, said (paraphrased)—"Oh, by the way, there’s another 10,000 mail-in ballots that we found that we hadn’t counted. Oops!"

No election official should ever be allowed to get away with “finding” ballots after the counting has been completed. They had one job. Finding uncounted ballots means they failed in that job. It’s a complicated job that requires planning and experience—which this unelected election administrator does not have, but was nevertheless hired by Lina Hidalgo without Republican approval, and without even unanimous Democrat approval.

We had high voter turnout on the Republican side. That was good. But we had polling places that didn’t have enough voting machines for Republicans. They are not interchangeable with Democrat machines on Election Day; setup is different. At one location, 300 Republicans were in line to vote at 7:00 PM; they stayed until all voted, as they are entitled to do, which took until 11:00 PM.

Did we mention that the Director of Training was fired two days before the start of Early Voting? While it ought to be happening far ahead, most training for Election Day workers happens during those two weeks. In fact, they were so late at appointing us—despite our giving our intention to serve months in advance—that the first week of training dates was over by then, and all possible trainings were at bad times (during our church on Sunday was when my husband had to do Judge training) or a long drive to the south end of the county. The training, we thought, was actually improving, now that we can do it in person—and they limit ADA training to the few minutes of necessary info. So I’m not sure why the Director was fired.

So, there were all these issues affecting voters who want to cast their votes. And do they own up to the problem? No. They blame voters for incompetence (don’t know how to put the paper in). They blame presiding judges for incompetence. They blame last summer’s election law changes—which apply to mail-in ballots, which were part of Early Voting count, not Election Day count—different places, different procedures entirely. They even claimed, “See, the errors were found; that means the system is working,” as if that vindicated them. By the way, it was the Secretary of State that found the discrepancy of those 10,000 votes, not Longoria’s “system.”

central counting taking place, screenshot from here

What we have is an absolute mess—followed by a coverup.

What we need is for this to never happen again.

We have a small countywide election coming up in early May. Both parties have a runoff election May 24. We need things fixed by then. But, even more importantly, we need things fixed before the high-turnout November midterm election. Last Tuesday’s disaster was with a 15% voter turnout. What happens when we get a 50% voter turnout?

Senator Paul Bettencourt suggests that we get rid of Hidalgo’s unelected election bureaucrat and return the duties of county elections to the County Clerk. Currently the County Clerk is a Democrat. Bettencourt, a Republican, is making that suggestion. Anyone has to be better than Longoria and crew. And we need someone accountable to the people, with some kind of stake in keeping us from being the worst run election of any large county in the nation.

The lawsuit is intended to force Longoria and her crew to resign or be fired. While that is necessary, I look forward to a day we can return our elections to a Republican County Clerk, with experience and integrity. We miss those days.